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Constant Change

Posted in Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on October 4, 2024| 4 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Britt Kaufmann]
 . 
Constant
 . 
The only constant is change.
 . 
In any function, the constant is the number
hanging out alone, no variable at its side.
It is what it is.
Until calculus, when C becomes fixed but unknown.
 . 
The coach’s wife says to him,
“Nothing changes, if nothing changes.”
He says nothing, but nods.
 . 
Always plot time on the x-axis:
It’s the independent variable, always marching on.
Until it isn’t.
Like the shortest distant between two points is a straight line.
Except it might not be.
 . 
I remember the non-trad who thought she could effectively argue
against non-Euclidian geometry to my old math professor,
both of whom then were younger than me now.
 . 
How flat our first knowledge becomes.
 . 
My future-physics-professor daughter
returns from the equator where she learned the Pachamama hug:
a spiral, like how they see time:
each moment a chord with harmonics of past and future.
What did they learn, so close to the sun,
watching the stars,
which is seeing time . . .
 . 
We learn orbits, as if the sun didn’t also fly.
The helix of our DNA, more akin
to our planets’ corkscrew through the dark.
 . 
I stare at images from the newest telescopes at the planetarium
in my Appalachian Mountains:
lost and dizzy trying to fathom the immense void.
Alone in the universe is really
alone in time.
 . 
And what of the twins:
One went to space,
traveled so fast he became measurably younger.
Sure that plot twist shows on a graph,
crumpled into a ball, tossed in a trash can,
so he could keep his birthright.
 . 
how precious this tiny world we burn. A magi’s gift:
watch chain and tortoise shell become slag and ash.
For what purpose, this rain of myrrh?
 . 
Britt Kaufmann
from Midlife Calculus, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
TIME must be straight as an arrow, because you know if an arrow’s shaft has the least warp the bolt will veer and never come near the target, no matter how perfect your aim. Time must be restricted and prescripted like the graph’s x-axis, proceeding forever to the right with its hatchmark divisions each precisely the same distance from the last one and to the next one. Time must have some plan that makes everything make sense.
 . 
Time being so steady, so reliable, how is that I’ve awakened from this busy dream, its urgencies and deviations and long drawn out doings, convinced that I’ve surely slept sound until down only to press the alarm and it’s 1:00 AM? How has time, restless and relentless, accelerated through these past two months of scheduling and planning Mom’s memorial service, then continued speeding right up to the flurry of texts and calls that crowd the minute when I shut off my phone and enter the chapel and the music begins, still stretching and rapping even until the reaching into my pocket and the unfolding of the poem I will read just before the closing hymn?
 . 
And now time unspools and uncoils. A few hours on the porch this morning while the minute hands takes its own good time to tick over, everything shared with family over the past 48 hours seems to slow and spread. The passage is not yet in focus but shows its desire to take shape. Hours became minutes, now expanding again into hours. Time an arrow, or time a wave? Sinusoidal – will it crash or will the long swell fetch from some distant shore and lap our toes? One deep breath. I can’t yet recognize what I’m seeing, but I see that recognition might become possible, might just possibly someday arrive.
 . 
❦
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The past is everything that has slipped the shackles of the present, but a memory is a bit of present still cupped in your hands. Not a crystal of time, not preserved in amber, but a flickering candle of time whose flame creates shapes of its own.
 . 
My younger sister tells me her earliest memory of our mother is being rocked in the wicker chair in which she still rocks herself at her home in Black Mountain. My memories are wisps and phantasms; I can’t say I see those moments, more that I can feel brief spaces and elapses shared with Mom when I was a toddler.
 . 
One vignette is clearer, though. We have boarded an airplane (in New York where we still lived? bound for NC to see Mom’s parents?) and we suddenly realize I don’t have Puppy. Did I leave him behind in the taxicab? Perhaps I wail, but when Mom hands me to the stewardess (this is 1955) and rushes away to find that cab, I feel a shriek rising even though I can’t hear it in memory. How long? How long? But now here she comes, Mom holding Puppy, back at last. Memory complete. Did we take off and land and get hugs from Nana and Grandpop? Perhaps, but all that memory tells me is that my mother was brave and undaunted, and that she would do anything for the little boy she loved.
 . 
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Coastal Prayer
 . 
In the pre-dawn glow, the pelican aunties
look down on me from their pier posts in sleepy disapproval,
their eyes set in Dia de los Muertos faces
as I paddleboard the calm intracoastal
before the boats wake.
 . 
No, not me, out to sea, among the crashing waves,
yet still in waters beyond my depth on tremulous footing
where little fishes leap like dashes on a slope field,
the beauty of their tiny splashes mar the surface and make light
a terror flight from a predatory snapper.
 . 
Give me a rule to follow:
+++ The constant rule through all these changes,
+++ The power rule to not give in,
Devise some rule so I make a difference
 . 
Britt Kaufmann
from Midlife Calculus, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Why poetry, if not to struggle to make sense of life? (And if poetry can make sense of calculus and astrophysics at the same time, well, bonus!) And what is life if not its changes? An academic physician I knew referred to an unplanned occurrence which produced an unexpected benefit as “a fortuitous concatenation of events.” How fortuitous for Britt Kaufmann to concatenate calculus, the mathematics of change, with the middle years of life, that time of accelerating change in our bodies, our psyches, our circumstances, and reveal to us such a beneficial poetry.
 . 
The set of all mathematical metaphors, as Britt so skillfully displays in Midlife Calculus, is very large, perhaps approaching infinity. The obtuse angles of her students’ exasperating density; the pointed and poignant trigonometry of the arc of her aunt’s dementia; even the calculating language of literary journal rejections: all of these and many more become functions and variables in the grand equation Britt sets herself: the struggle to make sense of it all. Perhaps there is no solution. Perhaps we can find some small gateway to acceptance, even joy, in irrational numbers. Perhaps I will come to the final page of this engrossing book, breathe deeply, and turn back again to page one.
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❦
 . 
Midlife Calculus is available from Press 53.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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outlier
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+++ with gratitude for Julian of Norwich
 . 
. . . but all shall be well
of a morning when
the dog thumps her thick tail on the kitchen tile,
a greeting, like the first cup of black coffee
 . 
and all shall be well
of an afternoon when
in February’s chill, green cotyledons
sprout under lights in the laundry room
 . 
and all manner of things shall be well
of an evening when
the weather warms, so windows are thrown wide
to the spring peepers’ sundown song
borne in on eddies laden with lilac
 . 
. . . all shall be well,
and all shall be well,
and all manner of things shall be well
 . 
Britt Kaufmann
from Midlife Calculus, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Noticing

Posted in Ecopoetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on September 13, 2024| 2 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Adrian Rice]
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Yard Work
 . 
The neighbour and I.
We joke across the avenue aisle
about the onset of porch time.
While praising the advent
of all that it means, we
comradely lament the yard work
that has to be tholed.
 . 
As if we are somehow
equals in the seasonable labour.
As if I could shake a spade
at her miraculous endeavours,
her skilled green-fingered-ness,
her laudable efforts to keep
her garden, and shrubbery, pristine.
 . 
It’s almost is if we are fellow poets,
fast farmers of verses.
As if one of us isn’t slacking
in what it takes to carry
the living thing forward,
not lacking in showing
the proper respect
 . 
for the copious rose,
the sculpted shrub,
the blade of grass,
the whole blooming lot.
As if one of us isn’t lazily inattentive,
undeserving of the true line
that is the all of spring.
 . 
Adrian Rice
from The Chances of Harm, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Every walk is preparation for the next. The past few weeks I’ve been preparing to share naturalist skills with poets on a walk through the woods. Poets! I’ve led fourth graders and trail maintainers and garden clubbers, but this is daunting. The organizer sent out a notice referring to the afternoon as an “Ecopoetry Walk.” What is such a thing? Will we be reciting Robinson Jeffers and Jane Mead as we struggle not to trip over tree roots? Perhaps not, but on the other hand I ought to consider holding up the ecopoetry moniker.
 . 
Ecopoetry is not synonymous with Nature Poetry. Perhaps Ecopoetry can be best summed up in three lines by Wendell Berry:
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
How do you make a place sacred? You don’t. You can’t. Its sacredness already resides within it, this little patch of dirt ribboned with mycelia and protists, springtails and worms busy making their lives and becoming someone else’s lives. Roots down and stems up and a tiny native bee stops by to test the flower for sweetness. Life has already brought sacred into being within this drab, insignificant patch.
 . 
And the stone that slowly disaggregates, the minerals it offers up to become incorporated into cellulose, chitin, bone; the light from a nearby star that filters through; the carbon turned organic, the oxygen exhaled as generous gift – all sacred. All worthy of veneration. Ecopoetry is kneeling in respect, recognizing the holy, bearing witness to the filaments of love that extend and stretch and bind everything together. Love binds us to everything and everything to us.
 . 
Turning away, withholding love, even just simply not noticing, these are desecration. Ecopoetry bears witness also of our sins. Maybe we didn’t know. Maybe we never stopped to think. Maybe we let ourselves become so disconnected that we no longer see beyond our own orbits and really believe that everything revolves around our personal center. How have we come to this place?
 . 
Let’s take a walk. Smells like autumn. Someone beyond this patch of woods is baling hay. A little less humid than last week. Tears of joy or ragweed? It’s too easy to pass beech-drops and pinesap blooming now so close to the earth, so let’s slow down. Red and green, the partridgeberry is already decorating for Christmas. One tuliptree leaf has fallen and flares lemon curling brown. All the usual September changes. There’s nothing really special here. Nothing except for everything.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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30 Doagh Road
 . 
She’s my grandmother, or she may be yours,
sitting in her small living room by a real fire,
sanctifying her evening corner of the fireplace.
In shot is the old black-and-white TV
standing stalk on thin brassy legs,
 . 
as much a part of the family as anyone else.
In her aproned lap she holds her knitting.
She grows colourful garments from a ball of yarn,
her hands kiting above unspooling wool-skeins.
Those busy needles of ancestral love
 . 
are clicking with effortless expertise
while she stages a smile for the camera.
Over the tiled mantelpiece, such as it is,
a family of ducks are forever in flight,
rising toward the moon of a plain white clock
 . 
cheap kind you’d see in local schoolrooms.
The chimney breast is lavishly papered,
dressed up in a floral flourish, unlike
the workaday plainness of the other walls.
On the mantelpiece there’s Scottie dog delph,
 . 
Grandchildren’s gift-knacks, small-framed pics,
another clock, a fancy one, polished and centred,
shaped like the Cavehill overlooking the house.
It tells the time, again, time that she is
religiously the last person to idly ignore.
 . 
O photographic proof of an old-fashioned
faith in the possibility of family!
O stitcher of seconds of unwasted time
into useful coverings to clothe the given clan!
Take these thanks for your example to that boy; this man.
 . 
Adrian Rice
from The Chances of Harm, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Lately I’ve taken to describing myself as a “full time” naturalist. All this really signifies is that I can’t walk across the yard without noticing the bugs and naming the weeds. It also reveals which books and apps occupy most of my attention. No paycheck is involved for the full time naturalist, except that when one pays attention, attention pays one back with interest.
 . 
It is obvious, reading The Chances of Harm by Adrian Rice, that he is a full time poet. No particle of life escapes his pondering gaze. He chides himself as “slacker” in Yard Work but feet-up-on-the-porch time is clearly a fertile spawning ground for poetry. Everything, in fact, becomes poetry when Adrian lays eyes and mind and heart on it. When I first opened this book, I imagined bringing those two words closer together until a blinding arc leaps between “Irish” and “Poet.” But it is not blinding. It is full and bright, the light Adrian brings, and suddenly I am seeing all the things around me in their true colours.
 . 
This world and all it holds, everything is worthy of the poet’s noticing. And I, the reader of poetry, am drawn into the poet’s embrace. Thank you, Adrian, for welcoming me to stroll through your neighbourhood and put my feet up on your porch rail. Thank you for opening the voices of things and places and people so they can share their stories. Next time I pause along my favorite trail to kneel and touch the stem of tiny lobelia peering from the shadows – pubescent? glabrous? – may it and all existence spreading out from it tell me the rest of its story, its poetry.
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❦
 . 
Visit PRESS 53 for books by Adrian Rice including his latest, The Chances of Harm
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
This Letting Go
 . 
Why wouldn’t we invest
them with such significance?
This letting go of leaves
from the avenue trees
which feels like the deaths
of so many people,
each struggling to hang on
 . 
until the very last breath;
all of them subject
to each sudden
mood swing
of wind that sends
showers of them
wending to the ground
every time it lifts.
 . 
But we come and go,
they seem to say,
we come and go,
and at least we’re not alone
like so many of you –
just look at us lushing
the dainty driveways
 . 
with our leafy selves!
And if we hadn’t have fallen,
how long, in this world,
in your world,
do you think we could’ve
happily hung on?
How long?
 . 
Adrian Rice
from The Chances of Harm, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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IMG_0768, tree
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Spontaneous

Posted in family, Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 30, 2024| 19 Comments »

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 . 
[with 3 poems by Terri Kirby Erickson]
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Heaven
 . 
You wake in a sun drenched room
with knotty pine walls and open windows,
 . 
white curtains billowing. The warm,
salt-scented breeze carries
 . 
the sound of waves, the laughter of children,
the cry of gulls. Somewhere
 . 
inside the house, bacon sizzles in a pan,
coffee drips into a pot – and there are voices,
 . 
familiar voices – your grandmother,
your brother, your best friend. It’s been
 . 
so long since you have seen them.
So you sit up in bed, stretch your strong,
 . 
supple limbs. There is no pain,
no stiff shoulders and creaky joints.
 . 
There is no weight of sorrow or regret –
only a kind of soaring joy that lifts
 . 
and circles inside you like a kit.
And when you move across the floor,
 . 
it feels like floating, as if your body is made
of light and air – but solid when
 . 
they reach for you, when their arms
open wide and you walk in.
 . 
Terri Kirby Erickson
from In the Palms of Angels, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2011
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Spontaneous combustion – when a ten-year old reads about such a thing of course he’s going to think, Fire! Cool! My friends and I weren’t allowed to play with matches (although we could have swiped some from our Dads, all smokers, and we certainly smoldered plenty of stuff with our magnifying glasses during the Memphis summers). So fire blossoming up all on its own?! We scrounged an old t-shirt, sopped up some oil that had leaked from a lawn mower, and stashed the rags in a dark corner of Mike Slattery’s garage. And waited. I moved away from that neighborhood two years later and I have yet to hear that the garage burned down.
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I have a friend with a gift. She can wake up in the morning first thing and fire off to the rest of us in the writers group what has just flowed from her pen into her journal. “Can” as in willing and able and unrestrained. Ten lines or twenty, she shares something always fresh, light breaking, a window open to her soul. Meanwhile, I’ve re-written this paragraph three times in my head, twice on paper, and six times on the screen. I need the t-shirt my brother-in-law Skip wears: “Hold on a minute while I overthink this.”
 . 
Now I’m stashing stuff in the car for this morning’s drive to Winston, errands to be accomplished for Dad: laptop, check; Power of Attorney docs, check. Wait, I was thinking of taking Dad some flowers from the front yard today. No, too tired. Next time.
 . 
And when might that next time arrive? Snipping zinnias, marigolds, anise hyssop, coaxing their stems into an old bread bag with a wet paper towel in the bottom, fitting the fresh bouquet into my cup holder – oh, my! Flames of purple and scarlet and bright orange, scent of mint and musky asters – pulling out of the driveway, how spontaneously I combust!
 .
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Sunflowers
 . 
In our well-manicured yard
where a clover can’t show its face
or risk dire consequences, a row
of sunflowers sprang up by the bird
feeder, claiming the kitchen
 . 
window for their own. Such thick
stalks and heavy flowers belong
in children’s stories, where
gardens bloom in shapes
and colors seldom imagined
 . 
and mushroom grow as big
as houses. With great dark eyes
surrounded by yellow lashes,
they follow the sun on its daily
journey – a bevy of bold young
 . 
girls in love with the same boy.
Dazzling beauties all, showing
up our prim blades of grass
and trimmed bushes like hula
dancers in a room full of pilgrims.
 . 
Terri Kirby Erickson
from In the Palms of Angels, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2011
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
clouds cast shadows across the ground like whales swimming through clear water
a bevy of bold young girls in love with the same boy [sunflowers]
the yellow-haired girl whose hands rested in her lap like fresh-picked lilies
her fingers dancing over tubes of lipstick as if they were piano keys, and she, learning a new song
 . 
Terri Kirby Erickson’s poems delight in the perfect image, the lance of daylight that makes shadows radiant. She populates her lines with characters from every neighborhood and every family, her own included, and she reveals their secrets, unknown sometimes even to them, but she does it with language so airy and effortless that I imagine her raising her pen like a lightning rod and drawing to it from heaven a bright spark of inspiration. Spontaneous, emerging fully formed from the heart. The rest of us bail the bilge as we adhere to the adage, “Writing is re-writing,” while Terri is skipping stones across the water.
 . 
❦
 . 
In the Palms of Angels by Terri Kirby Erickson is available at PRESS 53
More by Terri at Verse & Image HERE
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Grandmother’s Lamp
 . 
In the quiet stillness of a snowy evening,
the earth is white as angel wings and the sky
purple as lilacs pressed against the window
 . 
pane. The soft glow of Grandmother’s lamp,
with its yellowed shade and pattern
of porcelain roses, falls on the antique tabletop
 . 
and the picture of my mother, the ballet
dancer, posing. From the street,
it’s just another lamp in a long row of lighted
 . 
windows, but to me, it is the sweet comfort
of my grandmother’s face, bent earnestly
over her needle point, or patiently putting together
 . 
another scrapbook of memories, pasted just so
on the page. It is her quiet certainty that this, too,
shall pass, that God hears our prayers,
 . 
and the heaven is not the stuff of fairy tales
woven to quiet our fears, but as real as the lamp
she left for me, to light my way there.
 . 
Terri Kirby Erickson
from In the Palms of Angels, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2011
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❦ ❦ ❦
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Doughton Park Tree 2020-06-11a

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