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Bookshelves

Posted in Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, imagery, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Press 53, Robert Morgan, Southern writing on January 24, 2025| 5 Comments »

[with 4 poems by Robert Morgan]

Foxfire

Bright lace on the darkness grows

heavy as the meat of lightning bugs

crushed on bark, rotting leaves.

Flakes of the moon stuck to spongy logs.

Seconds sprinkled from a luminous dial on bearskin.

Glow worms crawl all night in stump water

without moving. St. Elmo’s fire.

Foxfire swims like fish of the deepest troughs.

City lights seen from a bomber.

the eyes of dead wood stare like jack-o-lanterns

burning last year’s sun

after a wet spell.

Coals of unlife,

chilly owls.

Robert Morgan

❦ ❦ ❦

When I was a Junior in High School I was going steady with the daughter of our town’s elementary school librarian. If you think Linda’s house wasn’t filled to the rafters with books, you’ve got another think coming. When we were in college, still dating, I decided for Christmas I would build her bookshelves.

During Junior High all the seventh grade boys took Home Ec with the girls and all the girls took Wood Shop with the boys. I got an A in sock darning and jello salad; on my woodworking project, a sculpture of a fish in walnut, I got a B+. Seven years later I gathered pine planks and 1×2’s in our basement to devise the Christmas present. Measure twice, cut once? Not so much as I recall, although I do remember wood glue, finishing nails, Minwax stain and varnish. Steel wool between coats. Linda seemed to like her present. Enough to marry me a year later and move the shelves to our 3rd floor apartment on Duke Street in Durham.

That little book case was not fine cabinetry, but the shelves didn’t sag beneath Linda’s textbooks: history, art, religion, all the heaviest stuff. My design was basic, mostly a ladder, something we and the years might climb together, or maybe an altar where she could cherish and display her first and truest loves. It was good as I could make it, the only thing I knew to build.

What did I know of all we and the years would build? The propagating books we’d carry home to become our family? Children grow and leave and carry their children back to you for an afternoon, but books are always close at hand to read to grandchildren like we read them to the grandchildren’s parents. A child is here for but a moment but bright spines and colored pages rest and wait for their return.

My work was not to build a house, or a home, or even rooms, but simply room enough for something she would never finish loving. Every birthday, every holiday, another book; any old occasion is fit time to add to the welcome weight of pages. They fill the hours and our hearts – and I foresee there will never be quite enough shelves for all.

❦ ❦ ❦

Very Old Man

Hounds bay in his breath,

face a wilderness, eyes like frozen fountains.

He speaks from a foreign country, words drunk

with exhaustion, wornout

habits of the tongue.

His shoulders are small as a child’s.

Sits on the cold peak watching us climb,

or doesn’t bother.

Elegy

Guess I’ll light a rag out of here, he said

and blindness rose in his open eyes.

Tilted chessmen, tombstones graze on the hill,

drag shadows at the setting moon.

Eighty years go down

like a ship.

Robert Morgan

❦ ❦ ❦

Saturday, September 15, 2001: Robert Morgan has managed to travel to Southern Pines to read at Weymouth Center before the North Carolina Poetry Society. So healing, so encouraging to us fellow mortals; I remember his tone and demeanor more than I remember his words, but many of his words have never left me. Actually, his words have grown in me and flourished. Audubon’s Flute – I have to pull that one out and read it every Earth Day.

Audubon in the summer woods

by the afternoon river sips

his flute, his fingers swimming on

the silver as silver notes pour

by the afternoon river, sips

and fills the mosquito-note air

So many notes before and after that morning in Weymouth Woods, so many words. No wonder that when I learn that Press 53 has collected Robert Morgan’s first four books of poetry into a single volume, I hear the silver tones calling me. In the lyrical introduction to Collected Early Poems of Robert Morgan, Robert M. West shares this quotation: Asked, ‘What is the highest praise that could be given to a poet’s work, southern or otherwise?’ Morgan responded, “ ‘You must read this.’ The greatest honor is to be read.”

And so we shall read and honor Robert Morgan. I am picking up his book every day for the next several weeks, and we will see where the music leads us.

❦

Collected Early Poems of Robert Morgan, with an introduction by Robert M. West (co-editor of Robert Morgan: Essays on the Life and Work), is a Carolina Classics Edition from Press 53, available HERE.

❦ ❦ ❦

Distances

Mind wanders down the long slope of trees

like small cat fur

turning blue in the midday sunlight of December

into a short valley

with only a cabin and a juniper

and one horse nibbling the dried grass

around an Indian grave.

Clear through the distance of memory

into the cabin where my great grandmother, a bride

sits by the fire smoking her clay pipe

and watching through the door the gap in the mountains

where her man may come any moment

with gun on shoulder and quail swinging

and steps so rhythmic

they leave tracks in the mind.

Robert Morgan

❦ ❦ ❦

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Flute in the Summer Woods – Robert Morgan

Posted in Imagery, tagged Audubon's Flute, Bill Griffin, birds, GSMNP, nature poetry, poetry, Robert Morgan, veery on June 16, 2012| 2 Comments »

Everything I love changes me, and if I can be true to love I will welcome the changes.

Hear the veery in the deep dapple-dark forest. Hear the descending double-voiced yearning so airy and earthy, old when these broad poplars were jade-and-honey flowers in their mother’s hair, old when these smooth mossed stones had just cracked from their father’s face. Sit in the silence of light retreating and perhaps the spirit-bird will join you, a momentary apparition of brown leaf shadow and speckled dusk. With bright eyes it will accept you, hop once, fly, and in the next moment you will hear again, ancient and aching, Audubon’s flute.

. . . . .

Audubon’s Flute

Audubon in the summer woods
by the afternoon river sips
his flute, his fingers swimming on
the silver as silver notes pour

by the afternoon river, sips
and fills the mosquito-note air
with silver as silver notes pour
two hundred miles from any wall.

And fills the mosquito-note air
as deer and herons pause, listen,
two hundred miles from any wall,
and sunset plays the stops of river.

As deer and herons pause, listen,
the silver pipe sings on his tongue
and sunset plays the stops of river,
his breath modeling a melody

the silver pipe sings on his tongue,
coloring the trees and canebrakes,
his breath modeling a melody
over calamus and brush country,

coloring the trees and canebrakes
to the horizon and beyond,
over calamus and brush country
where the whitest moon is rising

to the horizon and beyond
his flute, his fingers swimming on
where the whitest moon is rising.
Audubon in the summer woods.

Robert Morgan.

[Collected in Word and Witness: 100 Years of North Carolina Poetry, Sally Buckner, editor. Carolina Academic Press, 1999.]

. . . . .

Last Saturday I walked beside the creek and up the mountain with my sister while each veery called to the next that we were on our way. Today Linda and I drive to Durham to meet my teacher, the first time in over thirty years, and to gather with his students gathering from fifty states. Already we’ve been cataloguing the changes. What do I love now that I didn’t love then? How have I been true to the loves that entered me years ago? Before the noisy afternoon, I take a moment to listen. And when my bones are old as stones, trees, moss, how will my voice be recalled?

. . . . .

Robert Morgan was born in Hendersonville, North Carolina and grew up on the family farm in the Green River valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He is currently the Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell but has returned to North Carolina many times as visiting professor and writer to Davidson, Duke, Appalachian State, and East Carolina.

The Veery (Catharus fuscescens) is a small thrush of deep moist woods, chestnut brown with a speckled breast. All thrushsong is melodic and haunting, but to me the veery is most magical. On a quiet afternoon you clearly hear him singing harmony with himself, the doubled notes possible only with an avian syrinx (unlike my limited tenor’s larynx).

. . . . .