IVY, SING IVORY

This is an old poem, from WILDWOOD FLOWER. I began it as we drove past the Tuckaseegee River, dogwoods blooming on the ridges, the rapids in the river echoing their wind-blown blossoms. "The church bell rings Easter all morning," but so do the trees and the wildflowers. The redbud outside is blooming now. The landscape is waking us up, saying "Come out, look around, wake up."


Ivy, Sing Ivory

1
Like women, the dogwoods go nowhere
and wait for their season, the sun coming back
like a sea-roving laddie. By May Day

the ground will be white with their fare-thee-wells
no man will heed, his boots grinding
a path through the leaf mold. Such pretty things,
Mama said, touching the ivory lace
of my wedding clothes. What good are they
to me now? Every night I see stars falling,
white petals into the wilderness.

2
The church bell rings Easter
all morning like, clear-broken, ice
and beneath it the almost unmoving water.

3
White water charges the banks
after rain has been heavy.
I hear it wherever I go,
like the swirl of my dress
as I stand up suddenly,
kicking the chair from my path.

4
Leaves rasp underfoot half-a-day’s
climb to the summit. A possum sways
four branches heavenward.
Silver bells,
what sweeter music
than silence? The snail travels
slowly toward water that’s been gone
for centuries, rocked by the tidesong
of wind sweeping leaves back
and forth through the gap.

5
Down to the gristmill I follow the creek swollen
so loud by rain I can’t hear myself
sing ho-a-honey-ho. Lady Luck’s
left me a buckeye to warm
in my pocket all day like an earring
the old woman pulled from her dirty pack
whispering, “Filigree.”
“Gypsies,” my Mama said,
pointing me back to the crochet hook
stuck in a tangle of tiny white stitches.
“It’s too hard,” I cried, throwing down
all my fancywork. Fast as I could
I set out for the top of Bald Ridge,
asking] why can’t I keep walking out of this
endless blue sky into somebody else’s
life, fiddles and red skirt
that tickles the floorboards till
dawn. But I knew I could never go far
from the sound of this creek tumbling down
to the lilies of Cullowhee Valley
that bloom like a garland of lace
on my doorsill. Oh ivy, sing ivory,
rosebud and thorn! If only this afternoon
really were endless alongside the gay Tuckasegee
where now I ask, watching its broken light leaving
me, why can’t this water run smooth as stone?

GOOD FRIDAY

Easter has always been my least favorite holiday. Easter Sunday meant clothes more than anything else. New dress. Hat. Gloves. Shoes. Being eyed by everyone in the congregation. Or feeling that way. When I married, I spent Easter with my husband's parents, and going to church on Easter Sunday was de rigeur. The sermon was usually the same one I had heard a year or two before, and the preacher had to make the point that the empty tomb proved Christianity superior to every other religion. We could point to that tomb with pride. Sometimes he quoted Gandhi on the death of his wife, implying that the great man did not believe in the afterlife. Gotcha! Or he would pull out some other detail from another religion, usually distorted or misinterpreted, to show its inability to guarantee the resurrection of the body. Gotcha again! I sat through these sermons staring out the windows, watching the dogwoods sway in the breeze, waiting for the service to be over.

After the last Easter spent with my in-laws, we drove back home through the Smoky Mountains. The phacelia and trillium were blooming, the road spiraling through the awakening landscape like a journey into paradise, an earthly paradise. Here is the poem that grew out of that drive.

Easter Morning on the Hairpin Curve
Smoky Mountains

Is it water or
phacelia that tumbles
down the banks,
overflowing its rocky
creel, water
or trillium,
merging this morning
in one brim-
ful flagrant
resounding of
yes, She lives,
does the Earth,
our longsuffering
handmaiden raising
up dipper
by dipper the day
for us out of
her dark womb.

(first published in Kakalak)

GOOD REVIEWS: A Celebration

What is a "good" review? It's one that's intelligent, one that can read to the heart of a book and speak honestly about what that book is trying to do. It is not mean-spirited or shallow. It takes its task seriously. This is such a review, by a young poet named Luke Johnson. Several light years beyond the review in coldfront to which I brought some gypsy humor several months back, wouldn't you say?

Coming to Rest By Kathryn Stripling Byer. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. $16.95 (pa.)
THE HOLLINS CRITIC
By Luke Johnson

In her latest collection, Coming to Rest, North Carolina’s poet laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer creates a fluid landscape with her poems. The voice in these pieces travels from coast to coast as well as abroad, refusing to rest in a singular present moment. In doing so, the collection arrives at a more circular pursuit of history, “each now forever” as Byer writes in the poem “The Still Here and Now.” It is through creating a circle of family and feelings that these poems search for home, not merely as a place, but as an intangible sense: the slow familiarity of “late summer afternoon / and the dogs asleep under the oak tree.” Though the collection paints many pictures, it is the relationships that Byer presents rather than the landscapes that cultivate a ghostly, but very real sense of home.

In the title poem, Byer wrestles with the legacy of a namesake she never knew while openly questioning her choice of form in the first two sections, one of which is a ghazal and the other a villanelle: “Why cling / to another old form like this no-holds- / barred song for my aunt who died too young.” The revelation of these poetic choices establishes a trend in the collection, drawing the reader into the creative process. By being more closely aligned with the mind of the poet, the reader cannot help but also be in tune with the emotions of the poem. In the final section of the poem, entitled “Free,” Byer returns once again to the physical world, tying her relationship with her aunt to a “nameless creek / almost obscured by shade.” It is in the creek that Byer can reconcile her aunt’s “coming to rest” with Byer’s own continuing struggle with guilt, standing midstream in the water that “keeps rushing through [her].”

One of the finest poems in the collection appears in the final section, a tribute to Robert Watson entitled “Exotics.” Polished and well-crafted, the poem drives toward a relationship heretofore untouched, that of the student-mentor. While this relationship has little to do with the physical space of a house, to a writer it seems as though it is an instrumental step along the way to creating a feeling of home. It is in this environment that Byer recognizes the manner in which a person can take hold of one’s imagination, just as easily as a place: “I confess I have gone nowhere. / I’m still caught inside the same lines I’ve been trying / to write since we walked to Bob’s class.” Through remembering an old classroom with a brilliant professor, Byer creates in the poem a safe space, a peaceful enclave.

What results in Coming to Rest is a “hymn to the landscape,” a collection that digs beneath the dirt from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina to the roadside of Interstate 65, and beyond. Byer’s poems scour the past and ultimately leave the reader at once vulnerable and whole, awake to one’s own fragility and aware of the landscape’s ability to be. Byer conveys that home is not merely a place, but a meditation on the moments of quiet that can be found amidst the uproar of everyday.




(silkscreen by my friend Gayle Woody)

The Gift of a Poem!

I can't think of anything much better than getting a poem like this from a friend. Isabel Zuber, poet and novelist, and a friend I've had since 1977, emailed this today. She really liked the photo of me with one booted foot on the woodpile from an earlier post, I can't remember which. I didn't suspect it would inspire a poem! As for Byron, he has been a pest lately. And he bounds around on my husband's chair, disturbing the stacks of bills, etc., etc., that lie on the lamp table beside it, and he bounds around on the sofa, and on the bed. As for the barley soup, lately I've been making lentil soup, though I have nothing against barley.

Maybe we should all try writing poems to our friends. It's better than sending flowers. And more lasting. Don't we all want to be found beautiful by our friends? And don't we also find them beautiful?

I'll be writing a poem back to Isabel. What a lot we would miss without friends like Isabel in our lives.






For Kay

Our beautiful poet
is out behind her house
in her black boots, her big
red beads and a dress to match.

She has one foot on her woodpile.
Her blue clothes line waits
and inside on the stove
a big pot of barley soup bubbles.

And she has a kind, indulgent
smile for all those whose hands
have not felt the rough bark
on logs carried in to the fire,

who have never snapped a bean
or a clothes pin and who don't
have a small bushy black dog
named Byron to bound around

in the backyard. What
a lot they have missed!

Floodwater on the Farm

The horrible--and terrifying--bad weather of last week, and before, left so much rainwater behind that portions of the driveway and fields on our farm in SW Georgia were flooded. My brother took these photos. Better a deluge of rainwater than a tornado, I suppose, and although SW GA didn't have a flood crisis like the one in Minnesota, these photos still make my eyes pop.



The pasture in front of our house has become a pond! You can see the strip of Highway 37 that connects Mitchell and Baker Counties on the edge of the pasture-pond.



Our driveway has become a wading pool.




Anyone for a swim out to the top of the trough just barely visible? Georgia has been suffering through a drought for a long time. Not anymore! Another front is moving in. I hope it doesn't bring more tornado threats to my home county.

Sunrise, Clear Sky

This morning dawns clear and cold. Not a cloud in the sky after a week of either rain or what I calle "mizzle." The world outside looks like it's just stepping out of a long bath. The trees I calll my "white ladies" are drying off, letting their long torsos shine in the sun.



Two days ago in a seminar the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching called "The Power of Words," I wrote a short poem about them.

My white ladies wait
this morning,

just risen from their baths,
shoulders dusted

with powder my mother
loved--White Linen--

drying themselves
in the sun rising over

the mountins draped in fog
like their negligees.

National Poetry Month--no, Year--is Here!

I hereby declare that April 1 is the beginning of National Poetry Year. A month is not long enough. Let's have a whole year of poetry and study it, celebrate it, read it, and, yes, write it. I'm beginning the month with a poem by my friend and former NC resident doris davenport. She now lives in Albany, GA, teaching at Albany State University, just a few miles from the farm on which I grew up. Doris will be performing at the Asheville Wordfest in late May (more about that later), and she has just completed a memoir, Azalea Love.





(Endless Collaboration) Poem for National Poetry Month - April 2009

How is your POEM today?

Write a poem.
Create a poem.

Bailout a poem. Underwrite a poem. Manage a poem.
Send more troops to assist a poem. Legislate a bi-partisan poem.


Compose a poem. Play a poem. Dance a poem.
Sing a poem. Paint a poem. Dream in poetry.
Dream a poem. Hug a poem.

Have a poem today.
Remember a poem.
Be a poem today. and tomorrow.

Memorize a poem.

Pet a poem.
Eat a poem.
Feed a poem.
Rent a poem.
Buy a poem.
Thank a poet.

Hug a poet.

Make love to a poem. Propagate a poem. Marry it.
Cherish a poem. Love a poem. Love poetry. Now.





(doris davenport at Malaprop's Bookstore)