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.