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First Human

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Fish Streets Before Dawn, imagery, nature, nature photography, poetry, Press 53, Rick Campbell, Southern writing on May 24, 2024| 15 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Rick Campbell]

The Light We Call Winter

If you see me walking down

the shell road under myrtle

and Spanish moss, don’t worry.

The road’s a circle and it brings me

back to my yellow mailbox.

You might give me the name

of the bird that sat all morning

on the thin branch.

Give me the last lost months gone

in a haze, sloughed off like an old dog

shakes himself dry.

Walk with me.

I won’t say

I don’t need you.

Rick Campbell

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When the first Human woke up on their first morning on Mother Earth, they discovered all the other persons watching them. The Plant persons, the Animal persons, the Lichen and Fungus persons, all of them had already been living together on Mother Earth for a very long time and they knew how to get along. Now here was this new member of the family, this Human. No doubt everyone was asking themselves whether this new person would also learn how to get along.

The Human opened their eyes and the first thing they said was, “How did I get here?” A question Humans would spend a very, very long time trying to answer. Then the Human stood up, looked all around, and asked, “What am I doing here?!”

At this point the Creator of Mother Earth and Every Living Thing smiled. Yep, those are the right questions. Two of the big ones. And don’t forget the third, maybe even bigger and maybe even more important. The Human noticed all the persons watching – Plant, Animal, Fungus, all of them – and asked, “Who are you?” The Creator smiled even wider. Yep!

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A nod to Robin Wall Kimmerer and Braiding Sweetgrass for inspiring this little parable. And a nod to Rick Campbell for poking at all the questions until they wake up and try to swim to the surface. The answers you’re going to get in this life depend on the questions you ask.

Be sure to ask, really, the questions no one knows the answers to. I almost wrote “the questions no one knows how to ask,” but how is something you certainly do know. The more you pay attention, the more you wonder, the more you know how to ask those questions. Not ask like Rodin’s Thinker with your chin on your fist in placid contemplation. More like lying awake at 4 a.m. in a sweat and doubting but asking anyway whether there’s any reasonable hope for you, you Human.

What am I doing here? I haven’t needed an answer as long as I’ve been always doing, doing. In fact I don’t even know there’s a question until I stop. (Maybe Rodin’s silent seated ponderer is an apt image after all.) In that momentary pause, in that engulfing silence, the questions suddenly loom huge and overwhelming. Why am I? What is my purpose? And cold, dark nothing threatens to bring its answer.

But then I look around. Who are all these others? All these persons, Human and not, sharing this circle with me? Can we get along? May I know them? It’s never too late to ask. Never too late to try.

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Practicing Silence

Outside of NYC, it’s

almost impossible

to be mistaken

for a mime. Here,

at the edge of the country

I’m just a guy who moves

silently down crushed shell

roads, through pine forests

in deep sand, past the harbor’s

broken docks. Ok, yes,

I could talk more, but to whom,

the clerk at the Dollar General?

What would I find worth saying

more than thanks? Buzzards whirl

over my head like synchronized swimmers.

Rick Campbell

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Frank X. Gaspar writes this in the introduction to Fish Streets Before Dawn: In the poem Throwing Starfish Back into the Sea [Rick] wonders how much “good he has done” with his uncertain act of kindness. It is an apt poem, and taken in the context of this collection and its outcries, we see that Rick Campbell’s wanderings and questing are testimony to the core of his art: surviving, yes, but surviving as the step that allows us to pursue any small good we can bring along with us.

Rick Campbell lives in Alligator Point, Florida, and teaches in the University of Nevada-Reno’s MFA program. He has published seven earlier poetry collections, plus a collection of essays, Sometimes the Light. His most recent poetry collection, Fish Street Before Dawn, from Press 53 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is available HERE

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Xenoglossy

I once wrote of my mill town

that you can want all your life here.

I was in love with words and

the directions they might lead:

into the temple of furnace fire

and out again? Along

a ridge with hawks drafting

thermals? Blues as it’s bent

at the crossroads? Freight trains

clacking downriver under the cloaked moon?

Just empty space?

At night I speak in the tongues

of angels and fools: babble

imperfect definitions of desiderate, lack,

+++++++++++++++++++ ought.

Yesterday, blades of grass parted

as the pygmy rattler sidled away

from my boot. I wanted to call

the hawk in the pine tree

down to snatch it up, but

I had no tongue for hawk.

What did I know? I am older.

It wasn’t just home that wanted,

not just the valley that lacked.

Rick Campbell

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Discover

Posted in Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, bloodroot, imagery, Knowing, Mark Cox, nature, nature photography, NC Poets, Plant evolution, poetry, Southern writing on April 5, 2024| 3 Comments »

. .

[with two prose poems by Mark Cox]

. .

Poem at Forty I Could Not Finish Until I Turned Sixty

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The seas below our house pitch deep and soundless. Like sweat engrained in handrails, or the oil darkened edges of our dining room table, every shadow implies more shadow.

. .

Late summer has quieted the cicadas, damped their dwindling number with the lastness of their deaths. There is a chill to the air, no wind at all. My youngest son is twenty days old, feeble, burrowing in and out of awareness, still unsure his body isn’t trying to kill him. He cries to eat, he cries to sleep, he cries as his tiny gut rejects what all must go to waste.

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Last week, scientists discovered the bones of a humanoid who fell into a well shaft three million years ago. His wife said he’d turn up! That the world has no pity for the individual life, this is no secret to anyone, yet we just can’t get over it. I am here in the middle of a bed, in the middle of the night, in the middle of my life, my son nestled as if he were my own bones, as if we’ve both toppled forty years down into positions we’ll retain forever. There is no chiropractor for the soul.

. .

The museum of loss has at last opened its doors to me. Scholars cannot agree, the docents say, but almost certainly arms encircling the body was an omen of intimacy. Little is known of the fabled kiss; what remains of crude glyphs and mosaic shards indicate our elders once believed that souls were exchanged. One cannot, of course, touch anything in the museum of oss. One can only view what was once there. Nothing can be imagined and remain the same.

. .

Just what does this portend? There will always be a thermos next to the detonator, a pair of reading glasses weighting the sentence handed down without mercy. An airman in WWII, John Ciardi recounted how once from the blister all gunners sat in, he watched the bomber beside him burning. His counterpart waved up as that other plane went down.

. .

Each age has its designated bandwidth. Without warning, my son is twenty and in love. We are belted in. Splitting space. In his lap, he holds one hand with another, as if to keep its fingers from detaching, as if I’d helped him hurry to the car, and was driving to a hospital. I want my tree back the way it was, he whined, one autumn morning. He was four or so and knew even then what he’s now not able to share.

. .

Much is felt that resists being known. If there are seven billion human beings on earth, then every day is 19 million years of experience, just all at once. Somehow, I find this comforting, though by now you’d think we’d know what we are doing.

. .

Mark Cox

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Better to resist the flux and believe that something stays. At last, he thinks, that is his answer. How still it all is, so utterly clear. Then one bright leaf lets go and changes everything.

++++++Knowing, Mark Cox

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It all begins with a question. No, that comes second, first there’s noticing, and noticing that something is different. Wait, even before the noticing there has to be paying attention. No, no, it all begins with this: just being there, moving through the world, part of all the changes.

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Joe just texted Cynthia and me a remarkable photo taken along a path we’ve walked together more than a few times. Looks like Bloodroot – nothing else has those freaky leaves emerging from the earth like fingers of the undead – but the petals are different. Instead of a circle of daisy-like petals (radial symmetry) they are bunched and doubled. And the center is almost naked as a belly button.

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A hybrid, we ask ourselves? But there are no other species in genus Sanguinaria with which to hybridize. A mutant, then. Sure enough, we discover online images of Bloodroot Multiplex with these peony-like blossoms, all of them propagated from a spontaneous mutation first discovered in Ohio years ago. Sterile flowers in which the stamens have reverted to petals. Evolution amok. Now we have the same mutation here in our backyard.

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Plants that make flowers first appear in the fossil record 360 million years ago. Their flowers left the seeds exposed – they were naked (gymnosperms = conifers and gingko). Gymnosperms ruled for over 200 million years until the first flowering plants evolved forms that keep their seeds enclosed. But the outcome of the mutations that eventually resulted in plants with such protected seeds, angiosperms, was so successful that they have filled the earth with their variety and diversity. Every plant you see with flowers blooming this spring is an angiosperm (and even a lot whose flowers you don’t see, like grass for goodness sake).

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The enclosing ovary which cradles the ovule which will become the seed – what an excellent evolutionary idea! It most likely developed from mutations in fertile leaves which caused progressive curling and enfolding. All the parts of the flower – sepal, petal, stamen – are specialized modified leaves. But whenever we discover a Bloodroot flower with more than eight petals, we can assume that some of the extra petals are stamens which have turned back the evolutionary clock to become petals again.

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Is there anything we can hold on to that stays, fixed and static? Is it even possible to imagine something that never changes? Do I even really know what I think I know?

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There is only one thing that each and every one of us knows. Mark Cox reminds us what it is in Knowing – it’s something no one likes to talk about, but something Mark’s poetry is able to face and say in a hundred ways until we readers become more than willing to join the conversation. We’ve known it all along, maybe at times we’ve even braced for the brief plunge toward otherness, but in these prose poems we have a guide and a friend who is just as afraid as we are but braver about sharing his fear.

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Does a prose poem occupy some evolutionary niche between verse and narrative? Forget its phenotype: brevity, blockiness, absent linebreaks. What’s down deeper in its DNA? It seems to carry all the genes of its poetry forebears – language and imagery, rhythm and music, even internal rhyme – but it is its own genus. Unlike a story, it has no beginning, middle, and end – it is all middle. Crisis and denouement might embrace each other in the same line. (And can we even call them lines when they are all one? Sort of like the question how many grooves there are on a 33 ⅓ rpm LP.) In the poem, everything is happening, but how is it happening? Oh wait, as I read the poem everything is happening in me.

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And what happens in me over and over as I read these poems, as it dawns on me that the one thing we all know, each and every one of us, is that we will die, is this: I look up from the page and talk to myself. I query, I wonder, I argue, I confess. I pick up the threads of so many internal conversations left dangling because they were difficult, or scary, or just pushed out of the present by quotidian distractions. I’m not saying that by reading a book by Mark Cox titled Knowing I have gained or been granted my own cosmic knowing. But I have been reminded that I want to.

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Music Box

++ For Ralph Angel

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Everything’s just peachy, comes the world report: all clear. We are not pirouetting on the tip of time’s scalpel; we are not screwing deeper into the ground’s veneer. It is just the fleeting dance we do until the delicate box closes, having learned now to bow before hurting ourselves.

. .

Today is Thursday once again and the man next door is off to get his mail. He will wander back reading, as is his wont to do, his wizened leashed dachshund dog sniffing the leaves. The breeze passes over our shrubs and still they stand. A wary sparrow peers from them be we shouldn’t call it hiding.

. .

Yes, we have learned how to brace for the brief plunge toward otherness. We have learned to keep our eyes open to the dark, even if it doesn’t matter. We see most vividly what cannot be seen, and this is always the case.

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In the caves of our past, flames flickered on the rough walls. Fear grew there beyond reason and all sense of proportion. Our shadows have always been bigger than we are, the house lights shining up as they do, not down.

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It would make sense to be offered a tune now. Something simple and genuine, a tale of longing fulfilled. Something to do with a childhood nightlight, a mother’s cool palm. Whatever it is, it will have to be a memory wound long ago.

. .

Such a blessing might be broadcast from just about anywhere. We receive it on this bureau with no clue wherefrom it issues, which ancient satellite or lofty transmission tower. On and off like a warning beacon, the message beams. Once all is said, one has no choice but to choose. Call it grace, call it wonder, just, as they say, keep it calling.

. .

Mark Cox

Music Box first appeared in The Connecticut River Review

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Mark Cox is chair of the Department of Creative Writing at University of North Carolina, Wilmington. He also teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Program. His six previous books include Sorrow Bread: Poems 1984-2015 (2017) and Readiness (2018). Read more about and purchase Knowing at Press 53 HERE

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The Law of Love

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, family, imagery, Letters to Karen Carpenter, Main Street Rag Publishing, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Richard Allen Taylor, Southern writing on March 22, 2024| 8 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Richard Allen Taylor]

What’s Happening?

+++ after Choices, a watercolor by Catherine Mainous

Of course, I recognize it right away,

this landscape where past and present

bleed into future, as I have bled,

as we all do. I start green and work

my way up, grasping at blue. Earth

always reaches for sky, the tiniest seed

pokes through saltmarsh and sawgrass,

green fingers periscopes looking for light.

I always look for dawn. No, that’s wrong.

Sometimes, I search for dark and find it.

The light comes later, after regret, guilt.

See how that diffused orange glare

in the corner blurs into a bridge

to nowhere, skeletal structure

never completed. That’s what

you get with unrequited ambition.

Beginning, middle, no end.

A purple cloud in the distance.

A crane untethered.

An unexpected answer

to an unexpected question.

Richard Allen Taylor

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She doesn’t believe in inertia. If I take both hands off the wheel for a femtosecond, she’s convinced we will instantly swerve into the embankment.

She does believe in gravity. Since my last birthday she has forbidden me from using the stepladder to hang Christmas lights on the dwarf spruce in our front yard, much less reach to get the star on top.

She absolutely rejects Heisenberg’s principal of uncertainty. Whether I can detect them or not, my keys are fixed in place right where I left them.

She’s a little iffy on the conservation of angular momentum. If I accelerate into a curve to maintain a constant forward velocity, she wants to know why I’m speeding.

She accepts evolutionary biology without complaint but wanders from the straight and narrow of taxonomic hierarchy. Lizards and toads she seeks out as cute; snakes are OK only behind glass; spiders and gigantic roaches, even millipedes, she captures under a paper cup, slides a birthday card beneath, and relocates into the yard; fruit flies and ants must die.

And the law of love? It is, of course, not exclusively physics and biology. It also includes the law of culture and connection, of which she is founder and curator. When a particular issue of National Geographic reaches its twentieth birthday, she tears out each article worth saving and files it, astrophysics to zoology. She will let me re-read them if I but ask.

One more thing about the law of love: it seems to disobey Newton’s third law of motion. For each of my own actions – and how often they do violate something – there is a reaction, but thank God not opposite and equal. However sharp her initial glance and inflection, the ultimate consequence so far has been forgiveness. This is one universe I am happy to live in.

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The Second Law of the Apple

If the first law was not to take

the first bite, lest you be banished

from the garden, the second law

ought to be to finish what you start,

meaning the first bite obligates you

to a second, and a third, and so on

until the apple is eaten, except

for the core, which contains

the seeds, and sine you will be

traveling anyway, away from

the garden that spit you out,

you might as well learn

banishment from one place is not

the end, but merely another beginning,

and what you do with the seeds

is everything.

Richard Allen Taylor

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Richard Allen Taylor is part of the holy jangle of things / fastened to the belt loop of a forgetful world. The poems in Letters to Karen Carpenter and Other Poems are able to weave from the commonplace and humbly wonderful things of this world a sweet sadness . . . droll observations . . . life-giving joy. And some good jokes.

We knew this first collection since Richard’s wife’s death from leukemia would build a house for grief and healing. Who knew that Karen Carpenter would lend such a hand, but Richard weaves remembrance and biography together into powerful metaphors for attachment and loss. These poems speak to grieving with the whispered voice of his late wife, Julie – a mellow bell rings in the canyon. / And the canyon is me – as well as in Richard’s own sure voice of seeking, his wisdom steadily revealed as one that doesn’t cry for answers but is happy to linger with the important questions. All the old questions / that rise in the wake of storms: each of us must confront and accept these questions if we are to be fully alive. Autumn fades, winter enfolds us, but the seasons continue to turn. At the end of everything is not sadness but wonder, friendship, and love.

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Letters to Karen Carpenter and Other Poems is available from Main Street Rag HERE

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I Write to You About Julie, My Wife

I named a star after her. Astronomers call it

HD 10180. Both Julies—the woman I remember

and her eponymous star—emit a kind and generous

light. The star deserves a name that twinkles, and she

deserves the star. I never called her HD 10180,

but often call the star Julie. I chose it out of billions

because, like you, Julie got along so well with others—

none of that blasting the neighbors with deadly gamma

ray bursts, the way some pulsars do. And like the star,

my wife, when she was alive, had a family that orbited

her adoringly. Astronomers have identified a possible

gas giant, designated HD 10180g, residing comfortably

in Julie’s habitable zone, and—though the giant’s crushing

gravity could never support planetary life, they may find

moons that do. Suspected of strong winds and colorful

bands, without Julie’s life-giving warmth and shine,

HD 10180g would be little more than a vast frozen cloud,

a derelict adrift in deep space. I wish I could point out Julie

to you, but it’s in the constellation Hydrus, which is only

observed from the Southern Hemisphere, and, though

brighter than our own sun, Julie resides one hundred and

twenty-seven light-years away. We’d need a telescope.

I understand your concern that the striking similarity

between the designations HD 10180 and HD 10180g

might confuse some observers. Don’t worry.

To anyone who ever saw us together, it’s obvious

I am the gas giant, and she is the star.

Richard Allen Taylor

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ECOPOETRY FOR EARTH DAY 2024

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

+++ — John Muir

VERSE & IMAGE is seeking poetry to celebrate Earth Day, April 22, throughout National Poetry Month. Do you have a favorite poem that speaks to universal interconnectedness, as in the above quotation? Send it to ecopoetry@griffinpoetry.com by April 10 and we may share it in one of several posts dedicated to living together on our living planet.

Please read these guidelines:

Deadline April 10, 2024, midnight Eastern Daylight Time USA

Send ONE poem by any author except yourself addressing the theme of connections.

Include the full text of the poem in the body of an email or as a .DOC or .RTF attachment to ecopoetry@griffinpoetry.com. Please add info about where the poem is published.

Also include a personal statement – how do you feel connected to this poem? What does it mean to you? How has it connected you to the earth? [suggest 100 words or so; may be edited for length]

Visit GriffinPoetry.com between April 15 and April 30 to see if your poem has been selected for presentation.

Optional: if you submit one poem by an author other than yourself, you may also submit one poem on the same theme that you have written. We prefer previously published – include acknowledgments.

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