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Singing

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on December 9, 2022| 8 Comments »

 

[with 3 poems by Aruna Gurumurthy]

One directs from the piano while he plays, his left eyebrow for entrances, the right to cut us off. Another tells us stories about her middle school students, then gets us to open our mouths like grownups. The beautiful one coaches our vowels with a baritone so luscious even we ourselves begin to believe. The one with a degree in percussion can direct 6/8 with his right hand and 4/4 with his left – simultaneously. The one no longer quite young requires all her sopranos to sing as if they are. The forever younger one jokes with us constantly until someone sings a terminal s at the end of the upbeat instead of the up of the downbeat (some in the tenor section refer to this gaff as “showing your ess”).

And all of us gathered around our director? We sing.

We sing not merely phonating, mouths formed, palates elevated, cords vibrating. We sing not merely vocalizing, words in rhythm on pitch. Not merely making a joyful noise. Singing together is less about what issues forth from between our lips and more about what flows into our ears, listening to our brothers and sisters on either side. And the together in singing together is most of all about what we see, eyes lifted from the score, alert, watching our leader, his hands, her face, their power to slow and soften us into tenderness, to swell us to climax, to make us one.

Singing together: leader, voices, music, lyric, all coalesce into one wholeness, one flow, one message – the song.

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Madras

Tied in seventeen years of matrimony,
we lick the glazed onions and potatoes
of a masala dosa
from banana leaves at Karpagambal Café.

The scent and steamy ascent
of filtered coffee wraps around tunes
of the Tamil melody Ennavale.

He touches my swinging earrings
as I nod through tales of yesterday,
picking just the good ones,
the greener exits off the highway.

Breathless by the ocean, we watch
Earth’s blazing empress undress on miles of blue.

To heartbeats of the Ferris wheel,
we crack hot, roasted groundnuts,
glance at fluttering pigeons
and faraway people.

He pulls out three rupees for the jasmine braider,
tucks those flowers in my black curls,
smells the white, drooping malas
bounce in my hair
as we kick the wet sand on the pier.

Morning mantras resound
under the temple arches of Anna Nagar.
Garlands of marigolds sway to the singing breeze.
Devotees, we circle around the Ganesh deity,
break a coconut, drink the holy water
and make offerings for a good day.

We take a rickshaw to my mother’s brick cottage.
Crows caw on the neighbor’s wall
as we amble down the pebbled aisle.
A drop of dew slides on a hibiscus,
its yellow mellows even a passerby’s gloom.

I step on kolams, starry rice powder tattoos
on the foyer floor, dusting our rising dreams

of the shores of a white sand beach
dimmed by the dwindling sun,
where we curl our fingers
as the waves unfurl at our feet
and touch our breathing bodies.

Aruna Gurumurthy
from storySouth Issue 54: Fall 2022

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Cumin and mustard seeds pop in the oil, fragrant steam from onions, garlic, coriander, cardomom wafts us away from a cold, overcast day in the North Carolina piedmont to a warmer clime that gently challenges all our sense. Aruna Gurumurthy’s poems taste exotic. Sometimes the masala is hot and makes us sweat, sometimes it’s sweet and floral, but always fresh: an unexpected description, imagined encounter, cultural reference. Whether her setting is her home in Chapel Hill or her themes are as commonplace as home, motherhood, a morning in the garden or an afternoon in the kitchen, Aruna seasons each poem with a hint of something new.

Madras was runner-up for the 2022 Randall Jarrell Award of the North Carolina Writer’s Network. The Embrace and I Went to the Bottom of the Well are from Aruna’s 2020 book of prose poems, Down the Grassy Aisles.

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The Embrace

The growing vine, she helixes around the naked branches of the Oak. She travels through a gazebo, she dances about, the bounce loosening up a passerby’s grimace, with a musical glow, an oomph to the soul. Resplendent raw sienna, her body touches the tree. A cherub of twenty-four months, she has grown and crawls to embrace me. A subtle Shangri-La, a mystic Bethlehem, the dancing duos in he arms of Mother Earth.

Aruna Gurumurthy
from Down the Grassy Aisles, Kelsay Books, American Fork UT, © 2020

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I Went to the Bottom of the Well

They hated me, a timid teenager. They bit me with mean dragon faings, making me weak, shredded from within, stripped of my faith. The dragon’s fumes roared at me, turning its neck from side to side. I felt like a trembling half-dead cockroach. Left me feeling like they had shot me in the head, but I bled from down there. After it all, the dragon dove into the wter, escaping, extinguishing. I went diving too, to the bottom of the well. There lay a small, shining silver coin. I swam my way through layers of despair, arms as though mustering a breaststroke, and my fingertip reaching out for that coin – my faith. I had found my faith.

Aruna Gurumurthy
from Down the Grassy Aisles, Kelsay Books, American Fork UT, © 2020

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2018-02-09 Doughton Park Tree

 

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Corncob Miracles

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 2, 2022| 7 Comments »

[with poems by Kimberly O’Connor]

We walk out of the pines and hear it, a throaty chuff and grumble from somewhere across the corn field. A plume of dust and chaff is one clue but the clincher is the field’s gnawed border twelve rows wide, a swath of brittle stalks and husks eaten and spat out. And a scatter of yellow kernels in the weeds.

After we cross the road our trail re-enters the woods but still parallels the field. The combine is laboring well out of sight but its growling swells and fades. Linda and I hike this particular bit of Mountains-to-Sea trail every week and we’ve been wondering why these acres have been standing so long unharvested. Great day for an answer, this Wednesday before Thanksgiving – school’s out! – and the grandkids with us. Hardwoods now. In the leafless shadows we can smell corn dust even when we can’t see the field through the undergrowth. Saul hangs back to talk philosophy and politics with Linda while Amelia skips ahead and dares me to jump over every rock and root.

At our turning-back-to-the-car point, the trail branches north to Grassy Creek and south into the corn field. Machinery noise has receded; I want to see the carnage. We all walk up the red clay bank. Most of the stalks are now stubble but a few have been pushed over, unconsumed. I wander a few rows and pick up dry ears to show Saul and Amelia. Moldy toward the silks, but mostly each ear is clean hard kernels clinging to cob. I put a few nuggets in my pocket. Saul keeps two unshucked ears to carry home for evidence.

Back at the road crossing the uproar reaches its crescendo. We see the top of the cab as it approaches, pulling rows of stalks into its jutting incisors, and then it finishes its row and roars past us. A man and his son sit high in the glassed-in booth! They wave back to us and we watch for a few more minutes as more of the field is mown down.

When we turn back into the woods, Amelia says, “I’m sure glad they weren’t mad at us for taking some of their corn.” Small miracles – and another is that on today’s hike we heard nary a complaint from the kids even when I confessed I’d forgotten to bring the snacks.

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Old Dominion

Remove arteries,
veins, and clotted blood
around heart

was the start of a recipe
for chicken pie in
a 1920’s cookbook

I found and read in the house
of friends we were staying with
in Charlottesville. It was

an heirloom. Their whole house
was antique, old fashioned:
mason jars, strawberries

resting in colanders, milk
in a white porcelain pitcher.
Worn embroidered linen dishcloths.

She canned. He cut wood
for fires in winter but
this was summer. The air

almost tropical, unbreathable.
Azaleas. Wisteria. Roses.
When I breathed in, it hurt.

The house hurt me and
I didn’t know why.
Everything was white.

Clotted blood around heart –
I wanted that cookbook.
I almost stole it. I was

a terrible houseguest. I wanted
to go home. I cried beside
the clawfoot bathtub

throughout the afternoon.
I wanted to go home and
I wanted to own that house.

Kimberly O’Connor
from White Lung, Saturnalia Books, Ardmore PA, © 2021

 

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Kimberly O’Connor’s poetry is the surgeon’s dispassionate blade. Lie straight and still and watch the blood well up. Yes there will be pain, yes invasion, yes you are vulnerable, but what is cut from you may offer your best chance to live.

Kimberly O’Connor’s poetry is the surgeon’s passion and point of compassion. Yes there is pain in our world, both of us know it, both feel it, both of us have at times caused the pain. But here is our best chance for hope, for a world where we dig out the pain, find its roots, put it in a place where we can all see it for what it is. Maybe it won’t have to hurt us forever.

In White Lung, Kimberly explores every painful vein and clot of her Southern heritage and upbringing. She doesn’t flinch, although she cries and so do we, her readers. Several of her poems share the same title, The History of My Silence, which proclaims one of the major themes of the book and can be extended to the silence of not just one individual but of our society and culture: by extension, the silence of our history. Not only are the individual poems tense with emotion and meaning, but the poems communicate with each other to weave a personal story, and interconnect to bring their painful, hopeful, glorious epiphanies into masterful wholeness.

The North Carolina Poetry Society awards its annual Brockman-Campbell Award to the best volume published by a North Carolina writer in the preceding year. Kimberly O’Connor and White Lung are the winner for 2022. Kimberly is a NC native who lives in Golden, Colorado and has over 20 years of experience teaching and working with writers ages eight to adult. This is her first book.

[More information about the Brockman-Campbell Award, White Lung, and another poem by Kimberly O’Connor, available here: ]

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Portrait of a Lady

her father an electrician her mother
a hairdresser (it’s not that simple)
(you want her to be nice
and quiet) she’s a girl reading
in her tiny bedroom in the trailer
she does not say a word

you don’t want to read the word
n_____ but there it is her mother
says it her father says it the trailer
echoes with its two-syllable
thud & poison you can read
(here) where she wrote it in her diary a nice

(straight white) girl straight hair straight A’s nice
and quiet (like you want) says not a word
sits in the beauty shop reading
spinning a chair while her mother
cuts hair (she imagines she is special)
they drive the dirt road to the trailer

they move out of the trailer
build a house (big wood nice)
when her father wins a sweepstakes
they look at the letter repeating the words
over and over (it’s true) her mother
gives her the letter to read

there it is in red
(one hundred thousand dollars) the trailer
becomes a memory her mother
moves the shop to the new nice
spare room the ladies get shampoo & styles words
hum white nose white ladies scissors

swish you can see it (it’s simple)
a whit girl grows up in the South its red
& pink mimosas dripping scent the words
they say there taking root trailing
tendrils in even nice
girls’ minds (everyone says them even mothers)

Kimberly O’Connor
from White Lung, Saturnalia Books, Ardmore PA, © 2021

 

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Untitled (By the End)

By the end, we won’t remember what
happened when. We’ll remember hardly
any of it. The only thing that makes it

bearable is all the blossoming. The trees
turn white, then green. What unfolds
for me unfolds secondhandedly.

While they’re injecting the midazolam,
I am watching little girls in black
leotards play tag. Or it takes longer

than I think and we are already driving
home for dinner. But let’s go back
to before that. There was a murder.

It was violent. It was not an accident.
A young woman died and a young man
went to prison. Elsewhere, unrelated,

I want to be a poet. I fall in love with
someone. He becomes a lawyer.
We become a mother and a father.

We move to Denver. My husband meets
the young man in prison. He’s no longer
young. He becomes a kind of friend.

Of course this takes years. I learn things
like in supermax, the inmates are required
by law to have access to one hour

of sunlight per day. On death row,
the light though a skylight counts.
The men can’t touch their families

or each other. The day before their
executions, their mothers cannot hug
their sons good-bye. No one cares about this.

Why should they? Their victims’ parents
didn’t get to hug their children before—
yes. That is correct. So what’s wrong

with me? My husband sends his client books.
Should I say his name? He likes
vampire books. Mysteries. Thrillers.

When my husband calls him with the news
that the last appeal has been denied,
Clayton says Have a good weekend

when they hang up the phone. My husband
flies to Oklahoma City. I wait.
Amelia’s dance class is in a church.

I sit in the sanctuary and imagine
I am holding Clayton’s hand.
I am ridiculous. But my hand feels

warm for a minute. My husband calls
and he is weeping. Or he is furious.
He’s not dead yet, he says.

They kicked us out. They closed
the curtain and they made us leave.
It’s the end of April; everything’s in bloom.

It snows, then the sun comes back.
By summer, we should feel better.
By autumn, we might forget.

Our garden grows. We harvest. I walk
through the alley carrying vegetables.
When I get home and dump out the cucumbers,

I’m filled suddenly with joy. I pirouette
around the kitchen and imagine Clayton
is dancing with me, his spirit, anyway.

I think he is. I wish for it. I imagine
his victim’s mother wishing deeply
for my death, and I don’t blame her for it.

Kimberly O’Connor
from White Lung, Saturnalia Books, Ardmore PA, © 2021

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2020-09-08b Doughton Park Tree

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Early Snow

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 25, 2022| 9 Comments »

[with 3 poems from Quiet Diamonds
Bob Wickless, Susan Craig, Bill Griffin]

O narrow track, how I have missed you! O wee well trodden way, favorite mile, little path through pasture and wood that my right knee has refused to let me walk for all these weeks, I am so glad to see you again. Last visit you had all but shed your autumn yellows, not to mention cardinalflower reds and pastel meadowbeauties. Now here you are blowing snow across my path.

The season has arrived of whites and browns, feathers and fluff, crowns and rounds – seeds! Hello little calico aster whose name I just learned last summer; now your stems are strung with new stars so fine. Hello crownbeard; petals fallen, you lift your regal head. And hello snowy boneset and thoroughwort; one puff of breeze is all it takes to loft your feathered promises across the meadow.

There is a bare patch below my house beneath the powerline. There is an empty bag in my pocket. You won’t mind, prodigal wingstem, goldenrod, ironweed, if I catch a bit of your seedstuff and carry it home to a new bed? You won’t run short of provender when goldfinches and sparrows come to call. You won’t ever hear me, like some others, name you weeds.

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Prayer in Spring

beginning with a line from Seneca

Not hoping without doubt,
Not doubting without hope,
We enter the slow country
Of change, clad in the garment
Thread through the loom of change,
Woven in green doubt
Though woven in hopes

Greener than any hopes are:
May the clothes of the world
Still fit, in the eye’s mind
And in the mind’s eye, may
Our vision still clear
As the iced eye of the river
Cataracts, loosens, the view

In the breeze of the green flag
That is not failure, in one light
That will melt the white flag
Of surrender – Lord, we had not
Given up though the air had said
Surrender, through the vines, trees
Were all blasted with failure,

Though no light shone
Through the fabric of sky
But one pale and unaccomplished,
Wan, washed out as our vision,
Faded divinity, in the blank
Washed out country called snow,
A world neglected, blue

Now, Lord, even as the sky

Bob Wickless (Reidsville, NC)
from Quiet Diamonds 2022, The Orchard Street Press, Gates Mill OH

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Today in Elkin this blowing snow is windborne seeds of last summer’s asters, but inches of the cold frozen sort are accumulating in northeastern Ohio around Lake Erie. Snow belt – that’s where Linda and I met, dated, and graduated from the high school we walked to through slush & drifts. Call off school for a “snow day” in Ohio? Bah! The last time we visited Portage County was for Linda’s birthday six years ago. The old Aurora Country Club had been converted to a nature preserve – how many species of goldenrod filled those reclaimed fairways? The Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area had since 2000 become a National Park; we still talk about the canal trail, every ten meters another chipmunk to chirp and run across our feet.

Northeastern Ohio lives fondly in our hearts. Just up Chillicothe Road from the Cuyahoga and our old school is the village of Gates Mills and The Orchard Street Press, another font of fondness. OSP editor Jack Kristofco published my chapbook Riverstory : Treestory in 2018, so I most certainly love him, but even more I love the anthology his press produces every year, Quiet Diamonds. This year’s collection is deep and various and moving. The poems can be personal and at the same time universal. I find myself leafing back and forth through the book reading each one several times, in a different sequence, discovering new moods with each passage. So many I would love to feature on this page, wonderfulness from poets all over the US, but here I continue my focus on us Southerners.

Check in with The Orchard Street Press in January for their 2023 contest.

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Looking for the Banded Sphinx

++++++ I’d seen clutched last night to the railing
its wings of veined mahogany like a master craftsman’s
the way my brother’s finest tables
were inlaid in gold and amber

++++++ yet, only the marsh hawk waits
atop the same wooden rail outside the same glass door
its wing-shoulders brownish-gray
as any familiar relative

++++++ and even its flight, when it senses
the small breeze of my arrival, appears
blasé as a loping dog

++++++++++ Last night, the next-door young couples
played guitar as midnight lapsed into new year
sang Jolene in a lusty chorus
that rose and fell like the distant sea pulled
by a stranger’s violin

++++++ I ask my husband about the banded moth
Gone, he says, at first light
without a hint of nuance
++++++ the same way wonder disappears, the way
dust becomes fugitive

++++++++++ My eyes trace mid-morning’s
pale pentimento of moon
while at the edge of marsh a stalking ibis
is osmosed in plumes of fog
where sun glints cold creek
++++++ and we find no reason to speak
as the hawk melds like another riddle into winter’s
moss-draped bones

Susan Craig (Columbia, SC)
from Quiet Diamonds 2022, The Orchard Street Press, Gates Mill OH

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We Never Give Up Hoping

Morning frozen hard. Pour
++++boiling water
into the birdbath;
++++ they will come
to drink when I have gone.

++++ God of holy ice, holy
++++++++ steam,
++++ give my children
++++++++ water
++++ that all my hoping
++++++++ can’t.

Sound of wings, splash
++++ diminishing;
find the world again
++++ iced over.
Fill the kettle. Holy water.

Bill Griffin (Elkin, NC)
from Quiet Diamonds 2022, The Orchard Street Press, Gates Mill OH

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EARLY SNOW: ASTERACEAE

Stare across any random autumn afternoon and soon you’ll notice the jig and curtsey of little airborne tufts. Catch one and see if there isn’t a tiny hard seed hanging from that feathery wisp. The early snowflake you’re holding is a member of family Asteraceae.

Except for Cardinal flower (Bellflower family, Campanulaceae) and Meadowbeauties (Meadow Beauty family, Melastomataceae), all the flowers mentioned in my homage above are members of the Composite family (Asteraceae). This is the largest family of flowering plants in North America and vies for the world title with Orchidaceae. Besides typical species like asters, sunflowers, black-eyed susans, and coneflowers, Asteraceae includes less obvious suspects like Joe-Pye Weed, goldenrod, ragweed.

Study a daisy: you figure you’re seeing one standard flower, right? A ring of petals around the edge (corolla), eye in the center. Basic taxonomy of flowers depends on the configuration of their reproductive apparatus – flowers. But a daisy is a Composite – each “petal” is 3 or more fused petals from a complete individual Ray flower; each spot in the eye is an individual Disc flower with its own minuscule petals, pistil, and stamen, ready to make a seed. (And if that’s not already confusing, some Composites have only Ray flowers, no Disc (Dandelion), and some have only Disc flowers with no Rays (Fireweed).)

So what about this early snow, then? Ah, sepal and pappus . . .

In most flowers, sepals are the layer, just outside the petals, that make up the protective bud cloak. After the bud opens, the ring of sepals is called the calyx. In Composites, each “flower” actually multiple little florets all clumped together with zero elbow room, the calyx is diminished to almost nothing: the pappus, sometimes visible only with a microscope where it’s fixed to the seed. Except . . . those members of Asteraceae whose pappus is a bristle, hair, tendril, feather. For wind dispersal, but also for wonder and delight. When a breeze puffs the boneset or fireweed or lowly dandelion, one might imagine the pasture will soon be knee deep.

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Doughton Park Tree 2021-02-23

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