Air Defense

Saint Francis’ Satyr—

so rare its cocoa-powder wings

flutter only across a few wet meadows

on a single military base, where fire bombs

lobbed into canebrake make a scuttle of  flames,

open patches of sun where the sedges grow

and the Satyr, guarded only by eyespots,

lays one by one her tiny eggs

the color of new grass.

The meadow over the way

turned white with daisies the summer I was six,

and we wandered for weeks, the dog and I,

linked by garlands and lost

in an ocean of white.  

A man with a camera came,

and then a full-page photograph

in Time magazine—the daisies, the laughing dog,

and me—important reasons for effective air  defense

in black and white. The year was 1956 but the war

was the one war always being fought

somewhere beyond the edge

of the field of daisies.

Yet somewhere

among the leaves of grass

perhaps a chrysalis—

Bolts of Silk  6/9/2013

The endangered St. Francis' Satyr  (Neonymphia mitchelii francisci) occurs only on Fort Bragg military base in North Carolina, the state where I live. The exact locations of its tiny, fragmented breeding sites are kept confidential to protect the butterfly from collectors.  The photograph shows another Satyr Butterfly, the Creole Pearly Eye (Enodia creola).

Litany of the Nearly Lost

Listen:  their names

carry news of the places they live:

Tooth Cave spider and Virgin River chub,

Red Hills salamander and Bliss Rapids snail,

Eureka Valley primrose and Lost River sucker.

Maybe once, before they vanish,

they will rise up out of their subterranean

caves, come down from islands

in the sky, leave forest pools and relict

prairies, leaping, swimming, sidling,

soaring, scattering seeds and petals

over the knotted highways

and into the halls of Congress—

the map turtles leading the way.

Tumbling Creek cavesnail.

Kneeland Prairie pennygrass.

Peter’s Mountain mallow.

Delhi Sands flower-loving fly.

Slithering, sliding, crawling, gliding,

let them come, singing with one voice

This land is our land—

Let it not vanish away.

Laguna Mountain skipper. 

Ash Meadows sunray, Salt Creek tiger beetle.

Santa Catalina Island fox.

Written River 3:1, summer 2012

King Coal

She is old, though not so old as the mountain.

But the mountain is gone and she remains.

Outside her window at dawn the mockingbird

has forgotten his voice, sings only

the beep and grind of machinery.

She rises early to peer from her window

at the huge uprooted boulder that teeters

high above her house.  Still there—

she must be still alive. She lies back down

to plunge beneath the alien tangles in her brain,

thick as kudzu on the slopes above,

to go deeper and deeper into the farthest forests

of memory, under the layers of brown dust

that turn to sludge in every rain,

past the boarded windows,

the looted houses of her neighbors.

Her ruined mind is free to wander the lost coves

in search of goldenseal and ginseng,

though she finds the healing herbs

have strangely lost their power.  She climbs

through hickory, maple, sassafras and cherry,

toward the graveyard she can visit now

without an appointment or a hard hat,

without that coal-company fellow dogging along behind.

She pauses to gaze over the lines of hills, blue beyond

blue.  The clarity of light pierces deep inside her mind,

stirs up two words she’s often heard

but cannot grasp—demented and overburden.

Mountain and forest, poplars aching

toward distant sky, the song of the wood thrush

melting down the bones, stone and oak and doe

and the shimmering mayfly’s wing—

all this—they call it “overburden.”

She calls it home.

And that other word, “demented”—

that’s what they say is wrong

with her, yet she’s not the one

who turned the world all topsy-turvy,

fertile Earth buried under barren rock,

veins choked and valleys filled with rubble

crushed from the mountain’s ruptured heart.

But the knots and tangles of her brain

won’t hold to recent memory. She steps

between thick branches, out of shadow

into a sunlit, silent glade where—yes—

the mourning cloaks still gather,

more abundant now than ever,

and rise in gyres dark against the sky.

Written River  2:2, winter 2011

Field Guide

Here among the blue hills—

creased, battered, worn,

ground down to earth

and melding into sky,

raked and scrubbed by sun

and the swiftly scudding

shadows of bright clouds—

here among blue hills

I need a field guide to the light:

Ridge Light:  pale blue

tessellations caressing

the sinuous mountain’s spine.

Smoke Light: falls straight down

among the silent shafts of trees;

lights each dust mote rising.

Rain Light: shatters into droplets;

reflects the many colors of the soul.

Print it small on leaves

as thin as gamma rays

yet still its pages, numberless

as stars, would never fit my pocket

as I walk out among the waves

and particles of paradox,

the shards and shimmerings

that so accost the eye—

Brook Light: burnishes alike

the pool, the eddy, the fool’s gold,

and the seaward-running flow.

Light, Species Unknown: 

Emitted by dark mica

and the white moth’s wing at dusk. 

Penetrates the shut lid,

illumining the dream.

Written River Winter 2011

Along Aquohee Creek

In the syllabary

Sequoyah made

for his peoples’ tongue,

the marks that stand

for rivercane

look like letters spelling

Tao, the Way—

the way this relict patch

of rivercane still stands

shoulder to shoulder,

rooting the riverbank to home. 

The way the people

wove it into their homes,

their baskets, and their lives.

The way the cane,

when hollowed,

sent flying home the darts

fletched with thistledown,

and all the fluted

notes that echo

home to the hearts

still hidden here

among the sycamore’s

white bones.

The way the turkey hen

bustles in canebrake

and the meadow

runs with quail. 

The way the water

rings the heron’s leg

with gold and flows

downstream

like tears.

 Written River 2:2,  Winter 2011

Descent

Be prepared for darkness

to overtake you unawares,

from the heart of the white sky.

Think how it flows

down the dark mountain,

rubs out the rock face

with its broad thumbs,

erases the edges of leaves

and moistens the bark of the maple

with absolute color.

It closes the door of the clearing

without a sound.

Think how it seeps

into the pores of your skin

and strokes your clavicles

with the touch of fingers

caressing the strings of a harp.

And think how your body

must resonate

with unseen rustlings

and with the myriad questions

filling your bones like mist.

Pinesong: Awards 2009 (The North Carolina Poetry Society)

The Neighbor

“The most we can say is that

 the world is lila, God’s play”

                          —Huston Smith

The neighbor-lady’s mad.

They say her name is Lila,

but she always speaks in tongues.

Some days it’s beetles

that come flying off her tongue—

that tongue gray-green and curling

like the fiddlehead of a fern.

They put me in mind of Granny’s jewels

I pawned so long ago, them beetles,

the shine of their hard wings

so many colors in the lamplight.

They rattle loud as hail against the windowpane.

Other times she speaks nothing

but starfish and the house smells

of salt. They scuttle over the sandy floor

and under them wide blue skirts she always wears.

I don’t mind the butterflies—some purple,

and some with wings clear as glass—

but other days her tongue’s like pink elastic

and shoots out teeny frogs bright as sunrise,

only louder.               I never know

what she’ll be speaking next—

snakes or peacocks or some great beast

with tawny shoulders and a wild green eye.

It ain’t natural.          So I says to her,

I’m moving back to town—

I got to get away from the everlasting

clatter of your tongue.  She just throws

back her head and laughs

birds.

Earthspeak Magazine 9, Autumn 2011

Quantum Dreams

Waiting for rain at two a.m.—

not these paltry, separate drops

pinging one-by-one on the metal roof,

but the sleeve of heaven

sluicing away whole days of dust.

Longing for rain at three a.m.—

instead thoughts come,

pinging against the skull—

no clear distinction

between observer and observed—

the act of looking

changes that which is.

Peek into the void

and a quantum particle pings

out of its dreamy, wavy state

into the hard reality of time and space.

(Does it manifest, perhaps,

in the eye of a goose,

or in some feathered tentacle

waving in the sea?)

So the mind that watches

alters what is real.

Can mind-states, then, move matter?

The faith, say, of a Mother Teresa—

bone-hard faith with feathers

like a flight of birds—

can it cause Way to open?

Write down these thoughts

in darkness.  Use a quantum-quill

dipped in invisible ink.

Show no-one.

Rain begins at last.       

Anatomy & Etymology 1:4, November 2011

Lord God of Bread Dough

Pray to the lord god

of bread dough

that your life rise

like a new loaf

to be eaten warm

with plenty of butter,

salt or sweet.

Pray to the lord god

of bread dough

that when words

with tiny wings

on their shoulders

flutter like strange angels

out of the night air,

you have pockets

full of bread crumbs

to lure them

onto the white page.

Pray to the lord god

of bread dough

that you never

be caught listening

to the left side

of your brain

when the right side

is trying to tell you

something

known only to the yeast.

Pray to the lord god

of bread dough

that you stop needing

and start kneading

until your life

is firm and elastic

and does not stick

to anything at all.

Praise to the lord god

of bread dough

for unseen bubbles

that leaven this eternal flatness

into the delectable

multiplicity of forms.

Savor every crust.

Cipher

Braille lines on a dry leaf,

a scribbled epigram of ice,

the roots of trees in boldface underground,

and the doe’s bones—

knobs and facets written in the snow,

the lovely long articulation of the spine

hugging the dear earth—

a closing parenthesis.

But snow keeps falling,

each new flake

a word unspoken,

soft against the tongue.

 Avocet: A Journal of Nature Poems Winter 2008

At the Turtle Hospital

Great maimed beasts swim listing in circles,

weights glued lopsided to shells like rippled sand,

drawing them down toward lost

unreachable depths.

Rescue a turtle drifting at sea

and you earn the right to name it, like Adam,

though its true name be always

unspeakable mystery.

If ever I saved a sea turtle floating,

I’d name it, mother, for you—

and you’d laugh,

you who taught me it’s all mystery, all holy,

fish and the leaping, moonlit illusion of fish,

sea wrack and driftweed,

dark tides and the body

bathed in luminescence,

the least, lost creature drifting toward home.

You, who after the stroke swam listing through time

on half-blind limbs, shut out

of the silted sea cave of memory

until at last you dove alone

into the deep welcoming ocean of home.

 EarthSpeak 7, Spring 2011

Poetry Plum

I wonder who it is that names the colors—

those six thousand eight hundred and thirty-nine

hues and tints and shades, the possibilities of paint?

Who wraps and ties these splinters of the spectrum

in tidy packages of words—alchemy, nankeen, tassel—

packages that split and spill their rainbow

contents all across the Earth—lacewing, picnic,

charisma, quest.     I want that job.

Can I be paid in colors—impetuous, carefree,

frolic, rain? Colors would lap around my ankles—

rapture, bubble, nautilus—and rise buzzing into air

as clear as gambol gold—bee and butter-up

and nuance vanishing among the trees at dusk,

the deepening shades of oakmoss, refuge, lark. 

Slowly all the syllables of color leave the sky—

moonraker, lantern light, inkwell, stone

and sleep comes murmuring

the full spectrum of imagine—

enigma, daydream, ponder, soar.

Donors

The out-breath of trees

rides through seawater

on the beautiful

biconcavity of cells

traveling in their innocent

round back to my heart

until the needle prick

diverts them into the plastic

bag that dangles at my side

and silently fills

until the lever trips

to interrupt the flow—

which will continue

in the veins of someone

whose name I do not know

but who breathes

the same sweet air as I—

gift of anonymous donors,

the narrow veins,

the tiny silent mouths,

the myriad leaves.

          EarthSpeak 7, June 2011