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That Isn’t Me

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged Anything That Happens, Bill Griffin, Cheryl Wilder, family, imagery, nature photography, NC Poetry Society, NC Poets, NCPS, poetry, Press 53, Southern writing on December 6, 2024| 7 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Cheryl Wilder]

Anything That Happens

Until I was twenty, I believed anything

wouldn’t happen to me.

Walking from the car,

leaving you behind,

sirens whining louder as they closed on us;

I didn’t understand anything

had just happened.

People said it wasn’t my fault

and for reassurance,

It could have been me. But

I heard what they didn’t say.

I’m so glad it wasn’t.

Cheryl Wilder

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It’s 1990 and my kids are cruising toward teenagerdom. Every week in the throw-away medical journals that cross my desk there’s at least one article with a title like We Never Even Suspected, or Why Me? The doctor or doctor’s spouse laments about their teen who is (pick one): flunking out of college; a closet alcoholic; pregnant out of wedlock; addicted to Percocet. That becomes the one article I am compelled to read before assigning the journal to the round file. It’s a solid principal of statistics: if it happened to them it’s that much less likely to happen to me.

Because today in 1990 my kids are, well, not perfect but above average. They are so good. And I am so good. Whatever that other doctor did to cause his child to go wrong, I would never do that. Because somehow at this interchange along the cosmic highway I am totally in charge of (and totally to blame for) all the choices my kids are making and will make.

And responsible, of course, for all the rest, now and forever after. Are my parents happy? Is my wife fulfilled? Are my grandkids smart? Is there crabgrass in the flower bed? (Well, maybe I am responsible for that one.) Don’t worry, I am not poised here to write an article titled Everything That Would Have Been Better if I Were Better. That’s between me and 4 AM.

Instead, I’m attempting a more compelling practice. A practice without textbooks or certification exams. One that requires nothing but offers everything. A practice never free from pain but sometimes tinged with joy. All that this practice endeavors is to prod a slight change in phraseology, poke a minor shift in frame of reference. When I learn of your misfortune, when you tell me about your pain, when I recognize that you are suffering, I will try my best not to say to myself I’m glad that isn’t me, and instead I will say, That is me.

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Xing

I don’t know how I brought a child

into the world when I can’t reconcile

if crashing a car and a friend’s skull

is karmic debt created

or payment for a past immoral act.

I open doors and say thank you and do not try

to behave in a way I cannot afford.

There’s no barometer, no way to know

if the pendulum is swinging

away or toward, how many pay-it-forwards it takes

before I break even at the gambling table.

I cold blend in with the pure

if it weren’t for the scars that don’t fade

no matter how many turtles I save,

so am I all that surprised

when my little boy tells me

of his palpable fear

to cross the street.

Cheryl Wilder

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Sostenuto – a musical notation indicating a passage sustained to the utmost. Unrelenting. Imagine a violin’s piercing note, almost impossibly high and rising, horsehair glissando across the E-string. Now it’s joined in harmony by the A-string, discordant, the two dancing and warring with each other. They weave pitch and volume but never rest, sostenuto. You lean forward on the edge of your hard seat, your teeth are on edge, you want, you need, you crave desperately some resolution.

Cheryl Wilder sustains tension throughout sixty-four pages to the ultimate climax of Anything That Happens. Her story is too piercing: one tastes blood and tears. She lives every moment with that high, sharp note, days and years of guilt and pain – she has irretrievably damaged her friend – and then also weaves discordant disharmonies from her cold relationship with her mother and her non-relationship with her father. More than once I had to lay the book aside and breathe deeply to slow my pounding heart.

And more than once I resisted the urge to flip pages to the end. Who doesn’t crave resolution? What follows in this post today is the book’s penultimate poem. Some hurt can never be removed. No one can return to the moment before anything happens. Scars are just that, permanent marks and reminders of pain. How do any of us go on living? How? I invite you to enter the music of this book, its atonality and discord, one poem after another, until you reach its final page.

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Anything That Happens by Cheryl Wilder is a Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection and is available at Press 53. Among other awards, the book was a finalist for the 2022 Brockman-Campbell Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society; read an additional poem from the collection and celebrate 90 years of NCPS HERE.

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Home Safe

Friends visit the hospital

where I am not wanted. It’s just as well

that I stay in bed, carve poplar

into a shield I can place between

myself and others, learn you wake

from a coma by the drop

of my manslaughter charge. Years pass

before I hear your voice again,

asking me to lunch over the phone, your mother

telling me I am only allowed in her home

because you found my number

on your own. You reach for my arm

to steady your walk, lean close

to see me in focus, your smile wide

on one side of your face, brightened even more

at the restaurant when you flirt with the waiter.

That is enough, to see a glimpse of the friend

I once knew, but then you reach cross the table

for my hands, look at me to say

what you defied your mother to say,

It’s not your fault. Over and again,

I forgive you. You can’t remember

the night I cannot forget, but you know

your words are my salvation.

There is no talk of next time.

You get out of the car and walk

into the house, back to your mother

who can breathe once again.

Cheryl Wilder

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Generosity

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, family, imagery, nature photography, NC Poets, Night Talks, poetry, Press 53, Southern writing, Terri Kirby Erickson on November 29, 2024| 8 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Terri Kirby Erickson]

In the Midst of Grief, a Heron

Healing begins with the blue heron hunting

in the frigid water of a shallow pond.

Wings folded, neck tucked into its feathered

breast, it stands motionless in a shelter

made of branches, alone save for its shadow.

What would it hurt to loosen our grip

on grief? To allow the soft gray-blue

of a heron’s body to soothe our eyes, tired

of shedding tears? This day will never come

again and the heron will soon fly. Already,

the light is fading, taking with it all the time

that has ever passed. Let this peace soak

into our skin like medicine, remain with us

long after the heron is gone.

Terri Kirby Erickson

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Mike and Johnny Slattery would have been there, from three doors down on Marcia Road. My little brother Bobby, of course. I can picture the house right now as if standing there, the shape of our living room in that L-shaped ranch in the square-grid new-built neighborhood in Memphis. There’s the door that leads into Mom’s kitchen, to the right the little hallway to the front door, outside another ten steps to the carport and driveway where we played marbles or rode our bikes down to the street. Beside me is the corner cupboard Nana gave us, before me the cherry table Dad broke last year when he fell.

Most everything else from my nine-year old birthday party has faded. How many other boys Mom invited and gathered in from the homes around, what kind of cake, the candles and singing – all now clouded and indistinct.

One moment, though, remains untarnished. It’s been polished these sixty years hence by recollection and reflection. Mom thought to include one boy the rest of us didn’t play with very often. Maybe there was something a little different about him. To this day I can’t tell you his name. As the other boys present their gifts, brightly wrapped in colorful paper, he gives me a big smile and hands me his – a lump of crumpled tin foil. I peel it apart. Inside are six quarters.

I don’t remember any of the other presents I received that day. Why has this one stuck with me? I can testify I was surely no less selfish and self-absorbed than any other nine-year old, but with some vague child’s awareness I realized in that moment the boy was giving me all he had. Maybe he didn’t have a mom with time to go to the store or wrap a present. Maybe he’d never been invited to a birthday party. Today, writing these lines, I still feel a strange heaviness when I think about his gesture, a forlorn sadness but also a rich touch of awe and gratitude.

That smile – he was so happy to hand me that gift. From him to me. Thank you, thank you, little boy.

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The Letter

Northing is ordinary – not condensation on a pane

of glass – that streak of sunlight, yellow

as lemons, in the neighbor’s backyard. Trees

are rustling tender new leaves, and our lawn

is as thick as a wool rug. Even the scent of coffee

wafting from the kitchen is a miracle,

a woman walking her little dog down the sidewalk,

its leash as taught as rigging. Yet, every house

hides something that hurts, even as we call to one

another, good morning, good morning –

our faces open as a letter lying on a table, the kind

that makes our hands shake when we find it

in the mailbox, that we only read once.

Terri Kirby Erickson

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We can be generous giving money and things, and this week in the USA we generously give thanks, but where else does generosity slip in? Generous with advice, oh my yes aren’t we all, and woe to those who don’t take it. Generous with encouragement and acceptance, and who gets to decide what’s worthy of encouragement and what acceptable? Apparently it’s actually quite easy to be giving without being generous at all. We’ve had to make a rule at our house to keep the after-school peace: Pappy doesn’t try to eat Amelia’s snacks. Last week, though, Amelia had a sweet she really wanted to finish herself but offered me a bite. Generosity – it doesn’t have much to do with deserving or keeping score; it has more to do with making sacrifices and sharing the joy.

I think of myself as a reasonably generous person, and then I read Terri Kirby Erickson’s poetry. These people, these moments remembered and shared, these talks over breakfast or long into the night that leave each speaker that much richer, these also leave me richer, fuller, more human. In Night Talks, Terri presents about sixty new poems along with grateful selections from her six previous books, combined and swirled like the best layer cake you ever set fork to, perfect for morning on the porch with coffee or with evening lamplight leaning back into the sofa.

After returning to this book over and over, I can finally name the spirit that suffuses Terri’s work and that warms the reader – generosity. There is harm and hazard in Terri’s writer’s life, there is grief and loss and no denying them. These poems look into the darkness and discover light, even if only the pinpricks of stars overhead. These poems never overlook a radiant dawn – they always expect it. And it doesn’t hurt a bit that Terri is the impresario of image, the titan of the turn of phrase: summer wants [to] / hitch a ride on the back of a broad-winged hawk / to places where the stars feel like chips of ice / sliding down September’s throat.

How does her poetry restore and replenish its deeply generous spirit on every new page? Try on this bit of spiritual etymology: From gratitude comes generosity; from generosity comes giving. With recollection and reflection, let me polish up my gratitude. Let’s see where it take me.

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Moon Walk

++++ for my brother

Sunburned, bellies full of fried pompano, sweet

corn, and garden tomatoes purchased at a roadside

stand manned by a farmer with more fingers than

teeth—my family huddled around a rented black

and white TV set the shape and size of a two-slot

toaster, watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin

hop like bunnies on the rough surface of the same

waxing moon that shone through our beach cottage

windows. I was eleven years old, bucktoothed and

long-legged—my brother a year younger and, most

days, followed his big sister like Mercury orbiting

the sun. Mom and Dad sat side by side on the faux

leather, sand-dusted couch, and Grandma, never one

to hold still for long, stood by her grandson’s hard-

backed chair, her hair a nimbus of silver from the soft

glow of a television screen where a miracle unfolded

before our eyes. But grown men wearing fishbowls

on their heads, bouncing from one crater to the next,

seemed less real to my brother and me than Saturday

morning cartoons. And all the while, we could hear

waves slapping the surf and wind whipping across

the dunes—and the taste on every tongue was salt

and more salt. So when I picture the summer of ’69

at Long Beach, North Carolina, as history rolled out

the red carpet leading to a future none of us could

foresee, my heart breaks like an egg against the rim

of what comes next. But let’s pretend for the length

of this poem, that my brother’s blood remains safe

inside his veins, Grandma’s darkening mole as benign

as a monastery full of monks, and our parents, unable

to imagine the depth and breadth of grief. Here, there

is only goodness and mercy, the light of a million stars,

and the moon close enough now for anyone to touch.

Terri Kirby Erickson

❦

Night Talks, New & Selected Poems, by Terri Kirby Erickson, is available at Press 53 in Winston-Salem NC along with five other collections by Terri.

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Remembering Dannye Romine Powell

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Dannye Romine Powell, grief, longing, NC Poets, New Year, poetry, Press 53, Southern writing on October 12, 2024| 8 Comments »

I learned today from our friends at CHARLOTTELIT that Dannye Romine Powell died on October 10, 2024. She was a joyful and fearless supporter of literature, the arts, and poetry in North Carolina for many decades, and whenever I asked her advice or permission to use her work, she was a gracious friend.

I am re-printing this post from December 30, 2020 so that we can share again these evocative poems by Dannye. In Memoriam.

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NEW

[with poems by Dannye Romine Powell]

When we lower her pack from the tree where it has swung all night like a bell mocking the bear, the skunk, she opens it and screams: a fairy crown atop her sweatshirt and socks, a perfect round nest and four perfect hairless mouse pups like squirming blind grubs. We peer in awe, shepherds at the manger.

Mother mouse has hidden herself — she is not in the pack with her babies. We lift the nest intact, hide it in a bush beside the tree, nestle leaves around. Mother will sniff out her precious ones, reclaim her treasure. But we have other lambs to tend.

We eat, stow gear, shoulder our packs, face the trail, and consider: the pack was in the tree just one night; the nest is woven from meadow grass where we slept; the mother who climbed – how many trips up and back? – was heavy with her brood.

Miles before us, a new year before us – how heavy will each day’s burdens become before night brings rest?

. . . . . . .

A new book by Dannye Romine Powell arrived in the mail this week: In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver from Press 53 in Winston-Salem. I meant to read one or two poems this morning but I have read them all. A central persona that weaves through the collection is Longing: she visits rooms in old houses, unfolds memories into the light, shares the pain that others might lock in closets. Grief shared conceives within us hope to rekindle joy. Sharing grief, sharing joy, we become more human.

. . . . . . .

The Secret

Light glazes the near-empty streets
as I drive. Beside me, my grown son asks
if a secret I thought I’d kept buried
is true. A secret
that can still catch fire.
We stop on red. A bird flies
by the windshield. My father’s words:
Easier to stand on the ground
and tell the truth than climb a tree
and tell a lie. Now, I think. Tell him.
I stare at my son’s profile,
straight nose, thick lashes.
I remember, at about his age,
how a family secret fell
into my lap, unbidden.
That secret still ransacks a past
I thought I knew, rearranging its bricks,
exposing rot and cracks,
changing the locks on trust.

. . . . . . .

In the Night, the Wind in the Leaves

swirled and rustled
out our open window as if
for the first time,
as if we never were,
the earth newborn, sweet.

And what of us – asleep
on the too-soft bed
in the old mountain house?

Gone.

Also our children.
the ones who lived, the ones who died
before they grew whole. All night

the breeze swirled and rustled
through the leaves as if it played
a secret game, swirling
and rustling all night

as if we never were.

. . . . . . .

Dannye Romine Powell has won fellowships in poetry from the NEA, the North Carolina Arts Council, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared over the years in The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Harvard Review Online, Beloit, 32 Poems, and many others. She is also the author of Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers. For many years, she was the book editor of the Charlotte Observer. In 2020 she won the Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition for her poem “Argument.”