LARA TUCKER COTTRELL: BRING JOY

(FOCUS ON) HEALING

When your life
Becomes a butterfly
Resting on a palm--
And all its color
Becomes the moment of your truth--
Then your heartbeat will call your hand to your chest
And you will feel that you have always been loved--

Hear me--
You come into this world
Knowing all the answers--
Here is the time to take them all
And fling them up, up into the sky
Where they fly together--and call themselves home.

What you think about, you bring about.  Bring joy.


from Indicia, by Lara Tucker Cottrell


This is the last poem in Lara's posthumous collection of poems.  The butterfly reminds me of Mahmoud Darwish's image of butterfly, the flinging of all the answers into the sky, of Rainer Maria Rilke, but Lara has made the images her own.  The answers flying, calling themselves home....one of her last visions of joy.  

DIAGNOSIS: LARA TUCKER COTTRELL

Lara Tucker Cottrell succumbed to cancer at the age of 45.   One of her most powerful poems, Diagnosis, illuminates her emotional journey after learning of her prognosis.  I love the wildness and sheer determination to live, no matter how long, in this poem.  

DIAGNOSIS

First

The red face of the trees at dusk
Autumn puts it set to stage light
The early nighttime walking
Working like a balm, a cool pallor
I trace the veins of my life
As I pull through the air
Leading like a dancer

Second

Secretly walking in the dark morning
I travel the road as a loner arising suspicions at five thirty am. m. with my wild dogs
The empty fields like barren women
The dress like powerful anvils
Keeping me between the ground and the sky
The cars slow down to peer at us
For I am wired to me, the dogs breathe hard, we
     are all one muscle


Third

I have no time left
Or I have all the time I need
An incandescent, glowing,
Like the moon-washed water of the ocean,
Burning like the tips of the trees in the fall sun.

Fourth

I am balancing in the cold sparkle of the turning season
My life re-handed to me
And I am holding it in my hand
As the sun brings it to light


Fifth

they gave me so many months
I decided many, many years
I said you will die before me
To the doctor and laughed
And he did that itchy-eyed smile
That nervous doctors do

Sixth

And I looked out the window
And my husband held my hand
And the sun got caught in the trees
and it winked at me
And I was still crying, but I was starting again
       inside

Seventh

Because the earth holds me like its love
And there is nothing but air to breathe
And people to love
And my dogs and I went walking in the early
    night
And they smelled the air
And I rubbed up against them
With my glowing, glowing body

Lara Tucker Cottrell,
from Indicia


Because Lara was of Cherokee descent, Wayah the wolf 
must have been with her on these night walks.

Lara Tucker Cottrell

As the hours tick down on this November 26th,  another busy day, much too busy as far as I'm concerned, I want to take time to celebrate a woman whose life ended too soon, at the young age of 45.   Lara Tucker Cottrell was a gifted poet and teacher, a daughter, wife, and mother to her two children.  She left behind a manuscript of poetry that her parents Lanny and Ellie Tucker published a few months ago, titled Indicia.  They asked me to write a foreword to it, which I was honored to do, having found Lara's poetry vibrant and memorable.   I will be posting a few of her poems over the next several days.  I wish you happy birthday, Lara, through the walls of time, as Bill Monroe sang in his haunting song by that name.

I hear a voice out in the darkness

It .... whispers through the pines

I know it's my sweetheart a calling

I hear her through the walls of time

THE BUTTERFLY ON HER PALM

Foreword to the poetry of Lara Tucker Cottrell

         Trying to gather up words for a poet whose poems have come to me so soon after her untimely leave-taking  feels like trying to navigate the mystery of poetry itself--the undercurrents, the backwaters, the glimmering surfaces that always promise more and yet more that lives beneath.  Untimely, that cliché we use when someone leaves us too early!  And yet, used here in this gathering of words,  it is much more than a cliché.  It, too, is a mystery, for in her last poems, Lara Cottrell seems to move outside time.  Beyond it, into a place of what I call "always." Siempre.  She "untimes" time, undoes it as if unlacing a corset's stays.  She lets it fall away and in doing so, she becomes all luminous body and breath.  

     As a child she was immersed in the world of her senses, the first requirement for a poet, as Federico Garcia Lorca reminds us.  Even as a child she became a "professor of the five bodily senses," to quote Lorca.  Every pore in her body was and remained open.  Her ears, eyes, the tips of her fingers, mingling sight, sound,  and and taste in ways that  a classroom professor would call synaesthesia.  She wove her world together through poetry, her poet's heritage as ancient as the Cherokee language still spoken in the Carolina mountains. The mythic hawk Tlanuwa must have visited Lara often, riding the currents of her imagination.  Wayah the wolf must have been with her in her  poem "Diagnosis," his eyes glowing, like her own glowing body, as she walked her  "wild dogs" in the windy night, saying "...I am wired to me, the dogs breathe hard, we are all one muscle." 

     Moments like these, the flare of language and image that reveals what lies beneath ordinary reality, pulse within all of these poems, for perhaps that is what poetry is, the muscle of language moving us into the territory  of transformation.  Lara's poetry walks fearlessly into that territory, her last poem, “Healing,” leaving us with the image of a butterfly: "When your life/Becomes a butterfly/Resting on a palm--/ And all its color/ becomes the moment of your truth--/Then your heartbeat will call your hand to your chest/And you will feel that you have always been loved."  The great contemporary Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, whose own death came much too early, once wrote, The poem is always incomplete, the butterflies make it whole.  Were the two of them already breaking bread together, as W.H. Auden says art enables us to do, already together in that timeless realm of the imagination?  “What you think about, you bring about.  Bring joy,” Lara reminds us in the last line of her last poem.    Her poems bring that joy in abundance.  Read them and enter the life of a poet completely alive to her world, both inner and outer.  Come be alive with her through her voice.  Her joy.

*******************

Lara’s parents have published her poems in a book titled Indicia, a work she was hoping to complete before she died.

It also contains some etchings and drawings by her father, Lanny, and photographs by her sister Sasha-- which are used to divide some sections-- photographs of Lara and her family, and tributes to her memory including a special eulogy written by her brother Scott.

Proceeds from the sale of Indicia will go into a fund for Lara's children, Laja and Logan.

If you would like to purchase a copy or copies, please send a payment of $16.63 for a soft cover copy or $25.96 for a hard cover copy. This includes sales tax and mailing costs. [The check can be made out toL. Tucker/Indicia with a notation on the left lower side of the check that it is for "Indicia"].

 Orders should be accompanied by the address to which the book[s] should be mailed.

The mailing address for the order is:    Indicia.

                                                             PO Box 3084

                                                             Chapel Hill, N.C.

                                                             27515-3084

The cost of the book is $13.86 for a soft copy and $23.49 for a hard copy.

RIVER VOICES

The Flint River surges along its journey a mere three miles from the farm where I grew up.   The town of Newton, Georgia lies along its banks and the old Newton Bridge used to be the object of great trepidation when we would drive over it.  One-lane and ramshackle (or so it sounded) it always caused us womenfolk to worry that a truck would come our way and force us into the muddy depths.  "Don't look down," my mother would warn.  What might we see if we did?

This poem, in the ancient Persian form of the ghazal, explores that obsession with the river.  The first in  a series I hope to write about the Flint, it introduces some of the obsessive imagery I've carried with me over the years.  This poem appears in the current Pembroke Magazine.

River Voices

           " ...  say the  past is a muddy

river"

                                       

                                                     -- Evie Shockley

When  she lowers her hands to the river

she feels many dead voices translating river.

Her fingers turn cold, but her lips part,

as if, like a hooked  fish, she longs for the river.

Don’t look down, her mother warned; shifting

the Ford into second gear, crossing the river.

The drawbridge’s rusty spine still rattles

memories she tries to dredge from the river.  

Old men cast their histories into the depths

she can’t reach.  Stories keep shape-shifting over the river.

The trees keep their roots to themselves;

but they let their reflections be stroked by the river. 

When she hears the cricket frogs singing,

she wants to lie down on the banks of the river.

Come night she hears voices.  A drunken brawl.  Somebody

cursing the day he was born.  Somebody trying to drown in the river.

The backwater nags at her.  Dare she strip 

down to the bone and walk barefooted into the river?

PEMBROKE MAGAZINE: SOUTHERN WRITERS

The new issue of Pembroke Magazine is fresh off the press, focused on the American South and edited by Jennifer Key, herself a rising young poet with many accolades to her credit, including a prize from Shenandoah, one of the country's most celebrated literary journals.  I hope to feature her work eventually on this blog.

Jennifer asked me to send her some poems for this issue, which I was happy to do.  The following piece had its beginning twelve years ago while I was at the Hambidge Center in north Georgia.  I had brought stacks of journals I'd kept, filled with drafts of poems in handwriting I often could no longer read terribly well.  I pulled a few lines out from my scribbles, typed them into a disk on my ancient Mac, and proceeded to forget them.  This spring I pulled them out again and completed this poem.

I grew up reading my father's weighty books on the Civil War, haunted by the photographs of soldiers and battlefields, memorizing descriptions of the battlefields.....Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg.  At the center of my fixation, though, was Sherman's march through Georgia, branded forever into my memory by Gone With the Wind.  I wrote at least three poems about that experience, one entitled " Seeing GWTW for the Sixth Time," an obsession halted, I hope, by the the last GWTW poem I will ever write (I hope) titled "Gone Again."  This poem comes at the subject of William Tecumseh Sherman from another angle.     War is still hell, and we have only to look at our latest battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan to see the wasteland it creates, the scorched earth approach that Sherman practiced so well.

 From a Safe Distance

“War is hell,” Sherman said,

torching his way from Atlanta 

to the port of Savannah,

with God knows how many

small towns left burning between.

But tonight who’d believe him?

This new war’s a video game.

Push a button.  

Just look, we are winning,

the missiles on target,

 the clean zap of

bombs hitting bulls-eye! 

A child’s game

for overgrown children. 

A genius,  that S.O.B. Sherman,

he knew, once a war has been turned loose, 

it goes where it bloody well pleases.

Growing up, I found war

in the pages of Civil War volumes  

my father collected.  Photos of Stonewall

and Lee, the lost faces of 15 year olds

and the corpses at Shiloh seemed more real 

than counterparts snapped during D-Day

or, later, the peasants  

littering a road outside My Lai.  

Back then war was a book 

I could open or close when I wanted

and draw from a safe distance

its inevitable conclusions. 

No photos tonight of the slain

on my television screen,

no houses scattered like book pages

ripped from their spines,

but soon we’ll see leakage of bodies

blown into a digitized rubble by pilots

who speak with an accent I understand,

down-home and commonsense.

Do what you have to do.  

Lock on those suckers

and bring them down.  Sherman

would be pleased, the streets burning,

nothing much left of another small town. 

My Lai----Photo by Ronald L. Haeberle

COLD SPRING RISING: John Thomas York

One of our state's best poets has had to be patient for many years before seeing his first full-length collection published.  This spring he was able to hold that book in his hands and celebrate.   Those of you who have followed this blog know that I've devoted several posts to John York's work, so type  his name into the poet's slot to the right of this new post to read more about his poetry.  Go to Press 53's website to order his book, read his biography, and learn more about the artist who created the cover image.


Today's GOOD NEWS is that John and his daughter Rachel will appear at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva, NC this coming Saturday evening, Sept. 1, for a reading from the book and a performance of old ballads by Rachel.

  Drop by at 6:30 for this special event, have John sign some books for you, and stick around for a late supper downstairs at City Lights Cafe.   

Whippoorwill

The clear horizon was fading,

and my father and I sat together

on the warm steps,

cinder blocks painted smooth,

Daddy smelling of cows

and a cigarette, glowing, fading,

when it started, a song

both monotonous and magical,

as if God were plying

a hand pump, a musical 

machine that said, Make-it-Flow!

Make-it-Flow!  

Darkness rising from a deep well

and flooding the woods, the corn field.

I pointed, wanting a name:

“It’s just a whippoorwill, Johnny.

Just a bird, saying, Whippoorwill.”

Still the song rose from the dark,

a siren’s voice, sounding

the alarm for me and my father,

ignorant of any danger,

father-son sitting close on the warm steps

and watching the farm fading into the night.

The Gift

In the morning, getting ready for school, 

she would say, “Look at Mr. Redbird,

such a pretty, vain creature,”

the cardinal pecking at his reflection,

dancing back and forth in the sunlight

on the car’s big bumper.

And in the evening, after milking 

and dinner and the cleaning up, 

Mama sat on a bed 

with us and told stories, or she read

Johnny and His Mule, The Jack Tales,

a Bible story book.

I wanted to read, too,

but some words gave me trouble, 

so she used flash cards:

who. . .where. . .why.

She fed me words until they made

sentence, paragraph, story.

One day, the mailman left

a flat cardboard box, a book about whales,

the blue whale dwarfing

the man who stood beside it,

and fearsome orcas breached into the living

room and roamed over

the gray carpet, where sunlight

was striped by Venetian blinds: 

I turned off the TV for an hour and read 

my book, while my mother grinned 

to herself, as she cleared away her papers,

as she prepared the evening meal.

DOLDRUMS

What a self-explanatory word is "doldrums"!  It sounds like what it is, the first syllable's long mournful O sliding into the backwater liquid of L.  And then those drums, the shudder vowel of the "uh", the lid shoved down on it by the M.  And for good measure the sibilant S closing out this enervating sound of a word.  This enervating time, this summer lethargy I've been in for weeks now.

Arjun, now deceased, in a doldrums mood.  

No blogging.  Just a few poems begun, which is better than none, of course.  Much better.  One of them, tentatively titled "The Vishnu Bird" opens with a little song of promise.

The Vishnu bird startles me

this morning.  Vishnu

vishnu, he calls from the  tree

the locals call sarvis

because it blooms Eastertime,

 calling the faithful to worship. 

Barefooted, I'm walking out to the garden

in nightgown and bathrobe,

my coffee cup half full,

my head brimming over with another night's

bird calls. 

How Vishnu, in his incarnation as bird, got into my back yard, who knows.  Maybe he'll bring along some different rhythms and images.

Not even the garden has energized me as much this summer, though, Vishnu notwithstanding,  when I walk out barefooted with coffee cup in hand.  Our lettuces have been battered by rain and hail, our mustard greens gone to seed too early.  No tomatoes at all.

Still, the edges of a few leaves are beginning to turn russet.  The wind teases the hair on my arms.  Something's coming, some change of cloud-drift, some shifting of the imagination's tectonic plates. Maybe.  And though there are no tomatoes,  there are cucumbers, and more cucumbers.  What does that word sound like, cucumber?

 I leave it to you to tell me.