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Panta rhei

Posted in poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on November 1, 2024| 7 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Melinda Thomsen]
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11. Colorado Springs
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In a breath, the sun emerges unfurled
behind the hangar, and the sky turns gold.
It burns like an ore, as nearby grasses roll
in a breeze, and rows of sunflowers twirl
 . 
and flex. The Queen Anne’s lace slowly maps
the sun’s route west. A magpie somewhere
near the playing field squawks. Dawn appears
in shades of granite wearing a mica cap.
 . 
Let me put on the sky’s sapphire chains
and earth’s necklace of headlights from the cars
winding to Denver in their jeweled train.
 . 
When headlamps dim, sunshine shoots like stars
off the cargo bays of arriving planes,
and daybreak shows its wealth by reaching far.
 . 
Melinda Thomsen
from Dropping Sunrises in a Jar, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown KY; © 2024
[this poem is one segment of the poet’s sonnet redoublé]
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The sentinel sugar maple stationed above us on the roadway is first. Each day we park at the track and look up to its expansive globe outstretched in meditation. Preceding all other trees, it affirms change. In the swelling conflict of its upper limbus butterscotch and sulfur, sweet and harsh become the beginning of leaving behind the green of summer. Green we might have convinced ourselves to be eternal and foundational. But all things flow. You can never stand twice beneath the same tree.
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❦
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Last night a brief gusty squall; this morning the lone sugar maple has relinquished all but a few scattered flags and tatters. As we enter the woods, however, all the other trees in this progressive congregation are industrious in their competition. Who can display the brightest color? Who the most varied, the most novel? The southern slant of sun penetrates as if through stained glass; streaming light proclaims its gospel of chlorophyll, abscission, anthocyanins, carotenoids. Linda and I drop our worries along the trail like a trail of breadcrumbs – we can at least hope that the birds and chipmunks will devour them all in the hour before we return this way.
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And now we’ve reached the last straight segment before the walking trail offers to climb the ridge and lead back down to the river. We can see the turning where it beckons. Before we reach it we will cross the high bridge over Crooked Creek and look down to see if our fat water snake is sunning herself among the south-facing rocks as usual. Just beyond the bridge we will enter the final high vaulted cathedral. Overleaning trunks and branches, pointed arches familiar in the minds of trees long before Sumeria or Samarra, clad with brass and jade, they invite us now to share this space in reverence.
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❦
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This cathedral of flux. The never-changing God this world worships is the God of Changes. The crimson Michaux lilies that celebrated here in August today merely nod a few dry, creased, tri-partite pods, but what do they hold? A celebration of seeds. And beneath the springy duff the roots gone dormant have not forgotten their desire to rise again next April.
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Linda and I stand here for a moment, in the moment. The memory of red blossoms is not what we worship. The anticipation of future blooming is not what we worship. Right here right now is the only real thing – the only real thing is all things that have come before and all that may yet become. We hold a single thought, we hold all thought. For one brief moment approaching joy we are engulfed, we merge with the flux.
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Panta rhei. All things flow.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Dropping Sunrises in a Jar
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When daybreak edged the earth,
++++ I would roll over – unlike the birds.
It was as if we lived in separate jars.
++++ Wrens whistle and chirp about flames
blooming into a ball at sunrise
++++ then hush with the sun’s full burning.
 . 
I used to sleep through the daily burning
++++ for I didn’t care much how the earth
rotated itself into another sunrise.
++++ But years later, I wondered why birds
got so excited about a horizon in flames.
++++ So much time, I’ve spent within a jar.
 . 
The birds, too, live in a sort of jar,
++++ but they focus outward and seem to burn
with a gratitude that fans their inner flame.
++++ See pelicans fly about the earth?
They dip and lift until the idea of bird
++++ becomes a winged embrace at sunrise.
 . 
When I traveled, I watched every sunrise
++++ to see night leave its door to morning ajar,
and in its wake, I heard the calls from birds.
++++ Each place began with its horizon burning,
though, and I worry our Goldilocks earth
++++ is ending. We choose to go in flames,
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or up in smoke like a moth drawn to flame
++++ when just right gets too hot, but each sunrise
still unleashes warbling tenors upon the earth.
++++ For we don’t see birds flying into bell jars
or coal mines, do we? While forests burn
++++ in the west, in the east, squirrels and birds
 . 
gear up for hurricanes. Notice how birds
++++ of a feather fly from floods and flames?
Instead, I wake to the sky’s daily burning
++++ in these – my sunset – years to collect sunrises.
One by one, I drop then in a jar
++++ like candies gathered from my forgiving earth.
 . 
But this burning keeps flushing out the birds,
++++ who welcome the earth as if an old flame
and add their sunrise songs to its tip jar.
 . 
Melinda Thomsen
from Dropping Sunrises in a Jar, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown KY; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Melinda Thomsen lets no sunrise escape her. While the eye notices light returning to the world and the ear may welcome the first emphatic burst of wrensong, the soul delves deeper to discover that the light has never left. Some place where I can untangle myself through flashes of beauty – this is Melinda’s journey and her destination. And as we travel with her across the world and through the universe of Dropping Sunrises in a Jar, this might be the promise we hope to fulfill – One day you’ll shape yourself into the bird your soul holds.
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❦
 . 
These poems are woven with recurring images of sunrise and sky, birdsong and sunflowers, but in addition to these enticements Melinda’s use of formality has ensnared me. I am a sucker for a good sestina; this collection’s title poem is a great one. I had pretty much assumed it’s impossible to actually write a Heroic Crown of Sonnets (sonnet redoublé) but here Melinda has mastered it. In just 31 pages, this sequence elevates us and carries us into new worlds.
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Purchase Dropping Sunrises in a Jar at Finishing Line Press.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The Zoetrope Sunrise of the Taihang Mountains
 . 
Waking in a sleeper car, bunked
with three strangers, I raise the shade
 . 
to watch the sunrise, a pale peach glow,
among the snoring. Cornfields stretch
 . 
beneath gauzy clouds as our train enters
a tunnel and metal sounds reflect
 . 
off its stone interior. As we exit,
the ochre sky lightens, then another
 . 
tunnel and again a waterfall of noise.
Now, the sun glows behind mountain
 . 
peaks, and mist rests in the Taihang
valley of lush shrubbery when a tunnel
 . 
eclipses that view. The train
travels through tunnel after tunnel,
 . 
but between glimpses, the sun rises
and we emerge into a village
 . 
with streams edging the foothills
framed with cornfields and box houses.
 . 
A man feeds his donkey.
The child in our cabin coughs.
 . 
For the Chinese, the road over
Taihang means the frustrations of life.
 . 
Where the sun rises through slits,
this zoetrope carries me home,
 . 
or some place where I can untangle
myself through flashes of beauty.
 . 
I had to get out through stillness;
until bit by bit, the womb opened.
 . 
Melinda Thomsen
from Dropping Sunrises in a Jar, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown KY; © 2024
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[zoetrope: An optical toy, in which figures made to revolve on the inside of a cylinder, and viewed through slits in its circumference, appear like a single figure passing through a series of natural motions as if animated or mechanically moved. – – – bg]
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Three aphorisms attributed to Heraclitus (Greek, ca. 500 BC) declare change and conflict as the fundamental characteristics of reality:
On those who step into the same rivers, different and different waters flow.
We both step and do not step into the same river, we both are and are not.
It is not possible to step into the same river twice.
The central tenets of Heraclitus’s philosophy are the unity of opposites and the centrality of flux (change) as encapsulated in the phrase Panta rhei, all things flow.
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Moving Day

Posted in family, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 18, 2024| 9 Comments »

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[with 4 poems from I-70 Review]
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Bears Active in This Area
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++++ warning sign in my mountain cabin
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This time, others have seen you,
treading circles on the gravel drive,
shouldering through grapevine tangles.
The possibility of you was always here,
in the night-mouth of the cave that gapes
below my porch, in dark boulders
hulking along the trail.
 . 
Your presence countermands silence –
I chatter and sing as I walk the open road,
snatches of carols, toddler songs –
and shy from the path that meanders
to a sunlit filed strewn with windfalls
from long-neglected trees. I imagine
you keeping pace, just out of sight,
your huffs mocking my jabber,
your heavy steps a counterpoint
as I scurry past thickets, scan uneasily
the curving trail ahead, intruder
in a world that was never mine,
though you are the first to insist
that I acknowledge it.
 . 
Rebecca Baggett
from I-70 Review, Eighteenth Edition, 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
What would a toddler remember about moving away? The apartment in Niagara Falls is a dream of stairwells and windows and darkness outside; the new house in the new subdivision with no grass at all is a neighbor’s dog named Bishy. Or was Bishy the neighbor’s toddler I played with?
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I am four when we move away again, from New York to Tennessee, and I remember plenty about Marion Road: Bob and I watching Little Rascals until Mom declares, “You’re going to turn into rascals!”; our little sun room Aunt Ellen fitted up as a bed-sit while she attended Memphis State, and we kids hiding giggling under her covers until she came home each afternoon; the neighbor boy who introduced us to the word butt and we thought we were the first humans ever to utter something so outrageous. Memories of the neighborhood, yes, but memories of moving there? Packing and unpacking? Worrying that Puppy would get lost in the shuffle or that somehow Mom wouldn’t be there when we arrived? None of that remains.
 . 
Our family makes one more inconsequential move just blocks away when I am six, but then when I’m twelve the Big Away arrives. Up until this what a tranquil 1950’s childhood: I walk to Colonial Elementary every morning with my friends and play with the same friends every evening until the streetlights come on. Serene. Now I’m midway through sixth grade, still coasting, when the bomb drops. Did I protest when Dad announced in January we were leaving Memphis to move to Delaware? Maybe, I don’t recall; that memory is muddy, but this one is sharp as crystal – I walk into class in my new school and my new classmates all turn to look. My clothes aren’t right, my accent is a joke (literally – within about sixty seconds I will have the nickname “Memphis,” which sticks), and I have a different teacher for every subject. And then in just six more months we will move to Michigan. Just over a year beyond that, two months into eighth grade, we move to Ohio.
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So, my friend, is it any wonder that some sixty years later I have trouble remembering your name until the fourth or fifth time we meet? That as we converse in a group you notice me smiling and nodding and slowly drifting off into space? That I would rather write this blog into the wee hours than drop by your house for coffee? I want to be a good friend to you, and in fact I like you and this hug from me to you is real, but ah, it’s risky. There’s always that possibility, without warning and with no desire on my part, that someday soon I might be moving away.
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❦
 . 
It never occurred to me to wonder how Dad felt about all those moves. The moving was his fault, after all, necessary for his promotions and advancement with DuPont, for whom he worked all his life. I can scarcely imagine the million details he had to sift through to put his family into boxes and take them out again hundreds of miles away. I’m not surprised that as I clean out his house I find drawers full of lists on yellow pads, on the backs of junk mail, on bills and receipts. Half the time when he calls me, it’s to add something to the shopping list. And then there are still those boxes in the attic labeled Allied Van Lines.
 . 
But what about the rest of us? Did Dad wake sweating in the middle of the night worrying how moving away would affect his family? Just one time he blinked: after I was married and gone but Mary Ellen was still at home, a junior in high school, Dad turned down a promotion so she could graduate with her class. A sacrifice that stalled his career for a decade.
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Tomorrow is Dad’s last moving day. Since Mom died in July, Dad has agreed to move closer to us. For a week I’ve ferried boxes and duffels, checked off my lists and then made new ones, and tomorrow after lunch I’ll drive Dad to a nursing center just two miles from our house. He says he’s willing to move as long as the food is good (it is). We’ve hung portraits of the grandkids, pastels by Mom. His Duke pillow is on the recliner and his new Duke banner hangs on the door of room 507 to welcome him. God knows I’ve been waking in the middle of the night sweating the million details. Let us hope that after 98 years of moving, Dad will discover in this new and final home a place to rest.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Porta Nigra   *
 . 
++++ Trier, Germany
 . 
The breath of sun and rain
only darkens on my face.
The cat-claws of millennia,
the graffiti of tourists,
fade into my walls.
 . 
I, who guarded this city so long,
sit truncated now.
My frieze the sweaty flesh
of lovers on cool bare stones.
 . 
Catch me in another thousand years,
your eyes as hard and dark as mine.
See if these holes will match
the mysteries of death
and flesh on blackened stone.
 . 
Bradley Strahan
from I-70 Review, Eighteenth Edition, 2024
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* a gate in the remaining piece of Trier’s old Roman wall
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The 2024 issue of I-70 Review arrived in last week’s post. Besides many wonderful voices new to me, I discovered within its pages several old friends who’ve agreed to let me reprint their poems.
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I-70 Review, Writing and Art from the Middle and Beyond is based in Kansas, USA, but publishes poetry, short fiction, and art from around the world. They also sponsor the annual Bill Hickok Humor award for poetry.
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Submission guidelines HERE
Purchase a copy HERE
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Messenger in Early November
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++++++ – in memory of Jay Klokker
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Driving past Agate Bay, I catch a glimpse
of this deer in a splotch of sun and shadow –
the brown-tail’s flanks on the edge of the road
in yellow leaves, thin branches. Las May
after your death, a bear cub loped beside my car
like a lost Labrador, seemed to disappear
under my front bumper. Slamming on the brakes,
I felt no thud, heard nothing. Amazing, the cub
as if uninjured, clambered up the ditch-bank.
Only later, after your memorial, did I reread
your last poems, that black bear nosing
at your sleeping bag in the camp site
in Arizona; recalled marmots whistling
in the pillow basalt near Mt. Baker; the grouse
thumping its tail near our driveway,
feasting on red hawthorn berries.
You noticed. I cannot believe you said no
to another go-round on the cancer wish machine,
you called it, completed your book First Stars.
On you last hike, you raced downhill
in your wheelchair, shouting. You must
be in these sun spots, mottled shadows.
Too excellent a camouflage, my friend –
thin, flickering branches, a few gold leaves,
before all the color goes away.
 . 
Richard Widerkehr
from I-70 Review, Eighteenth Edition, 2024
this poem will appear in Richard’s new book, Missing The Owl (Shanti Arts Press)
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Other
 . 
Last night coyotes laughed
at the neighbor’s bulked-up lab restrained
behind his chain-link, his fearful bark,
their yips of liberty and mild derision;
 . 
are coyotes such demons, or just particular
about whom they allow to know them?
Or are they perhaps spirits of the other,
avatar of all we hominids in our marrow
 . 
know to fear? How to live beside that feeling?
Afraid of attack I stab; afraid of pain I cause it.
 . 
In the woods before daylight willingly lost,
soft tread, a twist in the trail then face to face –
perhaps she and I look into each other’s eyes
for two seconds, perhaps the rest
 . 
of my life; coyote impassive,
considerate, measures our distance,
our closeness, then softly pivots
and pads away, prudent, fearless,
 . 
willing to allow the two of us
to share the universe.
 . 
Bill Griffin
from I-70 Review, Eighteenth Edition, 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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❦ ❦ ❦
Doughton Park Tree 2020-09-08b

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Remembering Dannye Romine Powell

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , 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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❦ ❦ ❦

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NEW

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[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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

from In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver, Dannye Romine Powell, © 2020 Press 53

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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.”

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