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Tracking

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 19, 2021| 9 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Patricia Hooper]

Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, February 05-07, 2021

the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen . . .

Faint tracks – but when has life ever laid it out plain, an open book, page upon page with footnotes? Aren’t I still searching between the lines, faint traces, no clear prints? Lately I dream every night of making diagnoses, explaining treatments, buffing up my charts. Is Jung telling me that this was my only purpose in life and now it’s over?

Deer walk a diagonal gait – each hoof print is really two impressions, the forefoot overlaid with the rear. If the rear hoof strikes a little lateral within each fore print it means the pelvis is wider = you are following a female.

Don’t plan on seeing a bear in the Smokies in February. Mom is asleep in a hollow tree with her cubs and Dad is dozing under a bush somewhere (he snores), though he might rouse up to forage on a warm afternoon. So why are we studying mammals at Tremont in February? In the sere meadows, the leaf-littered groves, under the pale unforgiving sky the book of all their signs is open for us to read. Let’s hike up to that oak tree and see who’s been scratching for acorns, see who has left us some scat. Let’s follow that faint trail through dry brown stalks to check out predator and prey. Who clawed up this white pine? Who stepped in the mud?

Canids: dog paw prints show deep claw marks with claws of outer toes angled outward; coyote claw marks are less distinct but all aligned strait ahead; gray fox claw marks are the least distinct since they save the claws for climbing trees, and the rear pad looks scalloped like a chevron.

But clear prints are maybe 1% of tracking. We’re learning a new vocabulary of chewed nut and compressed grass. Tracking is patterns and connections, habitats and behaviors. Measure the size of the incisors that gnawed this antler. Measure the bits of skull and femur in this dropping.

And can I learn a new language? Maybe all these dreams are about knitting up the years, tying the last knot, laying it away to pull out when I need to reminisce. Or maybe I need to discover something missed. Life is not disjunctive – the end of every moment flows into the beginning of the next. The assurance of past creates future. Tracking in Cades Cove – a metaphor for opening oneself to an unseen message within, to the evidence of human purpose. Connections, convictions. We track a personal ecology that leaves signs for us to discover, to question, to wonder.

To follow.

Tracks have lead us to this place, maybe with a lesson or two that sunk in along the way. Some wisdom. And the tracks that still lead forward?

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Patricia Hooper’s bright clear poetry touches earth with a feather – to bring color and flight. Garden, feeder, wild crag, starry night, in all seasons she observes the particular and discovers its connection to the universal. Nature is her palette but human nature is the canvas she illuminates. The poems of her latest book, Wild Persistence, taken singly seem to open our eyes to brief moments or localities, but as a whole these poems weave a complex narrative of family, longing, grief, redemption. I find joy in her art.

Patricia moved to North Carolina in 2006 and lives in Gastonia. In 2020 she was awarded the Brockman-Campbell Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society for Wild Persistence, awarded for the year’s best book of poetry by a North Carolina author.

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Elegy for a Son-in-Law

1.

A distant figure on the mountainside
seems to be coming closer, then it turns,
a blue, retreating cap, a scarlet jacket.
Without another sign, I know you’re there,
climbing again the way you used to climb
before you were a ghost. I want to call
Don’t go! Come back! I have your two small sons
sleeping behind me in the car, their mother
watching the sky for falcons. But you move
farther away. Or we do. Now you’re gone,
back toward Mount Sterling where she took your ashes.
I hope it’s peaceful there. I hope you know
they’re doing well. I hope you didn’t see us.

2.
These are the mountains where you were a boy,
broad waves of mountains rolling like an ocean
into the distance, no horizon, only
these smoky contours where you knew each rise
and hemlock forest, plunging stream. Your friends
tell how you often left them for a while
after you’d reached the top, to be alone,
then met them at the camp, all tales and laughter.
Today, a red-tailed hawk riding the breeze,
gold leaves, cascading creeks, – your kind of joy:
cold rushing currents, then the ecstatic slide.

3.
This is the world you wanted: brisk fall air,
the valleys hung with haze, that long blue range
half-hidden by the clouds. It’s coming clear.
How far you must have seen from there! And here?
It’s hard to see around so many hills,
so many peaks and gorges, and the curves
are slippery on the parkway, miles of turns.
We’re heading home. The boys are waking now,
their mother’s passing crackers, pointing out
the overlook ahead: blue waterfall,
deep river valley, autumn leaves, the pines
along the ridge, the rising trail – and there,
the summit you’d have shown them. Mist and shine.

from Wild Persistence, Patricia Hooper, University of Tampa Press, 2019

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In Tennessee

The Blue Ridge at sunset – hardly a missed note
in the hemlocks where a mockingbird is singing
while to the west a falcon dips, then glides
over the valley, indistinct from here
except that the bird falls lower than the chair
I’m sitting in, and disappears. The sky
is the color of pomegranate, and the balcony
slips into shadow like the distant hills.
No wonder that the mockingbird is singing
a medley of every song he knows,
no matter whose. No wonder that he sits
in the glow of a single flood lamp high above
the roof, a pool he must mistake for sunlight,
enough to urge him on and on and through
his repertoire that bird by bird is ringing
over the day’s end, over the night’s coming.
Maybe he has to sing to know himself
as part of things – finch, cardinal, wren, and now
that long coarse call that sounded like the crow
or Steller’s jay – whatever voice he’s pulling
out of himself, some sound against the silence,
against the signs of brightness vanishing.
The railing of the porch dissolves in mist,
the sun has set, and now we’re weightless, drifting
as if suspended in the blackening air.
His sphere of light no longer seems as clear.
Maybe he knows the lamplight isn’t sunlight.
Maybe he feels he too is disappearing
into the darkness like this porch and chair.
he has to sing, he has to keep on singing,
to know he’s really there.

from Wild Persistence, Patricia Hooper, University of Tampa Press, 2019

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At the Rifle River

When the eagle unfurled, clearing
the green dome of the forest,
I almost missed it

till somebody cried, “Look up!”

and there it was
in the sky over the river

which I saw it must have owned
the way it spanned the rapids
with a single stroke,

and the sky parted.

I can’t say I believe
in messengers from the clouds,

but I didn’t believe
this was an accident either,

the way its light
tore through the drab morning
I barely lived in, and then

it rose over the steaming
forest, it disappeared.

*
At the time I was only watching
my own path by the river,

but afterward
I knew it must still be there
over the rim of maples

its white helmet, its fire,
and its gold eye turned toward me,

or something enough like it,
something powerful and amazing
which someone else sees.

Imagine my certainty
the moment before it rose
through the world, crossing the water,
that there was nothing anymore to surprise me.

Imagine my emptiness.

Imagine my surprise.

from Separate Flights, Patricia Hooper, University of Tampa Press, 2016

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GSMIT // SANCP

Special thanks to Jeremy Lloyd and John DiDiego directors and instructors at Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, for the weekend Mammals course, which is part of the Southern Appalachian Naturalist Certification Program, and to Wanda DeWaard, guest instructor for the day and master tracker and naturalist.

The Southern Appalachian Naturalist Certification Program at GSMIT comprises eight weekend courses designed to provide fundamental and specialty skills in Southern Appalachian ecology and interpretive techniques. Each weekend includes 15 hours and more of lecture and hands-on field study. Upon completion the student receives the non-credit Southern Appalachian Naturalist Certificate from the University of Tennessee.

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Daffodils in the Empty Field

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 5, 2021| 10 Comments »


[with 4 poems by Ruth Moose]

I’m driving from Elkin up to Dobson, our county seat, smack in the center of Surry. About half way there, as Mountain Park Road peels off to the left, Poplar Springs Road completes its transformation to Zephyr Road. I love that – Zephyr Road. There are farms and rolling hills and plenty of zephyrs, though some of them are perfumed with a whiff of chicken house or skunk. Soon winter wheat will green the fields, then Spring will raise corn, soybeans, finally tobacco. Off to the south you can see vineyards pruned and expectant.

While the pastures are still winter brown, pay attention. Look, there’s one – close to that big oak in the middle of an empty field, a little patch of green. Come March you’ll spy the yellow nod of daffodils. Why out there of all places?

Those daffodil plots, slowly spreading, most likely once knelt at the front stoop of a farm cabin. A century ago, even longer? No sign of it from the road but if I walked around the oak I might scuff up a few squared off stones that were its foundation or that hoisted a step up to the porch. The daffodils remember. And maybe it was the same man and the woman who hoed the corn, milked the cow, every winter killed the hog, two together across the years who some quiet evenings found an hour to sit on that porch, maybe they’re the ones who named the wagon track below the field Zephyr Road. I love that.

 

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Ruth Moose’s poems reflect the North Carolina icon she is. She draws on generations of memory to weave her stories and sketch her vivid images of locality and personality. Her sly wit, cloaked but never hidden by gentility, brings out the quirky individuality of the denizens of her world, real and imagined. And she reveals the deep, deep heart of longing, loss and yearning, our fragile mortality.

These poems are from three of her collections spanning decades. Ruth has also published novels, many short stories including two collections, and has won many awards and fellowships. Charles Edward Eaton said of her: Few writers can handle both prose and poetry, but Ruth Moose does them equally well, and with this double grasp has become one of North Carolina’s best writers. Ruth taught creative writing at the University of North Carolina until her retirement and she continues to support the creative life our home state.

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Smith Grove

There is a heaven
for farmhouses.
Acres of them
lit by cloud hills
that plunge and wind
past creeks
where cows crowd on hot days.
A million windows watch
where farm wives waited,
minded those who came,
those who left,
counted the colors
of morning, evenings,
the sky at noon.
From back door stoops
they marked storm clouds,
summers rent with heat lightning,
saying both aloud and under
their tongues the chant
of superstitions, old tales,
familiar talk until the dark
dissolved.

In the museum
of porch swings and farm tools,
kitchen work is rusted,
thick with the oven of meals,
baked enamel, porcelain polished
like plates.

from Smith Grove, Sow’s Ear Press, Abingdon, Virginia, 1997
Illustrations are by Ruth’s husband the late Talmadge Moose, widely published and displayed artist and illustrator; read more at Life As He Saw It in Our State Magazine, April, 2011, by Ruth Moose.

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Making the Bed

No matter how well
or worse the sleep
someone must take
the four cornered world
and set it straight.
Two can do it better,
take turns with edges,
coverlet, shams,
blanket and bolster,
wait in turn.

You can do it in the dark,
by feel, familiarity,
plumping feathers or foam.
You know your own scent,
shallow spots your knees
seek, the place you
fall into, dark and faraway,
taking you back or forward
like a train, all scenes
lighted cars you can look into,
out again. You hear the engine
that goes nowhere, the solitary
shriek as daybreak unrolls,
all wrappings out like flowers.

We go on with our lives.

from Making the Bed, Pure Heart Press / Main Street Rag Publishing, 1995

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Almost a Pantoum on Being

A script is not needed; our place is already there.
We come into the world naked, unafraid.
Helpless we learn as we go, if somebody cares.
From water we swim, kicking into blue air.

We come into the world naked, unafraid.
The spell is everywhere, something the soul knows.
From water we swim, kicking into blue air.
Alive as the earth is alive and newly green.

The spell is everywhere, something the soul knows.
No angels hover over us, sit on our shoulders.
We are alive as the earth is alive and newly green.
Taking the flight one wing at a time.

No angels hover over us, sit on our shoulders.
Celebration waits in the arms of others.
We learn the dance one step at a time.
Moving to tunes heard in our heads.
No script is needed. Our place is already there.

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How I Think It Will Be

My mother never talked about that winter
she had a husband in the VA hospital
not knowing how or if or when
he’d recover, three children sick
with the big red measles and twelve
inches of show on the ground
for over a week. She mentioned
it once, that’s all I remember
and the sound of her sewing
machine late, late into the night.
What did she sew? Her sanity?
Her soul? I only know I woke
suddenly, had gone from hot to cool,
my fever broken, my pillow wet.
I felt her hand on my forehead,
her touch, her voice as I left
that darkness and came into light.

I imagine it will be as she said then,
“Oh, here you are.”

both selections from The Librarian and Other Poems, Main Street Rag Publishing 2009
dedicated to HWLWG – HE WHO LEFT WITHOUT GOODBYE

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Chatham Arts Council bio of Ruth Moose
Poetry Foundation listing

 

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Improvisation

Posted in music, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 29, 2021| Leave a Comment »

[with two poems by Lenard D. Moore]

Mockingbird knows both of Blue Jay’s songs: the astringent lament that flings the blue name of the blue Corvid into pathos; the softer plaintive wheedle of him who begs to be thought better of. What does all that conversation signify when it erupts from the beak of the Jay? What meaning has the Mocker usurped, if any meaning at all? Who can listen and understand, and who can answer?

We of different class order family genus species can only speculate why the Mockingbird repeats four times each song he knows, and each song he himself composes, as he hops from the tip of power to the mailbox to the thorn bush and back again and his notes spiral the neighborhood. We are probably safe to bet that Mocker doesn’t care two bits about impressing the Jays. Song as proclamation, song as beacon, song as telegraphy, song as bulwark – let’s just imagine that Mockingbird proclaims music is glory and improvisation is king.

Listen and understand.

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I have known Lenard Moore mainly from his haiku. He points the way to that parallel universe which is only a hairsbreadth from ours and then with observation and pointed brush he opens the door.

I also know Lenard as a teacher and mentor to Carolina writers in many, many different organizations and settings, and particularly I remember a meeting about 10 years ago at Weymouth Center in Southern Pines, NC. While Bill Blackley played blues harmonica, Lenard riffed and bopped with his jazz poetry. Now I’m holding a book that brings it back: The Geography of Jazz, issued in 2020 by Blair as a reprint of a publication by Mountains and Rivers Press in 2018.

Sultry, syncopated, steamy – if you can read this book without bobbing your head and tapping your foot you need a little more sax in your life.

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At the Train Stop

I imagine the quick hand:
Thelonious Monk waves
at red, orange, yellow leaves
from Raleigh to Rocky Mount.
Alone in this seat,
I peer out the half-window
at the rainbow of faces
bent toward this train
that runs to the irresistible Apple,
determine to imagine Monk
glows like Carolina sun
in cloudless blue sky.
I try so hard to picture him
until his specter hunkers
at the ghost piano, foxfire
on concrete platform.
Now I can hear the tune ‘Misterioso’
float on sunlit air.
If notes were visible,
perhaps they would drift crimson,
shimmer like autumn leaves.
A hunch shudders
into evening, a wordless flight.

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Ascension: John Coltrane

I didn’t pick up the tenor
and soprano saxophones
for legendhood.
I wanted only to explore chords
into progression, step into another world
I had to escape anything too strict,
take ‘Giant Steps’ all the way
from Hamlet, North Carolina.
The music shimmered like a lake
inside me and turned blue.
It was kind of spiritual.
I thought of extending the scales.
I wanted to play on and on,
sail as long as the horn could
and eventually come back again
as if I had never left.
It was maybe the only time
I left my body.

both selections from The Geography of Jazz, Lenard D. Moore, Blair Publishing 2020 reprint, © 2018 Lenard D. Moore

More about Lenard D. Moore, his poetry, and haiku.

 

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Afterword: Old Jay still has a few tricks of his own. He can mimic perfectly the three Buteos in his breeding range: Red-tailed, Red-shouldered, and Broad-winged Hawks. Nobody messes with Mr. Blue Jay.


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2020-09-08b Doughton Park Tree

 

 

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