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[with 3 poems by Jan LaPerle]
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Cupboard
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One day I decide I’ll do something
good for people,
but I forget, then I nap.
My daughter wants to make
lemon cake so we do that.
I stand on the stool
and begin this great hunt
for poppy seeds.
Hours pass, and I’m on my tiptoes.
I stop searching for a minute to listen
to the wind. The branches snapping.
My daughter ran off agin to her swing,
her swing tied to the branch
of the tree she climbs,
the tree run through with electric wires
in the yard she flies her kite in.
She flies it high as the cell tower.
Her dragon kite breathing fire.
Her dragon kite headed in a nosedive
straight into those electric lines.
I can’t do anything about anything.
I’m trapped in the cupboard
forgetting what I’m searching for.
I dust the spice tops; they go on forever.
My hair too tight in its bobby pins.
Here as good as any place to pray.
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Jan LaPerle
from Maybe the Land Sings Back, Galileo Press, Aiken, SC. © 2022
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The dark and the light are neck and neck again. When dark creeps in the light just doesn’t seem to have much of a chance. This is a close as we come to living dangerously – taking a walk in the woods on an afternoon that promises thunderstorms. Today Linda and I are at Friendship Trail, part of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail east of town. Such a lovely name – almost no one walks here but when we do cross paths the others always smile. Perhaps they’re filled with the same thoughts as the two of us: cool shade, gentle slopes, chuckling creek. Green welcome.
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Only a lumpy heap of black sky to the north, that’s all we could see from the parking lot. For the moment sun slants through the pines and tuliptrees. Cicadas sing. Into our third mile, though, shadows begin to deepen and the leaves get nervous. We can still see blinks of blue straight up through the branches but dark is moving in, shouldering it all aside. A stick drops from height to land at my feet. Will a widow-maker be next?
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What gives dark its edge? Why its power to blot out a cheery afternoon and replace it with foreboding? Dark needn’t even knock yet I open the door to it.
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Dark 4 AM’s are worst although understandable: the hour when the soul’s earthly tether / gently uncoils its smoky grasp / as tenuous as breath.* If I awaken at such an hour I immediately implore myself, “Don’t think, don’t think of . . . ,” but so swiftly the dark lines up its charges, some sharp as yesterday, some rank with decades, some uncertain ever to arrive at all but all too easily imagined. Dark loves the quiet unprotected moment.
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But why, then, into light and airy freedom of mind is dark also able to intrude? I discover myself on a rural highway, green tunnel and morning dew, but instead of anticipating certain joy around the next bend I am reliving random moments of my own stupidity or, worse, recreating injuries and insults in some delusion that this heaps coals upon the heads of my enemies. Not Buddha but someone apparently equally enlightened said that to hold a grudge is to drink poison while imagining it will kill your foes. Here I am fueling the dark with anti-matter I’ve brought to the bonfire myself. This negativity, what could be more precisely the opposite of experiencing life in the moment? I open dark’s door myself.
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Take a deep breath. Give my heart a good airing. No blame, no shame, just look straight up through the branches and accept what you see. Gray now, but not black. Threatening gusts have settled back to cooling breeze; just a few cold drops on my neck and no more. Here is the edge of the woods, the field, our car up ahead. Linda and I say, as we tend to, “Well, we carried our umbrellas and that’s what kept it from raining on us.” For a stretch it seemed neck and neck, but even so this hour has been full of green welcome. If at this moment we were instead dripping, shoes aslosh, about to shiver, we could still likely bring ourselves to say, even as we are about to now, “That was a wonderful walk.”
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❦
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The dark and the light are neck and neck again. So they seem to be in every poem by Jan LaPerle. Maybe the Land Sings Back is not a book of platitudes and happy endings. In fact, this is the anti-platitude book. But neither do these lines ever surrender to unremitting darkness. Despair dances with hope even if they are both stepping on each other’s feet. Gray sadness cracks and a thin bright line of joy refracts into color down the wall. These poems accept the small daily trials we might think inconsequential as well as the towering existential anxieties we have to admit if we are alive in this century. These poems offer us the chance to share all of these and in doing so they invite us to become more human.
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Many of these poems are constructed as a series of observations. No, not observations, not apart from the experience but within the experience: these poems are a series of lived moments. Our image of the writer – her age and circumstance, her partner and parent relationships, what she fears and what she loves – is not constructed from what we are told or shown but from sharing the experiences as she does. She struggles to find meaning. So do we. She is surprised that a small act can dispel loneliness or that a small memory can carry a huge weight of joy. We experience surprise at the very moment she does. I have been blown through this collection by a wind of anticipation and revelation and promise. At the end I am simply convinced that, even though neck and neck, the dark doesn’t have much of a chance.
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Maybe the Land Sings Back, Jan LaPerle, Galileo Press, Aiken, SC. © 2022. Jan LaPerle lives in Kentucky with her husband and daughter, and is a master sergeant in the U.S. Army at Fort Knox. Galileo Press was founded in 1979 by Julia Wendell and Jack Stephens, now lives in Aiken, South Carolina, and also publishes the journal Free State Review.
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[* from Circadian (Welcome Morning) by Bill Griffin, published 2005 in Bay Leaves by the Poetry Council of North Carolina and collected in Crossing the River, Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte, NC. © 2017)]
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Dear Tuth Fary
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This is the beginning of my
daughter’s letter, and in it folds
a tiny tooth, small as the foot of the mouse
we caught this morning in a trap
that looks like a hallway to heaven.
The light at the end illuminating a dollop
of peanut butter, heaven enough
for the mouse who was still alive,
still zipping its stringy tail back and forth
across the hardwood. My daughter
and I went outside to set it free, left the tea
warm on the counter, the teabag
with one of those little paper sayings,
The earth laughs in flowers, but there’s no laughing here,
just ice creeping across everything, making us feel
even more zippered-in, my daughter
on the threshold right before the cry.
She could go either way, and this is always
up to me to maneuver. So I make up some life
for this mouse to get back to, some little car,
tiny house, little teacup tinier than a mouse tooth.
Isn’t it all so cute? Isn’t it great, how I can
hold the world in the light like this?
I cannot talk to her about why the mouse
went in there, the temptation, peanut butter
and loneliness, the pinhole of light in all the darkness,
like when she woke in the middle of the night
and came to my door to say, so sweetly, Hi mama,
which I snuffed out quickly with all my middle-aged
darkness. Midnight breath its own nightmare.
In the morning, I go to my coffee, my office
in the attic where I belong, and the squirrels
scrabble across the shingles and we laugh a little,
we being me and the comic part of me that
pops her head through the skylight to talk
to the critters above and below, and I can hear
it all from there. The inconsequential-ness
of my life is a cinch on my heart. The sweetness, too,
of my little girl growing in the most beautiful person
I have ever seen. That’s enough.
The dark and the light are neck and neck again.
I am freezing from my heart up.
I am right here, rooting from the window.
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Jan LaPerle
from Maybe the Land Sings Back, Galileo Press, Aiken, SC. © 2022
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Big Quiet Things
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Forever we remember her
on our way to the coast,
in the back seat, quiet
for a million miles,
watching movies with
headphones on and
then, as if a word were
a thing, as if quiet
were an ocean,
and out of it: CRAB!
And years now later,
my husband can say it
or I can say it,
and we are warmed together
even when all around us,
sinking us, pulling us under,
a riptide. And it feels
impossible. And there’s
nothing to hold onto.
Silence for a million miles.
Then out of it
a word, and then more where
that one came from,
all washing up, and the sun
warm, the sand
here with us,
waiting with us.
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Jan LaPerle
from Maybe the Land Sings Back, Galileo Press, Aiken, SC. © 2022
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