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Elemental – Scott Owens

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on March 28, 2025| 5 Comments »

 . 
after rain the hills
fill up with mist, everything
else just memory
 . 
[poetry by Scott Owens]
 . 
Elemental
 . 
Having been raised in shadow of pecan trees
he learned to keep his insecurities
concealed in shells the color of earth, almost
inextricable and gathered in brown paper bags.
 . 
Having been shaped by twisted logic of weather
in South Carolina’s Tornado Alley,
he learned when to move with wind and when
to stand fast and howl against the blow.
 . 
Having been dipped in yellow water
without being held by anything but current
he learned to sink to the bottom, plant his feet
in mud below and walk back to shore.
 . 
Having been burned in fires of passion and forgiveness,
faith and disbelief, he learned to trust little
but what he could see: bird flight, dirt
beneath the nails, quiet eternity of mountain.
 . 
Scott Owens
from Elemental, forthcoming in 2025 from Redhawk Press, Hickory NC; © Scott Owens.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Where is the transition point between cluttered and ungodly mess? I gave up long ago any hope of keeping my desktop tidy or my bookshelves neatly organized. For the past year, however, the normal books and papers and camera gear have been invaded and overcome by bins, boxes, and bags. Here’s a sampling:
file boxes of my parents’ financial and tax records, 2023 to present;
banker’s boxes of photos I’m bound and determined to sort, 1920’s and even earlier;
crumbling carton of 35 mm home movies shot by Grandpop, who died in 1958;
and before I totally blame Mom and Dad, one chair is completely full of books and magazines I’ve read or intend to, and the other chair is completely loaded with gear, field guides, and two dozen clip boards with botanical checklists I’ll hand out at my next naturalist walk in a week.
 . 
And one other thing among so many others that have not yet discovered or been granted their ultimate place of repose: a heavy oak urn containing my mother’s ashes.
 . 
The urn I will keep close and heft from time to time. Is any of this other stuff really essential? I don’t believe I will ever lose the picture in my head of Mom on her bicycle, luminous smile, age 11 – perhaps these boxes don’t hold anything that can surpass that memory. I can’t conceive of a meaningful life that doesn’t include a camera in my hand, but after all I can only hold one at a time. And the books! I’m planning to surprise thirty or so friends with a (comfortably read) book for Poetry Month, but the groaning weight of the remainder will scarcely feel the loss.
 . 
Whelm: To cover, submerge, engulf or bury; to overcome. Why have I made myself responsible for these accumulations? Am I their curator, conservator, salvager? Or do I expect this stuff to somehow save me? Buried by the non-essential all around me, perhaps I can thrash and claw my way through while I ignore my own ultimate burial.
 . 
In a minute perhaps I’ll withdraw my hands from typing, swivel away from the screen, actually open one of these bins and boxes. Maybe I’ll chuck a dusty double handful in the trash. But maybe I’ll pull out a talisman that opens my soul to more luminous memories. I will smile and share what I’ve found. It will be a treasure not of precious metal or envious resale value but because of the door it opens. A sliver of light finds its way through and reveals one moment that has made meaning in this life. A moment that still has meaning. Not the old material stuff but the memories it carries on its back: from something here I might discover something new about myself, the ones I love, this overwhelming life. I might find something essential.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Of Mint and Memory
 . 
The smell of mint makes everything feel clean,
clears the senses like bells ringing,
or wind chimes, maybe, on a summer day
in 1973, after the war but before
the bomb became too real a thing to ignore.
 . 
They say that smell is our most powerful sense,
not the strongest, not the one
we use the most, but the one we find
closest to memory and feeling, the one
most difficult to ignore, resist, overcome.
 . 
I’ve given up patches of my yard to mint
so I’ll always have it for tea,
for homemade chocolate chip ice cream,
for the times I need to go back to days
when I didn’t know enough to be afraid.
 . 
Scott Owens
from Elemental, forthcoming in 2025 from Redhawk Press, Hickory NC; © Scott Owens.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Linda listening to Fauré while she reads. A brown thrasher sneaking into the holly just outside my window. Lacing up for another afternoon walk in the woods. I could list a dozen necessary things that have intruded on this morning, but if I take a deep breath and reflect on what is essential those first three seem like a good start. Last night we drove by a church signboard with this suggestion: “Do one thing today that makes the world a better place.” Essential. I would add, “one thing that makes you a better person.” Paying attention. Gratitude. Joy. If even for a moment, make space in the necessary for the essential.
 . 
Scott Owens is always on the lookout for the essential. His new manuscript, Elemental, expands and reinforces the search. Expect to encounter the essential and you will! Scott has written thousands of poems to ground himself in the seeking and yet he still finds joyful surprise in the daily happenings and encounters that make real meaning in life, if you allow them to. Perhaps it is because he is intentional and systematic in his noticing that he discovers joy all around him. This book includes a section on the seasons, a travelogue section especially exploring North Carolina, a final section of life’s lessons. I will use it as a field guide for the truly essential.
 . 
Oh, and trees. Scott really, really loves trees, both in their grand collective leafiness and in their individual personalities. He mentions that he grew up around pecan trees and learned something about hiding vulnerability from the way their shells hide the sweet kernel. I’d like to sit down with Scott and swap yarns about the pecans in Granddaddy’s back yard. Or my beloved beech I will not forsake even though it dropped a branch through my windshield. Or the hundred colors of lichen on the holly’s bark. Then we will move on to birds, and mountains, and the sound of moving water. We will discover how much we have in common. We will nod and share a slice of joy in the discovery that every single creature on earth holds that much in common and more. That joy, that knowledge, is truly essential.
 . 
❦
 . 
Keep your eyes peeled at Redhawk Publications for Scott Owens’s new book, Elemental, due out by this August, 2025.
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
All That Is
 . 
It’s winter,
a hard time of year
for noticing things,
except the wide sky
through limbs of trees,
and the shapes of trees
stripped of leaves,
and a white-breasted nuthatch
hopping sideways
down the trunk
of a peeling paper birch,
and the omnipresent cold,
and the quiet
of everyone staying inside
as long as they possibly can,
but all that is not there,
in the haunted austerity
of a winter landscape,
is what makes it possible
to see all that is
 . 
Scott Owens
from Elemental, forthcoming in 2025 from Redhawk Press, Hickory NC; © Scott Owens.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2020-06-11a

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Everything New

Posted in family, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 17, 2025| 6 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Ralph Earle]
 . 
The Body’s Small Purposes
 . 
His lungs like exhausted fishermen
drew in their glittering catch
of oxygen and his heart
called to the receding tides of the blood.
His bony fingers curled around mine.
I read from Mary Oliver
 . 
how the soul may be hard, necessary,
yet almost nothing, how we all know
the sand is golden under the cold waves
though our hands can never touch it.
 . 
The hearing goes last, the doctor said.
 . 
There are not words for this communion,
this hope that his eyes, turned from
the sunny branches outside, could summon
a vision of loved ones long gone,
wife of fifty years, sister dead in childbirth,
souls knowing already this passage
and awaiting him in whatever form of glory
the living can conjure: my brothers, me,
our children, all the others
still casting the nets of our breath,
still sifting the golden sands.
 . 
Once in his search for love after my mother died
he told me it never ends. But it does.
On a broken day the breath stops
and the cells gently fall asleep
and the soul, perhaps puzzled
by this coming to rest
of all the body’s small purposes
rises and looks on the silence.
 . 
Ralph Earle
from Everything You Love is New, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
After I sit through lunch in the nursing home dining room with him and his friend, Dad and I roll back to his room to hang out for an hour or two. Maybe he tells me about the birds that have discovered the feeders I set up outside his window – he can name most of them. He always offers me something from his overflowing snack drawer – it began as his sock drawer but over three months the socks have all had to find new digs. If I prompt him he’ll recall talking to his sister on the phone last Sunday, or he’ll show me a card someone sent. This is his home now.
 . 
When Dad returned to his townhouse from the hospital after his fall in July, we called Hospice. For a week he barely ate, barely knew us. We set up dual hospital beds so he and Mom could continue to share a bedroom like they had for just shy of 74 years. She would sit and hold his hand for hours, couldn’t bear to have him out of sight, but once told us, “There’s a man in a coma in my bedroom.” He was home only three weeks before she died, but during their last days together he certainly knew her. They ate a few bites together. Watched the news. When she was gone, although the house was never empty it was completely empty.
 . 
“Good as new,” just what does that mean? Six months after Dad’s fall he can get himself out of bed by himself, putter himself down the hall in his wheelchair using his feet like Fred Flintstone, polish off his lunch. He wins quarters at bingo. Today he and I play our weekly Rummikub, exercise for the little gray cells. Last week he beat me for the first time. Right now we’re each down to just two tiles remaining until I draw the winning combo – for a second I consider feigning a bad draw to give him a couple more chances for victory, but nah, I win.
 . 
And at this very moment the activities coordinator sticks her head around the door to remind Dad – a local church has arrived to share a worship service this weekday afternoon. Dad, I’ll pack up the game if you want to attend. We hug, he rolls himself away. I dump the tiles into their case, stash it on his dresser, put on my jacket, and by the time I walk down the hall Dad is out of sight.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Cormorants Arrive
 . 
Like a gang of legislators
+++ dressed in grey
+++ +++ from somewhere
 . 
outside of town,
+++ the cormorants loiter
+++ +++ on the lake’s little float
 . 
strutting a step or two,
+++ dropping
+++ +++ into the water
 . 
for a fish.
+++ The represent
+++ +++ some constituency
 . 
I don’t recognize,
+++ shuffling around
+++ +++ their little island.
 . 
They disturb me,
+++ they embody my fear
+++ +++ of narrow minds,
 . 
of self-assured
+++ self-inflated strangers,
+++ +++ fear of my own silence.
 . 
Still, when I approach
+++ they dwindle
+++ +++ into a smattering
 . 
of awkward fishing birds,
+++ all angle and tackle, waiting
+++ +++ their moment of excitement,
 . 
the shadow of small prey
+++ out of reach
+++ +++ in the darkening water.
 . 
Ralph Earle
from Everything You Love is New, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
They are here. They are gone. Does Ralph Earle mean the birds, flock of black specks flapping, or does he mean the curses his wife calls to herself? Is nothing permanent, not grief, not joy? Everything You Love is New – perhaps it is your love that makes something new, or seem new in that moment of loving, that wonderful fleeting moment when you know you can’t hold something forever and yet you are able to rest in not having to.
 . 
So delicate — Ralph Earle’s poems touch ever lightly all the heavy things we encounter as human creatures. How we do all hurt each other after all, sometimes careless but sometimes intentional. How the things we imagine will bring us joy fall to dust. How apt we are sometimes to turn away rather than reach out. Yes . . . but. These are not poems of despair but of awareness, of acceptance, and sometimes of bright heart-swelling discovery and joy. Reading a poem requires a pause, a brief silence. The mind as it embraces that silence creates an opportunity to fill it with love.
 . 
A damselfly, so delicate, hovers above the mirror of pond. Her abdomen curls to touch the water’s surface so lightly there is no ripple, yet she leaves behind an egg that may become a new damselfly. Perhaps everything you love makes you new.
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❦
 . 
Ralph Earle’s new full-length collection Everything You Love is New is available from Redhawk Publications.
 . 
Read an additional poem by Ralph Earle at last week’s post, Tenacity.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Birthday Ending in Zero
 . 
No rain for days, and on the pollen-dusted porch
a vase of flowers arrived from nowhere:
 . 
yellow roses, lilies, carnations, tulips with orange tips
and stems of electric-blue buds like paper lanterns.
 . 
We were happy in that second Covid spring, gathering
our loved ones on Zoom, cooking fish with asparagus,
 . 
ate our apple pie and still it didn’t rain. In the pollen
on the back deck, small animals left yellow footprints.
 . 
That week, after so long alone, you let go
into the space we had begun to share.
 . 
You stood the flowers on the kitchen table
surrounded with gifts and letters from my friends.
 . 
Our hearts opened like small animals looking around.
We slept skin to skin, your presence rippling like a lake.
 . 
That week the huge heads of the roses unfolded
in radiance even as the water started to cloud,
 . 
even as carnations drooped and tulip petals dropped.
When the rain began I found a ravine where no one goes
 . 
and under the trees, scatted the globes of the roses,
tulips with their falling petals, lilies and lanterns.
 . 
Ralph Earle
from Everything You Love is New, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2019-02-09
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Be Filled – Shibori Blue

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 12, 2024| 12 Comments »

Poems and photography from Shibori Blue
by Beth Copeland
 . 
Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance.   –   Yoko Ono
 . 
 . 
Frost on the mountain.
Creeks freeze under skins of ice.
A broken window.
My neighbor’s chimes are silent.
Even the wind is frozen.
 . 
❦
 . 
Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence.   –   Yoko Ono
 . 
 . 
Does the mountain mourn
its lost children, bones buried
beneath sediment
and stone? Who gathered near its
peak? What family, what tribe?
 . 
❦
 . 
Summer passes and one remembers one’s exuberance.   –   Yoko Ono
 . 
 . 
Bridal veil mountain
in May, the month of weddings.
Fog, Mist, and white clouds.
Wild daisy fleabane bouquet
fresh in a blue Mason jar.
 . 
❦
 . 
Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence.   –   Yoko Ono
 . 
 . 
Tiger-striped sunset
above the ridge in the west.
Trees with leaves and trees
without. What are we losing,
my love, and what will we keep?
 . 
❦
 . 
Poetry and photography by Beth Copeland
from Shibori Blue: Thirty-Six Views of The Peak, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Beth Copeland lives in Ashe County, North Carolina, smack in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Each morning from her porch she sees The Peak, the highest mountain in Ashe County. It is solid and eternal – it is always shifting. Beth has recorded the mountain’s moods and contemplations with daily photographs, now pairing them in her new book with thirty-six poems that capture ephemera through the course of a year, moments of change through the changing seasons.
 . 
Thirty-six. A figure of truth and power. Product of two perfect squares. Multiplied by 2 to create the 72-season calendar established in 1685 by Japanese astronomer Shibukawa Shunkai. And again 36 the number of woodblock prints of Mount Fuji published by Katsushika Hokusai from 1830 to 1832. It is no coincidence that Beth chose thirty-six views of The Peak to inform her poems. She was born in Japan, the child of American missionaries, and has long revered the iconic mountain of her birth country, Fuji-san, whose profile The Peak of Ashe County so resembles.
 . 
This book invites me to slow my breathing, pause in the busy race, contemplate each page: five simple lines of verse, the silent mountain drawing my gaze. Redhawk is gathering a family of uniquely creative poets, writers, and artists to stretch our imaginations and open us to new experiences of words and images. I will leave this sentence here at rest and return to another page of Shibori Blue. And another.
 . 
❦
 . 
More information about Shibori Blue: Thirty-Six Views of The Peak and the opportunity to purchase HERE
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Perseverance – Deep in winter do they dream of the music they will make, cicada song? Crescendo arpeggio decrescendo, easy combers across the long sea of summer. And does the creature measure the span of its days, egg to nymph, seasons in darkness, climb into light to mate and to die? Nothing can last, not even our song, yet we do not withhold our voices.
 . 
Innocence – She is most beautiful when she does not know I am watching. She gives her animals life, little fox blanket, cupcake kitten, and they take from her all the fear and heartache that could have been trapped within to fester. Then she begins to sing.
 . 
Exuberance – Utterly alien at once perfectly identifiable, the house wren fills its small kingdom with melody, rocketing in turn to each waypoint to pause, raise its minute cornet, FANFARE!, then swift to the next. I do not understand the words but I recognize the tune.
 . 
Reverence – What we have heard teaches us, reminds, suggests, niggles, promises, invites. What we have yet to hear offers to pull us into its presence. Listen. Be filled.
 . 
❦
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IMG_6432
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