Rain!

This morning when I woke up and looked out my window, there was a blanket of fog over the mountains.



The Tuckaseegee kept unrolling its gray cloth underneath the drizzle. Can you see it?



And the trees looked soaked, scrubbed, ready to be transformed into an artist's watercolor.



Poor ole Bro, however, had no artistic ambitions. He simply wanted to be let inside!

Adam Zagajewski: from Another Beauty

(Cats sunning themselves on the rooftop outside our hotel room in Budapest.)

I've been reading the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski's essays again, finding in their refusal to be corralled by thesis, theory, or theme a way into a poet's life, his history and "sensorium," a word that fascinates me. I salute his devotion to the physical world, what goes on beneath our notice so much of the time--the dirt under our feet, the air moving around our bodies, the animals sliding secretly along their paths apart from us. Here are some sentences from his Another Beauty, a collection of essays.

"There was something mysterious in the way that the earth and things existed, avidly and intensively. They seized each moment, exploited every opportunity, if only to enjoy, in a lazy, catlike way, the July heat or even November's drizzling rain, the crackling dry frost of a February night. They cynically agreed to every minute of the year, every change in the season or the weather, if only they could keep on being. Anything is better than the nothingness that so preoccupies the modern philosphers. No, the earth and things had no use for nothingness; their interest lay with clouds and rain, the enthralling progress of nights and days. Steel bridges stretched blissfully each time the temperature rose, wood balconies creaked gently, as if to say "You, people, keep right on murdering one another, but you'll have to forgive us for staying on the sidelines, for steering clear of those ever-changing theories to which we pay no heed. Our task is far too serious for us to mind the fickle temper of the times; we, things, are reallity's roots, we are the pillars of being. We've got no use for young literary critics with their irony. Long duration is our fate and not the short-lived nuptial flight of fledgling poets... ."

LETHA

LETHA

Now when she weaves,
she weaves everything blue
and not only because blue does
not reveal earth’s stain
as homespun left unlaved by larkspur
or indigo will. She keeps blue flowers
boiling all day in her dye-pots,
the bubbly-blue sap
of her fleece turning darker
and darker till she sees the Deep
churning under his ship
as he told it those nights
when his words held him close
to her, whispering he was the only
survivor. He flung his tales wide
as fishing nets in which she finds
herself still tangled, hearing
him liken her eyes to the harbor
lights leading the seafarer home
to a fair woman’s bed
where the coverlets
she has unwound from her loom
bear the blue names
he taught her to say like a charm
against doubt. She repeats
whem with each shuttle’s throw,
knowing someday she’ll sleep
under all Seven Seas of them,
sleep as the drowned women
he liked to sing about sleep,
having sunk so deep
into the blue,
blue repose of forgetfulness,
they need have no mortal
fear of the bottom.

--KSB

First published in Shenandoah: Appalachian Writers Issue

South Georgia Sunsets

Sunsets on the coastal plain can be magnificent. Although we had rain for a couple of days while I was visiting my mother last week, there were some sunsets worth capturing--and playing around with on my computer. Here's a blazing red one just outside the backdoor.



This "green sunset" could be dawn and not dusk.



My favorite? A blue sunset, with all the poetry and melancholy that this image conjures up in the imagination. Sunsets on the plains have always called to me,closer, come closer. Or Stay still. Stop breathing. Wait. No doubt that's why I respond so strongly to Cindy Davis's paintings. (See post before this one.)

DESCENT: My new manuscript

My new manuscript has been printed and is ready to send to the editor at LSU Press. I've already decided on the cover, if LSU chooses to accept the book. You can see it above, Cindy Davis's TOTEM GHOST, acrylic on half inch gallery wrap canvas. It's 23"h x 23" w, and I have just made arrangements to be its owner!

Here's a poem to go with it.


DOWN



When the telephone rang,
I was brushing my hair
in the bathroom and squinting
my eyes just enough
so my face in the mirror
looked almost like those
on the covers of Seventeen,
distant and dreamy,
the dogwoods and
pear trees in flower,
the windows wide open,
my mother’s voice suddenly
crying out, gone,
almost gone, and the door
slamming after my father
whom I can still see driving
too fast, as always,
down that sandy road
to the house where my uncle
lay dying, my mother
forgetting to turn off
the oven as she grabbed
the keys to our Chevrolet,
flinging back one last
command, which I tried
to obey, standing there
at the edge of the known
world, my hands holding on
to the fence stretched
alongside the highway,
while I watched the swollen
sun that I knew nobody,
not even Jesus, could
talk into not going down.

from WAKE, a chapbook published by Spring Street Editions.

SOUTHERN FICTIONS

I suggested a few days ago in a response to Vicki Lane's comment on NIGHT FISHING that I might post a poem a bit darker than the earlier ones, "Night Fishing," and "Glorified," from my new manuscript DESCENT. This is the first poem from my sonnet sequence titled SOUTHERN FICTIONS. It first appeared in CALLALOO: Confederate Flag Issue.

Southern Fictions

...human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

My father drapes his battle-flag across
a backroom window. If I tried to tell
him why I wish he wouldn’t, I’d have hell
to pay. Or else I’d end up sounding crass
and smug. It’s just not worth it. Let it pass.
I squelch my fury at this flag and all
it means, the stubbornness, the pride, the gall
of my own people trying hard to pass
the buck, as if what happened never did
exactly, or even if it did, it doesn’t mean
what “they” think: something awful-- racist swill
and all that liberal junk. I know the truth hid
out those days in silence, but, what does it mean,
this flag? Refusal to admit our guilt?

NIGHT FISHING

(Flint River)

Goodness gracious, I've had such great responses to "Glorified" that I think I'll post another one from my new mss. This is titled "Night Fishing" and I think some of you may have seen it before. I had fun with this one, too.



NIGHT FISHING

I bait my lines
with the scent of old planks
rotting over the muddy Flint
River where drowsy snakes
coil in the rushes and lightning
bugs fizzle like spirits
of nightcrawlers nibbled
by minnows. No catch
in my throat but this aching
to wade into lazy black water
and stand all night long
in its leavetaking, calling
the fish home to Mama.

(first published in STORY SOUTH)

GLORIFIED

Here's a patch of a poem from my poem quilt pages. I'm longing for petunias on this gray day.

GLORIFIED


Whenever I praise what she’s brought forth,
whether biscuits or chicken stewed all day
with sweet corn and gumbo, my grandmama says, "To God
Be the Glory." But I tell her I don’t mess around
with an old man who’s so far away he can’t hear me.
I’d rather be talking to petunias that bloom on her porch,
or the bathrobe she wears when she’s making
the coffee, her toes while she’s sleeping in front
of the t.v., her big mouth that’s snoring.
To you be the Glory, I say, feeling
so brazen this morning, I dare God
to give me the finger. “Go scrub out
your mouth,”she scolds, but I see her smiling.

(first appeared in the NC Literary Review)

A bit feisty, but I don't think God minds a little feistiness now and then, do you?

A PATCHWORK OF POEMS

For the past few days I've been assembling a new book of poetry, titled DESCENT, tenatively titled, I should add. Who knows how a manuscript might change over time and revision? Most of the poems are done, though I hesitate to call them "finished." Was it W.B. Yeats who said, "A poem is never finished, only abandoned"? Or was it Thomas Hardy? Whoever it was, let's say this is a manuscript of abandoned poems.

Right now it looks more like a quilt in the making--- pages of poems in various arrangements, spread over the bed.



With room for a dog or two, of course. Muddy paw prints illustrate some of the pages.




I'm still fiddling with a handful of poems and no doubt I'll ditch a few of them before the piecework is completed. Then the final print-out, one more read-through, something I always dread. Have I been fooling myself all along that this book is ready?

Is each individual poem as well-made as this quilted hotpad displayed on my kitchen wall?




Even more important, is the whole quilt of poems as eye-catching, as rich with imagery as this quilt on our dining room wall? I found it years ago at the Hambidge Center Gallery in Rabun Gap, Georgia.



When I can answer yes to these questions, I will consign the manuscript to the U.S. Postal Service.

Then the long wait will begin.