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Semper Plus – Trout Lily

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Erythronium, imagery, Kathleen Wakefield, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing, Stan Absher, Trout Lily on March 31, 2023| 9 Comments »

[with poems by Stan Absher, Kathleen Wakefield, Bill Griffin]

How does science work? What does it mean for me to think scientifically? I notice something (empirical observation); I draw a conclusion (hypothesis via inductive reasoning); I check it out (experimentation, testing the hypothesis); it doesn’t all hang together so I try again, maybe noticing a little more closely (refining the hypothesis).

That final bit is the kicker. Even scientists can be seduced by their theories. Scientific knowledge, however, is never fixed and final. The most beautiful deduction can be proven false by the more precise observation. A posteriori trumps a priori. Anyone can be wrong.

The Naturalist Method is a subset of the Scientific Method. When I lead a nature hike, I advise folks, “Pay attention . . . ask questions . . . make connections . . . share.” And I am not the least bit shy about announcing that I myself don’t know everything. Not knowing (but wanting to!) is my defining characteristic. Semper Plus Discere – Always More to Learn. Bring books!

Which bit me on the butt a few weeks ago. For years I’ve walked a little section of trail where trout lilies carpet the banks every March. The first time I saw them – mottled fish-scale leaves, bright yellow recurved tepals, pendulant maroon anthers – I opened my trusty old field guide and confidently proclaimed, “Yellow Trout Lily, Erythronium americanum.” Firm, final, and correct. Never even gave it a second thought until this spring, when I decided to photograph some prime specimens in my SEEK app to add to my iNaturalist log. Click. Searching. Erythronium umbilicatum flashes up on my screen. No, no, that’s not right. Just shot ‘em from the wrong angle, try again. Every flower, every time the same – Dimpled Trout Lily.

When I got home I tore open my newer guides and references and discovered this: some thirty years ago taxonomists split the one species into two. And this: of the two, Dimpled is by far the most common in the foothills where I live. So how do you tell them apart? After a couple of hours on the NC State plant science websites, and after tracking down online photos (which I ultimately determined were mislabeled as americanum 52.3% of the time) I had my armamentarium. Back to the woods, this time with a hiking group I enlisted to find all the Trout Lily they could, especially ones gone to seed.

And what we observed was this — if still in bloom, no auricle (“ear”) at the base of the inner tepals; if gone to seed, a distinct dimple at the end of the ovary, and often lying prone on the ground. Every dang plant we found was Erythronium umbilicatum. I stand humbled and corrected.

But here is another observation to add to the guide books. Yellow Trout Lily is described as holding onto its style, still attached to the ovary after forming seeds. Many, even most, of the Dimpled we found also retained their style. Maybe we’ll come back in a week and observe again. Maybe notice a little closer.

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Heifer

Destined for slaughter
she wades into the water
to the belly and drinks deep.

Does she see her own sad eyes
wide and innocent in the pool
looking up out of the sky?

Soon fear will make her bellow,
but now her muzzle is cool
and wet. Her skin twitches,

scattering flies; her switch
brushes them off. Across the water
she sees a pasture

she will never graze
a clump of trees
that will never give her shade.

J. S. Absher
from Visions International #107, Black Buzzard Press, © 2023 Visions International Arts Synergy

Erythronium umbilicatum

Erythronium americanum

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Thirty or so poems in a modest package; writers from Europe, Asia, the Americas; no page numbers but a few hand-drawn illustrations – all this and a remarkable meditative companionability create the magic of each issue of Visions International. I ask myself how editor Bradley R. Strahan manages to pull me into these pages so warmly. Some insistent human voice calls us, the readers, to encounter distant circumstances and experiences and realize they have become close, familiar, our own. How has Brad, through the decades, made this so?

My friend Stan Absher suggests: Because he often publishes poets over a long period of years, Bradley’s readers can get to know some poets rather well. I’ll mention only the late Michael Mott (he died in 2019) and Nikolaï Kantchev, a Bulgarian poet who died in 2007 and whom Brad continues to publish in translation, but there are several others.

And Kathleen Wakefield, after reading Issue #107, commented this to Bradley: I love the cadence of these poems, their subjects and very particular visions, language that skewers you or lures you in. Some are simply magical to me, others have the strangeness and dark absurdity, fused with love, that points me back to Simic, one of my favorite poets. So glad you honored him and are always including poets from other parts of the world who write of something vital at stake. All of these poems jar me out of my usual forms of speech. That is a very good thing. It’s not just mental; the heart is altered.

I am honored to appear in these particular pages with two friends I’ve come to know through shared poetry, Stan Absher and Kathleen Wakefield. As I continue to read each issue of Visions, my circle of companions expands.

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Subscribe to Visions International. For four issues, mail $25 to:
Visions International / Black Buzzard Press / 309 Lakeside Drive / Garner, NC 27529

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Summons

1.
I am practicing my lying down
beside the stripped spines of jay feathers,
the azures unwinged, seed heads gone to must
and rot, bones of mice cradled in mycelia
tangled and ghostlike.

I am asking the names of wildflowers to ease me into sleep,
saying them over and over, Bloodroot, Evening Lychnis,
Celandine, Enchanter’s Nightshade, Coltsfoot,
Wood Groundsel dissolving
on my tongue.

The faces of those gone before me rise up,
and those I will leave behind, my children
far flung as seeds carried by wind
and pelt and rain.

2.
Go ahead, let the dankness of earth
seep into your thighs, let dust
silt your lungs, your spine
crack like river ice

but the mind pulls you back up through snake skin and mist,
through dry creek and river bed to the trees’
green asylum, rain smacked leaves
waking you to the body’s arterial hum.

Get up while you can, full of your hunger and regret.
Get up from your knees. Taste
what you are, cloudburst, mud, burnt grass,
words buried in iron, bone, lips, and breath,
in this sorrow and honey,
this skin and ash.

Kathleen Wakefield
from Visions International #107, Black Buzzard Press, © 2023 Visions International Arts Synergy

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Albedo

Rare to discover you
+++++ aloft in the afternoon
your eye so blue
I can see right through
+++++ the curving edge of sight
and your face so bright
+++++ I believe the fire
of your glow must burn
within – but no,
+++++ reflected whole
where you hang on the arm
of your golden man.

Bill Griffin
from Visions International #107, Black Buzzard Press, © 2023 Visions International Arts Synergy

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EARTH SCIENCE: Albedo is a measure of how much light is reflected by the surface of a planet or moon; an albedo of 1 means all light is reflected; an albedo of 0 means no light is reflected – all light is absorbed by the surface and it will appear dark. The albedo of the moon is 0.12, pretty dark as celestial bodies go. Saturn’s moon Encedalus has an albedo of 0.99 due to its covering of snow and ice.

The albedo of Arctic ice is much higher than the albedo of open ocean. As more of the Arctic becomes ice-free in summer, more light (heat energy) is absorbed by the darker water. This has produced a positive feedback loop so that the Arctic is warming much faster then the remainder of the planet.

PLANT SCIENCE: The female reproductive part of a flower is the pistil, composed of the ovary (containing the ovules), the style, a slender column projecting up from the ovary, which is tipped by the stigma. Pollen lands on the stigma and sprouts tubules down through the style to fertilize the ovules and produce seeds. Of the 450+ families of flowering plants containing more than 260,000 species, each contributes its own variation to the configurations and shapes of flower, pistil, and stamen, and the strategies for insuring that pollen and ovule meet.

When the outer whorl of structures on a flower can’t be sussed out as sepals or petals, the blades are often called tepals. Sepals are the outer whorl that cover and protect the bud and petals are the inner whorl, usually colored to attract pollinators. Especially in many members of the Lily family, Liliaceae, the two layers merge or fuse; the term tepal was compounded to describe them.

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Chain

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged A. R. Ammons, Bill Griffin, ecology, Ecopoetry, imagery, Julie Suk, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poetry Society, NC Poets, NCPS, Peter Makuck, poetry, Southern writing, Word and Witness on February 24, 2023| 15 Comments »

[poems from Word and Witness: A. R. Ammons, Julie Suk, Peter Makuck]

Carnage ensues at the table while I make coffee. As all the other animals look on in abject silence, large plush Starfish (carnivore, you know) has captured Baby Chick and is eating him with authentic suck-the-juice-right-out-of-you sound effects.

I remark that I’m going to be sad to miss little yellow Chicky. My grandson looks up, all innocence, and simply reminds me, “That’s just the way the food chain works.”

So it must be. Nine years before the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Alfred Lord Tennyson had already warned us (“she” being Nature, “types” being species):

. . .
She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.

‘Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death:
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more.’ And he, shall he,

Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law–
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed –

Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal’d within the iron hills?

+++++ from In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850)

Shall we weep for Baby Chick? For the extinctions accelerating around us? For ourselves, our loss? A few years back I was leading a group of Junior Highs on a nature walk when we spotted a marvelously large spider shuffling along the path ahead of us. When we reached it, though, we found it was not the legs of the spider that were walking but the legs of the pint-sized wasp that had stung and paralyzed it and now dragged it to a favorable spot for egg laying. In an instant the spider transformed from an object of fear and loathing to a spike of compassion in our hearts.

This week a very talkative red shouldered hawk is haunting the woods out back. No coincidence: that’s where the bird feeders hang. We hope he’s eyeing the squirrels – there are more than enough squirrels, eat all you want Sir Hawk. And the mice that come for the seeds dropped to the ground from the feeders, and then store them in our basement, yes, eat them, too. But please, not the cute chipmunk who hides in the ivy or the finches we love. Alas, I guess we don’t get to choose. That’s just how the food chain works.

But wait – do all our choices come to nothing? Our love, our suffering of countless ills, our battles for the True and Just – is the end of all these to be blown to desert dust? Can’t we choose to engage with embattled Nature? Can we reduce our relentless consumption of the planet, choose leaders of vision and intelligence, make peace with our brothers and sisters? How lengthy shall I extend this list? Shall we abandon hope and just accept our place in the food chain while the warming earth devours us?

If a spider can inspire a moment of compassion in a 13-year old, I will have to accede that there may yet be hope for our species.

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The Yucca Moth

++ The yucca clump
is blooming,
++ tall sturdy spears
spangling into bells of light,
++ green
in the white blooms
++ faint as a memory of mint.

I raid
++ a bloom,
spread the hung petals out,
++ and, surprised he is not
a bloom-part, find
++ a moth inside, the exact color,
the bloom his daylight port or cove:

though time comes
++ and goes and troubles
are unlessened,
++ the yucca is lifting temples
of bloom: from the night
++ of our dark flights, can
we go in to heal, live
++ out in white-green shade
the radiant, white, hanging day?

A. R. Ammons
collected in Word and Witness: 100 years of North Carolina Poetry, Carolina Academic Press, © 1999 North Carolina Poetry Society

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This week a friend asked me to send him the table of contents of Word and Witness for a project on biodiversity he’s considering The book was published by the North Carolina Poetry Society in 1999 and edited by Sally Buckner with an afterword by Fred Chappell, who was NC Poet Laureate at the time. It spans the full 20th Century of North Carolina poetry and poets, and as I was scanning the TOC to email my friend a PDF, I re-discovered the names of so many folks who have inspired and befriended me over the last two decades.

Poetry continues to thrive in “the writingest state.” Word and Witness is 261 pages; it would be a real challenge to prepare Volume II for just the first quarter of the 21st Century and limit it to that length. I believe it is still possible to purchase a copy from Carolina Academic Press. You need to get yourself one.

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Waiting for the Storyteller

Once more we wait for the storyteller
to step into the margin and reveal intentions:
why the first letter flowered,
spiraling down the page with intricate designs,
the hand translating what the tongue began.

Clues drop, mostly forgotten,
so on and so on stacked like bricks,
crumbling when we look back,
a voice once close now a stranger.

All through the book we wild-guess the villain,
so deceived by this one or that
we look for reprieve, a surprise ending,
the page turning to a house in the woods,
dogs locked up, gun put a way.

In the still forest of words,
where the hidden appears in its season,
hills darken and move in.
Like lean horses that have rocked a long way home,
they circle the pool of our hands.
A deer riffles through leaves, then a bird
sings begin again, begin again.

Julie Suk
collected in Word and Witness: 100 years of North Carolina Poetry, Carolina Academic Press, © 1999 North Carolina Poetry Society

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Dogwood Again

Home from college, I’d leave my reading,
climb the hill through trees behind the house,
listen to a rough wind suffer through
new leaves and, too aware of myself, ask why?

The answer could have been stone wall,
wind or some other words. In April, our house
lived in the light of those first white petals
and now I think more about hows than whys –

How, whenever we fished at Pond Meadow,
my father dug a small one up, carefully
wrapped the rootball in burlap, and trucked it
home until our hard blazed white all around,

and how, at Easter, those nighttime blossoms
seemed like hundred of fluttering white wings.
Again that tree goes into the dark loaded
with envy, those leaves full of light not fading.

And this morning, a fogbright air presses
against the blank white pane and would have us
see the way mist burns from within, shimmers,
slowly parts, and flares upon an even whiter tree,

tinged now with orange, and how a soft fire
runs to the farthest cluster of cross-like petals,
each haloed with clear air, finely revealed.

Peter Makuck
collected in Word and Witness: 100 years of North Carolina Poetry, Carolina Academic Press, © 1999 North Carolina Poetry Society

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Bios adapted in part from Word and Witness:

After growing up on a tobacco farm near Whiteville, A. R. Ammons (1926-2001) received a degree from Wake Forest College, and served as an elementary school principal, but he lived most of his adult life outside his native state. His interest in writing developed during long hours aboard ship when he served a term of duty with the Navy. In 1964 he joined the faculty at Cornell University, where he was ultimately Goldwin Smith Professor of English. Among his many honors are the Bollingen Prize, the national Book award (twice), the MacArthur Fellowship, and the 1998 Tanning Prize from the Academy of American Poets.

A native of Alabama, Julie Suk (b. 1924) has lived for many years in Charlotte, where she worked in a nature museum. In addition to authoring six volumes of her own poetry, she has co-edited (with Anne Newman) Bear Crossings: An Anthology of North American Poets. Her collection The Angel of Obsession won the 1991 University of Arkansas national poetry competition, and in 1993 she won the Bess Hokin Prize given by Poetry magazine. In 2004 Julie received the Irene Blair Honeycutt Lifetime Achievement Award from Central Piedmont Community College; her book The Dark Takes Aim won the 2003 North Carolina Poetry Society’s Brockman-Campbell Book Award and The Oscar Arnold Young Award from The Poetry Council of North Carolina.

Among previous occupations, Peter Makuck (b. 1940) lists, “truck driver, painter, mechanic,” but he is best known as writer and as Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences at East Carolina University. Pilgrims won the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Award for the best book of poems by a North Carolinian in 1989. In 2010 Long Lens: New & Selected Poems was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In addition to his eight collections of poetry, he has published numerous short stories and essays. Peter has received the International Poetry Forum’s Charity Randall Citation; a Connecticut native, he has been a Fulbright Lecturer at the Universite de Soavoie, Chambery, France. He founded Tar River Poetry in 1978 and served as editor until 2006.

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Wapiti

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, imagery, Keep the Feast, nature photography, poetry, Southern writing, Stephen Cushman on February 17, 2023| 14 Comments »

[with 4 poems by Stephen Cushman]

What did Daddy Buffalo say to his little boy when he dropped him off at school?

“Bi Son.”

Bert (5) and I watch the little herd of elk graze along the gentle Uwharrie slope. They are all females except one chesty bull with a rack of antlers twice as tall as Bert. Every few minutes he raises his head and eyes us. He ignores six bison when they approach from the east, although drawing near they snort and the white-rumped cow elk back away. Grazing resumes.

Bert is the animal man. He will correct you immediately if you refer to bison as “buffalo,” whether in his home menagerie of plastic creatures or here at the North Carolina Zoological Park near Asheboro. Bison and elk once roamed the Carolina piedmont prairie; their grazing plus fires from lightning and intentional burns by indigenous tribes maintained the open expanses encountered by European settlers. Today we learn that the last native eastern bison was killed by hunters in 1799. And from Zoo interpretive displays we also learn that what we see here are Woodland Bison from Canada, a different subspecies from the slightly smaller Plains Bison we’ve watched at Yellowstone.

We’ve also learned something else this morning: these are not elk!

Cervus canadensis is one of the largest species of the deer family, Cervidae. When English settlers arrived in North America, they named creatures they met to match vaguely similar species back home, taxonomy be damned. (European Robins are not even in the same Family as American Robins.) In English the word Elk refers to the European moose, Alces alces, also Family Cervidae, but by the 17th century moose had been extirpated from the British Isles. Having never seen one, for most Englishmen the concept of Elk had grown a little fuzzy. They may have just used the word to mean Big Deer, and these were definitely some big deer.

So if we don’t want to be a big disappointment to Bert by calling bison “buffalo,” what shall we call elk? Wapiti, derived from a Shawnee and Cree word for “white rump,” is the term for Cervus canadensis preferred by Zoo educators and taxonomists. It is the same species reintroduced to Yellowstone in Montana and to North Carolina in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and native across Canada and Alaska (with subspecies in China and Siberia). Wapiti and Bison, preserving the Atlantic piedmont prairie ecosystem for thousands of years, we bow to you.

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Not all English settlers called the big deer Elk. The native British Red Deer, Cervus elaphus, is a dead ringer for Cervus canadensis. Until the advent of molecular phylogenetics, in fact, the two were considered to be the same species. Sir William Talbot’s 1672 English translation of John Lederer’s Latin Discoveries called the North American species Red Deer, but noted in parentheses that they were for their unusual largeness improperly termed Elks by ignorant people. *

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The Rain in Maine

fell also on the Etchemins, their name for us
humans, us builders of fish weirs,

us real people, as opposed to monsters,
animals, or the ghosts of others

back for a visit to glacial moraine
above the beach where clamming thrived

and the canoe route south could make good use
of easy portage across a bar

exposed at low tide, for which they also
must have had words, maybe one meaning

the waters inhale or the earth whale breaches,
as they would have had words for various arrowheads,

the kind meant for deer rather than seals
or for making war on trespassing tribes,

who bad as they were weren’t so pathetic
as to need such abstractions

as religion, as nature, as beauty removed
from whatever gray weather the eagle glides through.

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Stephen Cushman’s book is a feast – of imagining, of unexpected encounters and epiphany, of wordplay, of luscious sensuality and sheer rejoicing – but after reading and re-reading I am still asking myself if there is one specific feast he’s admonishing us to keep. The miraculous feast at Cana, stale water becoming wine that exceeds even the host’s best vintage? The poet’s groaning board of allusion and figurative language? A banquet of awe and praise in the presence of the numinous? Biophilic diversity shared with all creatures and creation?

Keep all these feasts. Attend and partake. Pry open mind and soul and feel the inrush of delight. Keep the Feast relishes the twists and turns, the movement, the sink of stomach as the bottom drops out and the soar of heart when the object of adoration appears. The middle section, a long poem of 26 verses with the same title as the book, is loosely configured like Psalm 119, but it is as if the Psalmist, Jalāl al-Dīn Rumi, and Steve Martin spent all night together on Mt. Ararat – the mystical language of prophesy and ecstasy with a 21st century voice. Look out, Reader! You may remain hungry for more.

Stephen Cushman is general editor of the fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012) and Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Keep the Feast is his seventh collection of poetry.

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from Keep the Feast
section 23

Whither can thy servant turn
+++++ and not find thee there before him?
Whither can his eye revolve
+++++ and not see dust thou art raising?
How can his ear, even if deaf,
+++++ shut out the buzz of constant current
charging the wind with thy high voltage
+++++ and effervescing through his blood stream?
Behold, how doggedly days do their job
+++++ and how the hours persevere!
Soon they will demolish thy servant
+++++ and dismantle his worshipful voice.
If he should cover his head with ashes,
+++++ pay him not the slightest mind.
Do not let him get away
+++++ with some glib quip or facile finale.

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Green Zebra
++++ Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink,
++++ taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of each.
+++++++ – HDT

Help, Theophrastus,
or you, lewd Linnaeus,
with classes for plants and Sexual System

That borders on porn, “nine men in the chamber
of only one bride” sounds pretty wild
and might keep her happy, that passel of stamens
for only one pistil,
+++++ +++++ +++++ but where is the wild
found anymore,
what’s the vicinity
that hasn’t been tilled by husbandry wholly
to nothing but cult, -ivated, -ivar;
+++++ +++++ +++++ +++++ take Adoration,
cocktail hybrid, or flat-globe Celebrity
or even Enchantment, all engineered
one way or another,
+++++ +++++ +++++ while here we were thinking,
when madly monandrous

+++++ +++++ +++++ +++and mounted like wolves
howling full moon beyond the tame pale,
we had evaded human improvement,
+++++ +++++ +++++ +++++ only to find
in ancient love manuals
+++++ +++++ +++++ we might as well be
a Cherokee Purple, another Big Rainbow,

or this zingy beauty with flavorful flesh
striped green and yellow.

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Woe to Us Hypocrites

Hemingway’s fantasy
of days when we’re free
to shoot whom we please
hasn’t got a chance
luckily for us
who trust we’re the marksmen
and never the targets
so when you come home
from drudging through Monday
to news an old enemy,
nasty-cuss nemesis,
had open-heart surgery,
don’t whoop and cheer,
just send him a card,
maybe some mums,
that dish of green beans
you’ve nearly perfected,
garlic, hot chili oil,
and bow to hypocrisy
for keeping the peace
with smiling mimesis
in spite of the anger
for which we’re still liable
to judgement and fire;
there must be a reason
it’s a translator’s freebie,
a piece of the Greek
that’s English to us.