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Cusp

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Etymology, Gregory Lobas, Hannah Ringler, Kakalak, Martha O. Adams, nature photography, NC Poets, Paul Jones, poetry, Preston Martin, Southern writing 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

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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) ]

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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

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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!

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[ 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

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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

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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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Chimney Swifts

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Bradley Strahan, Heron Clan, imagery, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Preston Martin, Priscilla Webster-Williams, Southern writing on July 28, 2023| 4 Comments »

[with poems from Heron Clan X]

Chimney Swifts at the Historic Carolina Coach Garage

Two now more arrive and flit into the swirl,

swelling hive mind they shift and shape

the wind, counter then clockwise whirl

above old brickwork’s beckoning gape

left standing here erect as testament,

our conservational intent to leave

some landmark urban respite, benevolent

perhaps, perhaps self-serving; we’ve

taken advantage of their propulsive drive,

pushed our chairs back from the table

in the court to lean & steal their lives

and freedom open mouthed, rapt, able

for these few moments until darkness falls

to rise with them, untethered, bold

venture to where the elemental almost calls

but too soon bedtime, now our supper’s cold.

[For decades this warehouse and shop in Raleigh, North Carolina was a hub of activity servicing Carolina Coach Company buses, in the 1940s the nation’s largest regional bus company.]

Bill Griffin

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Mom can no longer hear their restless chitterings up the flue on summer evenings. When we sit on the front porch she doesn’t notice their atmospheric ellipsis, punctuating summer afternoons with their aerobatics. She can’t believe they’re calling constantly to each other and to us until I try to mimic that chatter and she laughs. What she most definitely can, though, is wish to see them diving into her chimney at dusk, especially when I tell her I’d seen one do just that last night.

Revered ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson described Chimney Swifts as little dark cigars with wings. Tapered on the head end and the tail end with sharply tapered wings jutting out mid-fuselage, fluttering so rapidly you’d swear those wingbeats were uncoordinated and asynchronous, well, yes they do look like airborne cigars. Although they often appear in field guide pages adjacent to those other famous aerial foragers, the Swallows, taxonomists place Swifts most closely related to Hummingbirds (based on wing structure). No hovering, though, for these Chimney Swifts – always forward, forward, forward with their loops and barrel rolls. Some species of Swift only alight to lay eggs, spending all the rest of their lives in the air.

Once you recognize a Chimney Swift’s fricative titter, you’ll realize they’ve accompanied you on hot afternoons and evenings all your life (assuming you live in the Eastern US). Although they winter in Peru, all summer long from the Great Plains to the Atlantic coast Chimney Swifts are widespread and common, probably more common today than they were pre-colonization, when they depended on hollow trees for breeding. These days they sometimes nest by the hundreds in abandoned chimneys, great clouds spiraling in at dusk, perhaps mistaken for bats. You can even buy chimney-like roosting boxes to attract them to your yard to eat the mosquitos.

After supper, I carry our chairs to the deck for a clean line of sight to the chimney. No smoke has risen from these three pots for decades. Mom and I watch. And watch. The birds circle and tantalize, gyre away, spiral out of earshot then back again so swiftly she misses their brief passage. Keep looking. Don’t blink. Two Swifts buzz the opening but then pull up in a high-G climb. Sky darkens. Dusk wants to coalesce around us, trundle us back indoors. Suddenly one little bird at full throttle blips straight down into the chimney. Then another. It’s become too dark to count the rest, but when we return to the couch beside the fireplace we hear the nestling together of a congenial company who’ll rest here with us until first light.

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Doug Stuber, Ed Lyons, and Richard Smyth Ph.D. hatched the idea for Poems from the Heron Clan in Rochester, New York in 1998. After Doug returned in 2015 from a seven-year professorship in South Korea, the anthology has been published every year. Not only does Volume Ten encompass a wide geography – poets from five continents, poets from Turkey, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Montenegro, and a dozen other countries – it also embraces a lavish geography of style and theme. The editors explicitly state: “We aim to represent well-established poets and emerging writers, young and mature poets, and poets of color.”

And North Carolina. NC poets populate these pages abundantly. JS Absher, Glenn Cassidy, Earl Huband, Shelby Stephenson, Steve Cushman, Anna Dallara, the three founders themselves – if you live in the South and read poetry, you’ll recognize these voices accompanying you all summer, all seasons. I’m drawn to all of the Carolina poetry in this volume and tempted to sample each one in this post. Alas, perhaps you’ll just have to purchase a copy. Meanwhile, here are Priscilla Webster-Williams, Preston Martin, and Bradley Strahan from Heron Clan X.

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Morton Salt

Under a purple umbrella, a girl in a yellow raincoat

carries a box of salt, the cover art singing out

When It Rains It Pours. I studied the dark blue carton

that lived on the kitchen table, the Morton Salt Girl

smiling with each shake of the cylinder.

Morton, my father, toured with the big bands,

playing what he called Mickey Mouse Music,

tunes too tame for one who’d grown up crating

spicy Chicago jazz with Red Nichols and Jimmy Dorsey.

Morton met Jean, my mom-to-be, at the Nicollet,

where she was hostess of the grand dining room:

Grant Wood murals, double white linens,

real silver silverware, and a stage

for the musicians and the act.

Morton must have winked at Jean

from behind his golden trombone,

the vocalist crooning I’ll be seeing you

in all the old familiar places.

He must have whispered some kind of proposal

as they floated like movie stars across the dance floor.

When I was six, Mother shredded my Father’s photo,

set her stoic Midwestern jaw, and never spoke

of him again. She didn’t need to, his features etched

on my face like the grooves in one of his Bluebird records,

the same strawberry-blond hair appearing in my mirror.

Each day, I gazed at his name on that dark blue box

stamped with the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval,

and over time, Morton, my founding father,

became a pillar of salt.

Priscilla Webster-Williams

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Elegy, Gloria Died in Eden

She took the well-traveled road

two nights ago.

No more tractoring up the back hills

or brush cutting lower fields,

or using her Daddy’s walking stick

++++ down beside the creek –

or oiling the mower or

penciling in the Reds box score,

or sipping an evening sweet wine

on the porch

++++ as nightly geese call down,

close overhead, descending to the reservoir.

She noted in her diary the day the flew on south.

And who will shoot the coyotes now?

Preston Martin

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Empty Places

In the end we are all archaeologists,

sifting through the ruins of existence

to find shards of pottery

inscribed in a strange tongue:

a letter from a friend left on a picnic table

a poem written on the back of a menu,

the sketch of a girl whose name you can‘t recall,

a yellowed photograph with stranger’s eyes.

We keep on struggling with left over pieces

from a childhood puzzle, trying to fill the gaps

left my smiling lips missing from a face,

tears frozen on eyeless cheeks,

fingers absent from an outstretched hand.

But somehow cannot fill the empty place

and the dark comes creeping in.

originally published in Gargoyle

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The editors of Poems from the Heron Clan invite you to buy a copy, explore their previous issues at their BLOG, and consider submitting three poems and a 50-word bio to:

katherinejamesbooks@gmail.com