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Speaking in Tongues

Posted in Imagery, music, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , on December 15, 2023| 11 Comments »

 . 
[with 4 poems by Kim Hayes]
 . 
Winter Wind and Chimes
 . 
All this winter, the wind has moaned,
its deep modal harmonies
rolling up the valley’s throat
like a procession of monks, chanting.
And at the darkened door,
they strike the chimes –
cowled visitors
shifting restlessly, foot to foot,
on the icy steps.
 . 
All this winter, like metronomes,
two ghostly porch chairs
have, in unison, rocked a rhythm
for strange sulfurous chords;
invented, frenzied arpeggios;
or just one strident not repeated,
brassy as a storefront bell –
wind and chimes tangled in
an endless ensemble.
 . 
All this winter, she has listened,
even going out once to tie a string
around one pitchless chime,
hoping to set it better in tune.
But the wind worried loose the knot
and snatched it off.
Come spring, she thought,
I will take down these chimes.
 . 
All this winter, the wind has composed
for chimes and chairs and a woman
who will, on second thought,
let the wind have its way,
leave the chimes alone
to be played by softer breezes
on a warm summer day.
 . 
Kim Hayes
from As If She Spoke in Tongues, Grateful Steps Foundation, Asheville, NC; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Technical challenge, that’s one of the reasons I love choral singing. Will I even be able to learn this tenor part with its oddball intervals and syncopation? Can I project a clear open tone all the way up to that G sharp, maybe the A? Can I keep balance & rhythm and avoid falling off the stage when the time signature flips from 6/8 to 2/2? Can I listen so perfectly to this alto standing next to me that our voices may create something beyond the sum of us two?
 . 
This last challenge transcends technical. In an ensemble, the emphasis is not on the individual but the communal voice. Perhaps blend and modulation are learned skills, but the birth of art is in the give and take, the sharing, the group coming together as a single organism. What a fine metaphor for poetry. Writer and reader are not performer and audience. The poet can learn craft, devise image and simile, tinker with language and rhythm, but all the poem’s music is flat until the reader breathes it in and the lines begin to sing in her heart.
 . 
This is the spark both music and poetry yearn to ignite: beyond technical and communal, the beauty and truth which burn into us and set us afire. Several times in this season of many rehearsals and concerts I have felt a moment’s elevation to that mysterious plateau. In a blink, the magic of notes, harmonies, lyrical language swell my heart until I can’t read the score for my tears. I couldn’t say the epiphany arises from the instruments, from the lines of verse, from the voices surrounding me – it takes life from all of these together. The music communicates its message directly to the heart.
 . 
The choir releases its music into the air. The poet surrenders her lines to the universe. A new language is revealed. A new voice speaks from which some ear, some mind may discover some new life never before imagined. Our spirit breathes in these vaporous things and is exalted.
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Grandmothers
 . 
Thanksgiving morning,
before the sun, I wait
in the dark kitchen
for the gentle ghosts
of my grandmothers.
 . 
I welcome them
as I heat the oven,
feel them gathering,
like the warm aromas
of brown sugar and
cinnamon, to watch me
as I baste and bake.
 . 
In the drifting dust of sifted flour,
their hands guide mine:
a pinch more of this or
a little salt in the broth or
give that a stir before it sticks.
 . 
A I set the table, they lean in,
sighing, fingers smoothing,
lingering over each fine stitch
in the embroidered
tablecloth, handed down,
daughter to daughter;
they smile as I take out
the old rose-patterned
wedding china.
 . 
And so, they keep me company,
chat, chuckle and chide
all morning long as they
share my kitchen,
the grandmothers who,
by being who there were,
make me who I am.
 . 
Kim Hayes
from As If She Spoke in Tongues, Grateful Steps Foundation, Asheville, NC; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
. . . as long as she kept [her words] to herself, they were one language. Her language. It was only when she gave them up, like babies for adoption, that they slipped from her grasp and became subject to interpretation. . . . No translation was the same. No understanding was universal. The language of her words unfolded into many languages, many understandings, as if she spoke in tongues.
 . 
From the Author’s Note in As If She Spoke in Tongues by Kim Hayes, this is a mysterious and provoking expression of the potential and power of words. Innocent-sounding words spoken with heat might spark a conflagration. Words fumbling for meaning may yet reach their mark and forge strong bonds. Even we writers with the opportunity to pause and ponder, we who strive to select from all options the perfect words, can never know how they will be received. From this mystery rises poetry’s power to connect.
 . 
The poems in Kim’s collection connect in all these mysterious ways. Her poems span generations and geographies. The speaker may be obvious and defined or intentionally obscure, thereby becoming universal. We humans are not, thank all stars, telepathic. Therefore from the writer’s images and memories we must create our own imagery and resurrect our own memories. And doesn’t this surprising connection we discover within ourselves also fire a feeling of connection to the writer?
 . 
We cast our words into the breeze like feathered seeds and cannot know what will bloom. As in this line from Adrienne Rich, But poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know. And these lines from Poems for Sale by Kim Hayes: a poem like a trick of the eye, / peripheral flicker – / what might or might not be, / glimpsed and gone; // I have for you today . . .
 . 
[Order As If She Spoke in Tongues   HERE  ]
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 . 
Rocks and Hard Places
 . 
Barefoot, I walk
on a dream road
paved with all your
rocks and hard places,
misery and discontent.
“I only had to bury him once,” you said.
“It’s the god-damned memories that won’t
stay in the ground.”
 . 
Sharp-honed memories like flint shards,
chiseled by every hard place
you ever knew ( and there were plenty),
stabbing themselves upward to the surface,
resurrected and designed to cut deep.
 . 
My feet are bleeding now.
 . 
But tonight, I still plan to dance
with your unearthed undead,
twirling on yet another hard place,
by bloody footprints leaving
gritty, blushing rosettes,
 . 
while you wait somewhere in the dark,
another rock in your hand.
 . 
Kim Hayes
from As If She Spoke in Tongues, Grateful Steps Foundation, Asheville, NC; © 2023
 . 
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
My Heart of Stone
 . 
Running a thumb over
the worn and rounded edges
of this cold, found rock,
I try to think
of strength.
 . 
This worry stone,
gemstone,
whetstone,
pocked and veined
with sparks
of fool’s gold, cools
 . 
as I hold it,
no heart to part
with it today, although
I have often thought of
giving it away, until
 . 
feeling the pull of it,
charged, magnetic,
I always come home,
press my heart of stone
into the warm palm of
your open hand.
 . 
Kim Hayes
from As If She Spoke in Tongues, Grateful Steps Foundation, Asheville, NC; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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IMG_1948
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What Is Required

Posted in Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 8, 2023| 4 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Bob Wickless]
 . 
Not Wind, Not Water
+++++ In Memory of Rod Jellema
 . 
I would study, if I could, not wind
Nor water, but the silence after wind,
The scattering after second motion
 . 
On a darkened shore. Tests, if given,
Would consist of laying pages
End to end, the opening of endless
 . 
Information, movements on the beach
At dawn. Neither light nor darkness overall,
But the space of intersection . . .
 . 
The X between the film and camera
Where easy motion crosses over
One to the world. There I’d sit,
 . 
X’ed out, oblivious, yet hugely intelligent.
Schools of fish would soon dismiss me,
Flotsam would pass, failures survive,
 . 
But I, jetsam, drunk beyond knowledge,
Would float aimless, issuing assignments,
Collecting homework from the stars.
 . 
Bob Wickless
from The Secret Care the World Takes, The Orchard Street Press, Gates Mills, OH, © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Not much to see here this time of year? But that’s exactly why we’ve come. While Linda and Margaret chase Bert down the wide camellia-lined promenades of the university garden, Josh and I take an inconspicuous side path. Not many folks meandering these narrow trails today. Winter-brown, bloomed-out, leaf-strewn: welcome to Native Plants.
 . 
Meadow, borders, understory, they draw us right in. Just a month ago these pale bristles, fuzzballs, and tufts  were brightly hued racemes, cymes, and corymbs. So inviting. Now begging for dispersal. I let my hand cup a stem and run up over the feathery head. I examine my palm – dozens of tiny seedlets, each with its stiff barbule. My, my — Josh just happens to have a sheaf of miniature brown envelopes in his shirt pocket. He hands me one and I dribble my catch into it. How many different species of goldenrod and aster? And we still have an entire little prairie to traverse.
 . 
A month after last April’s tornado crossed our neighborhood, after the cherry picker and chainsaws had gone home, after the ‘dozer had pushed two-ton trunks and root balls to the edge of our property past the Duke Energy cut, I imagined that the bare clay and churned up leaf mold would wait for winter, barren, when I could sow the half-acre with something new. But this summer the exposed earth received something it had patiently waited decades for. Sunlight. This fall the slope is a jostling upright congregation of pilewort and poke, and knee deep in damnable invasive stilt grass.
 . 
Best get to it. It’s a lot of square meters, but I have a fire rake and a 5-pound hazelhoe I use for trail workdays. And on the screened porch I have a bag of bags, cold stratifying, waiting for January and a smooth, raked bed: native silver plume grass, big bluestem, Indian grass my friend Joe gathered from his meadow on the Mitchell River; wingstem, crownbeard, ironweed I’ve been pulling during hikes along the MST; store-bought half-kilos of Southeast Wildflowers; and a little miniature brown envelope, stuffed full, and hand-labeled “Duke Mix.”
 . 
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Two Poems From School
1. Drawing Horses
 . 
There was one slow girl from grade two
And three, unable to multiplicate, ill-
At-ease, and long to devise, who tried
But tired of her dull and daily work,
Turned the smudge of your yellow page off
And began to draw horses.
 . 
Riderless, stream of those great manes back,
her horses rode out of no course but gladly off
The end of every page to the end of every class.
 . 
And when that girl died in a white hospital
Kicked by no horse but the one deep inside
Galloping over her frail, fourth grade hide,
I though I would try drawing horses. But I,
I was no good.
 . 
So girl, who never learned much from school
But taught me a daily grace in the movement
Of horses, these are for you.
 . 
Bob Wickless
from The Secret Care the World Takes, The Orchard Street Press, Gates Mills, OH, © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
When Bob Wickless signed my copy of The Secret Care the World Takes, he noted that while we have never met in person we share three things in common: poetry; North Carolina; the editorial generosity of Jack Kristofco at The Orchard Street Press. And a fourth thing – a year ago I featured Bob’s poem Prayer in Spring in another post extolling the wonders of native “weeds.”
 . 
Bob is from Maryland and has “held many jobs” in his lifetime, but he wisely retired to Reidsville NC to reside in “the writingest state.” Secret Care takes seriously the creative task of reminding us of what we all share in common. Bob leads his characters by the hand, introduces them to us, places our hand in theirs and waits quietly while we gaze into each other’s eyes. That tender connection may be wistful, it may be sad, but there is also humor in these poems. Laughter. Joy.
 . 
In the end may we become convinced that the World does care for us. Perhaps we may feel the tug to care also for the World and what it contains, what it nurtures, what it brings forth. Through the magic of poetry, this care is no longer secret.
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❦
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Check out The Orchard Street Press, its annual contest and anthology, Quiet Diamonds, and order Bob Wickless’s book HERE
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Solstice: The Children’s Ward
 . 
The secret care the world takes
Has pressed closed all the petals
Of tiny summer flowers
As if darkness might infuse
Those dying colors
With some thing they did not mean,
Some statement thy did not possess,
Some dream they could never intend.
 . 
It is in the same way rain,
Or even the thought of rain
Oncoming, turns up a maple’s leaves
Like fragile buckets –
Or a whole forest of maples,
A hundred, thousand, children’s hands
Raised in anticipation
Of the sky’s sweet promise.
 . 
And it is evident, too, the easy way
You breathe, so effortlessly in sleep,
How your small, secret bodies know,
Always, exactly what is required
Of this world and the next
To simply sleep
A sleep simple enough
To trust all your flowers to love.
 . 
Bob Wickless
from The Secret Care the World Takes, The Orchard Street Press, Gates Mills, OH, © 2023
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Cusp

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on December 1, 2023| 11 Comments »

 . 
[with 5 poems from Kakalak 2023]
 . 
Autumnal Asymptote
 . 
The sun’s last red is seeping through the maple now,
and umber too, like the webbing of a frog, like the shadow of winter.
How tenderly the ground holds each leaf. How lightly they rest
before they snuggle down under the rain.
Such a wealth of dying. The coin of the land is on its edge,
a membrane, the balance of water, seeping –
even the roots break light together.
Even the fungus breathes its gifts
to the soil.
 . 
Even the breath of me shatters this silent grace.
My steps churn leaves, worm-cast, root, stone.
The arc of reaching out is endless, airless –
I cannot kiss the earth’s brow so lightly.
She cannot sigh and settle beneath my hand.
 . 
Hannah Ringler
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
I am about to read an online poem titled Bicuspid and I immediately tell myself it will be about that congenital heart syndrome in which the aortic valve has only two leaflets instead of the normal three (“tricuspid”). The man in the poem won’t even know he harbors the cardiac defect. His life will be flowing along its secure expected trajectory until suddenly in his 30’s he won’t be able to walk up a flight of steps or have sex without gasping for breath. Everything crashes – painful tests & procedures, dangerous surgery, bankrupting bills, a foot-long scar down his sternum. The life he was a moment before so confidently devouring has abruptly turned to eat him up and spit him out. Will he discover a new center?
 . 
The title also launches me into another favorite pastime – etymology. Just what is a cusp, anyway? Whenever you open yourself to a new field of exploration, your first big hurdle is its vocabulary. In scientific parlance, its nomenclature, but, hey, still just words. Don’t your non-poet friends’ eyes glaze over when you wax rhapsodic about enjambment? I know when my grandfather G. C. Cooke attended medical school in the nineteen-teens his required courses included Greek and Latin. Maybe he couldn’t do anything about Bicuspid Aortic Valve Syndrome, or even diagnose it pre-mortem, but he definitely was armed with all the nomenclature he needed to know cusp derives from Latin cuspis, a spear or a point, and the first recorded use of tricuspidem for “three-pointed” is from the 1660’s.
 . 
Dig deep beneath the words growing in these lines, whether cultivated garden or rank unruly weeds, and you discover that all is metaphor. The cusp of the moment is a fulcrum impossible to balance upon; leap left or leap right? The spear prods your back; it will not permit you to remain standing on this spot of ground you imagined so stable. The motion of your very heart is arrested, worn out of synch, its fluttering leaflets no longer able to manage the flow of your minutes.
 . 
Wow. I read the poem. Turns out it’s describing teeth. Bicuspid, duh. But it is still all about getting chewed up by life. And it’s awesome.
 . 
❦
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[ read Bicuspid by Clemonce Heard on poets.org HERE ]
[ and HERE is my favorite online Etymology Dictionary (or download the app Etymology Explorer) ]
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Under
++ from the early Chinese philosopher Mencius:
++“The ten thousand things are part of me.
++ Treat those things as you would treat yourself.”
 . 
Under the cloud, a man in the airplane
looks down from the window and yawns
at the mountain’s green canopy,
the towering tree where, under
a branch, the owl sleeps.
Under the owl, a young mother
leans against the rugged trunk;
under her eyes, a small screen,
her frog thumbs hopping;
under the screen, her hands.
Under her darting glances,
her child squats. Under the child
the tumbling river dances;
under the river, the rock.
 . 
The child lifts the rock and squeals
as, under the rock, the crayfish wakes.
Between two fingers, under her gaze,
its curious feelers, its wiggling tail,
its many legs running midair,
its hooked fingers; its eyes
examine her. It whispers in her hear.
The water stirs. She lifts the rock again
and tenderly tucks the crayfish
under, for now she knows
the ten thousand things are part of her.
 . 
Martha O. Adams
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Fox Moves in Nearby
 . 
As incense from a censer,
+++ wildness wafts about him –
he saunters
+++ outside our sliding door.
 . 
Red as cinnamon,
+++ gray-flecked belly,
he swings his head side to side,
takes everything in
+++ his black pearl eyes.
Squirrels scatter,
+++ grackles fly.
 . 
He lifts his leg and marks
+++ the stoop
and, with deliberation,
+++ three stones by the fountain.
 . 
He hesitates, concludes,
+++ and prances
through the hostas,
+++ slows beneath the forsythia,
squeezes through the fence.
 . 
We spend sever quiet breaths,
+++ fingertips on glass,
before we step out to sense
+++ his leaving.
The birds flit back
+++ to feed and chatter
Shadows underlying trees
+++ are darker,
redbirds, redder.
 . 
Preston Martin
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
 . 
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
A few weeks back a friend in my writer’s group (holy poesy, Bill is in a writer’s group now!) mentioned that she has edited an anthology by poets near her home in northwest Ohio. Imagine opening a collection and recognizing the writers by name! See their faces as you read their lines, hear their inflections and cadence. You might realize immediately that the poem is about teeth and not heart valves. Such a concept!
 . 
Welcome to Kakalak 2023. Although the editors no longer require a North or South Carolina connection in order to submit, I still discover many friends and acquaintances in the pages of this annual anthology. This year’s book very much retains the flavor of the South – has there ever been an issue without at least one mention of red clay or grits? But these almost 200 pages span most everything that could be said to make us human, whether grief or exaltation, recollection or discovery, love or despair, current events or origin stories, even a raised middle finger to the Home Owner’s Association.
 . 
I’ve read the book through from page one to the end. I intentionally avoided skipping straight to the names I know in order to discover names I want to get to know. I used my standard criteria to select three poems to feature here, which is no criteria at all except what grabs me in the moment of reading (and the three quickly becam five, eleven, fifty). Do you need some new friends? As Robert Frost invites when he heads down to clear the pasture spring – You come too!
 . 
❦
 . 
[ Kakalak 2023 is edited by Angelo Geter, David E. Poston, and Kimberlyn Blum-Hyclack; learn more about Kakalak, and purchase  HERE ]
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Moon-Child
 . 
+++ +++ +++ Sophie has pummeled the beach all day
+++ with the unbridled vigor of a one-year-old
dog, her tail held aloft like a kite gaining the wind
 . 
She is tired and wonders why we’ve come back at this hour,
+++ though sand feels coos as the night sky peels off
+++ +++ the top layers of heat. She pants and leans into me.
 . 
+++ +++ That’s enough, isn’t it?
+++ To feel day draining into atmosphere?
+++ +++ To hear the surf recite the history of a planet –
 . 
+++ +++ +++ extinction events,
+++ +++ +++ +++ rise and fall of Rome,
+++ +++ +++ discovery, war, conquest,
+++ +++ pandemics, and underneath it all,
+++ echoes of lost Atlantis rumbling in the waves?
 . 
Sophie’s nose twitches.
+++ Something in the dark has put her on alert.
The cone of my flashlight reveals where a ghost crab
 . 
+++ +++ has been sidling. A moon-child
+++ +++ +++ gleaning alms offered by the tide
+++ +++ has scribed in the sand abstract patterns,
 . 
ragged as the Milky Way,
+++ like a record of all the small events
that drive the Earth, too delicate to see.
 . 
Gregory Lobas
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Hive in the Wall
 . 
Sometimes, when a soul has more to say,
it holds on to some place, some person,
or just moves in between joists and frames,
 . 
taking the shapes of bees, even their names,
their endless buzz near the too-warm kitchen.
Unlike other ghosts, they work by day.
 . 
They still need light and the scent of wet grass,
flowers that love summer and last until fall.
They, I say they, but I mean they act as one.
 . 
Many creatures made of one spirit, a mass
that’s a fused, united, yet scattered, all.
That’s what it takes to get the job done.
 . 
This may not be true, but here’s what I believe:
that one day, all bees, in one swarm, will leave.
 . 
Paul Jones
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Hannah Ringler (Durham, NC) is a poet, gardener, and educator.
 . 
Martha O. Adams (Hendersonville, NC) includes drawings for coloring with her recent meditative poem In Your Meadow.
 . 
Preston Martin (Chapel Hill, NC) facilitates classes in poetry and literature at Duke Continuing Education.
 . 
Gregory Lobas (Columbus, NC) won the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize in 2022 for Left of Center.
 . 
Paul Jones (Chapel Hill, NC) is a member of the NC State Computer Science Hall of Fame and some of his poems crashed on the moon.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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2020-03-07 Doughton Park Tree
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