THE GIFT OF POETRY FOR THE HOLIDAYS: Julia Nunnally Duncan's AT DUSK

One of the great pleasures of being a writer in North Carolina is the literary community that helps introduce us to each other. I've known Julia Nunnally Duncan for many years, discovering her work while a reader for Appalachian Consortium Press. That discovery was Blue Ridge Shadows, a collection of short stories. I was so impressed that I contacted her, after which we became literary "sisters," so to speak. Julia has studied with Lee Smith, among others, and has published several collections of fiction. Her poetry, however, is what I'm celebrating today--her second collection of poems titled AT DUSK. Several of the first poems in the book seem appropriate for this time of year, especially the one about a wood stove! This would make a good winter-time gift for yourself or one of the readers on your holiday list.

(Julia Nunnally Duncan at Malaprop's Bookstore last December, after a reading with Cecilia Woloch and me. She read poems from her recently published book, below. )

Please order from Old Seventy Creek Press at http://oldseventycreekpress.books.officelive.com/Julia.aspx. This small press is located in Albany, Kentucky.

Utensils

I polish the utensils

one at a time—

knives, forks, and spoons

emptied today

from my mother’s kitchen drawer.

Forgotten fork, long-pronged

and mismatched;

I didn’t want it put

beside my supper plate.

What difference does it make?

my mother asked through the years,

but I still refused to lift it to my mouth,

sure that it would taint

the taste of the food.

Floral-patterned stainless steel implements,

bought through the decades

at the Roses Five and Dime;

and tarnished silver plate pieces

that were saved from my grandmother’s set

or unearthed when the garden was plowed—

all have waited to be caressed by me.

I finger the years

with a cotton cloth:

clean, rinse, and polish,

till I conjure my inverted image

in the spoons’ embrace.

Wood Stove

In my mother’s kitchen

I sit near the wood stove,

shying away from other cold rooms.

Here she bakes biscuits

and boils pinto beans

and dries her hair

at the opened oven door.

In my early childhood

before the luxury

of a finished bathroom,

I took my baths at the wood stove:

buckets full of cold water,

kettles full of hot

that steamed as she poured them

into a galvanized tub,

the water cooling too soon

in the shadows of a winter evening.

It seems I am always drawn back

to this embrace of heat;

and as the pine wood hisses

and embers glow,

frost lacing the windows early tonight,

I sit at the wood stove,

close my eyes,

and enjoy.

Volare

In some woman’s Ford—

I can’t remember exactly whose—

I slouched in the hot back seat

and nibbled warm Swiss cheese from a grocery bag—

too hungry to wait for dinner.

My mother and the driver sat up front talking

while the radio blared Volare.

Now—

forty-five years later—

when I hear that song,

I taste the waxy blandness of Swiss cheese

and feel the heat of a summer day.

I am a child again,

set apart in a stifling back seat,

hungry,

impatient to get home,

bored with the unintelligible

talk of women.

Roadside Stable

The Appaloosa gelding at the roadside stable,

where a tourist could get a trail ride for two dollars,

was too weary to care where the trail guide led us

and too bored to buck when I nudged with my heels

its bony sides.

I thought to canter would be impressive

to the acne-scarred boy who led us into the woods

on his buckskin mare.

But he never noticed my posting,

or the new black boots I wore,

or the riding crop I’d gotten at Sears—

my English style so wrong for my Western mount.

The guide wanted only to get us back

to the dusty gravel parking lot,

where my father and mother waited,

impatient to drive on to Cherokee.

POET OF THE DAY: JULIA NUNNALLY DUNCAN

Julia Nunnally Duncan has been a friend for many years. Her work came to my attention when I was on the reading committee for the Appalachian Consortium Press and found her story collection Blue Ridge Shadows in my hands. I liked it so much that I contacted her after the selection process. We've been in touch ever since. Julia was born and raised in WNC. Her credits include five books: two short story collections (The Stone Carver; Blue Ridge Shadows); two novels: (When Day Is Done; Drops of the Night) and a poetry collection (An Endless Tapestry).

She has completed a second poetry collection At Dusk and continues to write and publish poems, stories, and personal essays. Her works often explore the lives of the unemployed, the socially outcast, the lonely. She lives in Marion, NC, with her husband Steve, a woodcarver, and their eleven-year-old daughter Annie. She studied creative writing at Warren Wilson College's MFA Program for Writers and teaches English at McDowell Technical Community College in Marion, NC.

English Leather Lime

The rectangular box was stored

in my parents’ dresser drawer,

kept perhaps to hold loose change

or sales receipts,

too small to be very useful

but well enough made

of light soft wood

to make my mother think

it too important to throw away.

I pulled it from the drawer

while looking for some high school memento

from my cheerleading days,

and opening the box and holding it

to my nose,

I thought I caught the smell:

a citrus scent evoked

by the illustration of a lime

on the green label:

English Leather Lime.

The cologne the box once housed

had belonged to my brother

forty years ago.

I recognized that scent

in 1969

when the handsome

seventeen-year-old boy—

star of a rival basketball team—

passed through my parents’ front door

on a November evening.

It was my first date,

and I was afraid

to sit alone in the living room with him,

so my mother stayed close by

in the kitchen

while he courted me.

On our second date, though,

I savored our closeness

as we sat in his car

at our town’s drive-in theater

and awaited the film Thunder Road.

The speakers crackled B.J. Thomas’s

Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,

and when rain suddenly began to fall outside,

we looked at each other and smiled.

When the movie started,

he scooted closer and

coyly rested his dark head

on my shoulder,

his lime cologne mingling with the remnants of my

Love’s Fresh Lemon Cleanser.

He might have kissed me in a moment,

but when he reached to turn the ignition key

for heat and windshield wipers,

the engine would not start.

After that, he rushed around,

some tool in hand,

tinkering for a minute under the hood

and then trying the ignition again.

His efforts were useless, though,

and as if to admit defeat

he finally called his father

and then mine—

a courageous move indeed

since he was supposed to have taken me

to our warm downtown theater

to see Kurt Russell starring in

The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes.

When my father did drive up

in our red Mustang

to rescue me,

I never heard goodbye

from the boy

who huddled beside his father,

their heads bowed under the car hood,

both of them soaked and shivering

in the December rain.

Lady in the Truck

Lady in the Chevrolet truck,

parked beside me at Wal-Mart,

I can tell by the way

your blonde head leans against your window pane

and your side presses into the passenger door

that you cannot get far enough away

from the driver.

I know by the angle of his head,

the way his dark tangle of hair

shakes when he shouts at you,

that his anger couldn’t wait

until he took you home.

What are you thinking

when you peer out of the grimy window?

Do you take to heart

this man’s hard words?

Do you hurt when his fingers squeeze your arm

to make you listen?

I can see by the way he looks straight ahead now,

tight lipped,

leaning to start the ignition,

that though his rage is not over,

he has spoken his mind.

I see by the way your head is lowered,

your hand covering your face,

that you do not want him

to spy your pain.

You are a young woman still,

and though I can’t discern your face,

I know it is a face

that another person could love.

Your mouth could smile at a lover’s whisper;

your eyes close at a caress.

Yet more so I know that

tonight when this man

pushes his body

close to yours

in your sweltering bed,

his voice calm,

cajoling you back,

you will look at him

and hope that his words

won’t be so cruel again,

that his love might be

worth your faith.

LADY, by Julia Nunnally Duncan

Julia Nunnally Duncan at our joint reading at Malaprop's Bookstore in December.

Julia Nunnally Duncan is both poet and fiction writer. I "discovered" her years ago when I sat on the reading committee for Appalachian Consortium Press and read her manuscript of stories entitled Blue Ridge Shadows. It was haunting work, and I contacted her about it. (It was later published by Iris Press.) We've been friends ever since. Julia's latest book of poetry An Endless Tapestry (March Street Press) was one of 3 finalists for NC's Roanoke-Chowan Award and received a great review in the 2009 North Carolina Literary Review. She has published several collections of stories and a novel. To learn more about her and her work, go to http://www.topsail-island.info/wordpress/index.php/nc-authors/julia-nunnally-duncan/

Julia sent this poem to me after learning of my blog invitation for work about beloved animals.

Lady

The wildlife worker found her
deep in the winter woods,
a front leg clamped by a hunter’s steel trap,
the bone nearly severed,
snow her only sustenance
for the two weeks that she was caught.

He named her Lucky,
and the veterinarian’s record
made before the amputation
listed Lucky as her name.

We had named her Lady
a couple of years earlier
when we found her at the abandoned house,
cowering inside an outside toilet,
her basset hound mother already
dead from a neighbor’s bullet,
her sisters and brothers either killed
or dead from malnutrition.

Lady’s face was malformed—
a face only a master could love,
we would later tease.
At first too weak to hold her head up,
she let her muzzle hit the ground—
bonk—
every time she tried to lift it.
I braced her head
so that she could drink the water
she had thirsted for.

But after a few weeks of living in a cardboard box
on our front porch,
the shocking mass of roundworms
purged from her puppy guts
and her white gums soon pink with health,
she began to play.
And her speed
as she darted around our steep yard
would shame a greyhound;
her appetite proved phenomenal.
One Thanksgiving after she had filled her belly
with turkey and dressing and mashed potatoes
(her favorite dish),
she lay in the yard to rest,
but still barked at the leftovers
that tantalized her.

That later winter
when she went for a walk in the woods
and didn’t return,
I called the city dog pound
and cried as I described Lady—
black and white basset-beagle mix,
jut-jawed, big brown eyes—
hoping the dogcatcher might have picked her up
and still held her alive,
fearing he might say I’d called too late.
But he had not seen her.

And then after many torturous days
something happened:
a dog was mentioned
in the lost and found section
of our local newspaper.
I called the number and
spoke to a wildlife man
who had found her.

But I have bad news,
he added,
and told me about her lost leg
as if I wouldn’t want her anymore.

Lady lived with us many more years,
as quick a runner as ever,
and died at seventeen and a half
during a hard, cold winter,
when icy mounds of snow
piled around her backyard dog house.

She spent her final days in our basement, though,
near the woodstove.
We wrapped her in a quilt
and tended to her
as we might an elderly parent.
She suffered from incontinence,
had stopped eating—
her jaws locked—
and her eyes,
long past seeing,
had turned a cloudy blue.
It seemed her luck had run out,
or maybe it was a blessing
that the end was near.

When Lady passed,
my husband played a song on our stereo—
In the Arms of the Angels—
music that gave him comfort
and that he wanted to give to Lady
to send her safely away.
But like my mother who doesn’t want to hear
The Old Rugged Cross—
her mother’s favorite hymn
that was played at the funeral,
I have only to detect the first notes of the
Sarah McLachlan song,
and I change the radio channel.

It’s not that music that I want to hear
and remember Lady
as she was on her final night;
but rather I would like to recall
the bright sound from years earlier,
of her baying
at the Thanksgiving scraps,
annoyed that she couldn’t hold
one more bite.

Reading with Friends this Weekend

Mary Adams


I'm looking forward to this weekend when I get to read with three friends--Cecilia Woloch, Mary Adams, and Julia Nunnally Duncan. On Saturday Night, Cecilia, Mary and I come together at City Lights in Sylva to flaunt our new books. Mary's Commandment is hot of the press at Spring Street Editions. An NEA Fellow in writing, she saw her first book, Epistles from the Planet Photosynthesis, published by The University of Florida Press.

On Sunday, December 6, 2009, Malaprop's Bookstore/Café (55 HaywoodStreet in downtown Asheville, NC) will host poets Kathryn StriplingByer reading from ARETHA'S HAT: INAUGURATION DAY, 2009; Julia NunnallyDuncan with AN ENDLESS TAPESTRY and new, unpublished poems; andCecilia Woloch, author of CARPATHIA.

Julia Nunnally Duncan writes both poetry and fiction. She has
previously published two collections of stories and a novel, and her
second novel, WHEN DAY IS DONE, is just out from March Street Press.
Her Appalachian poems have appeared in scores of literary journals,
and her first published collection of poetry, AN ENDLESS TAPESTRY
(2007), was named a finalist for the 2008 Roanoke-Chowan Award for
Poetry. She recently completed the manuscript for a second collection
of poems, AT DUSK. Rob Neufeld, book columnist for The Asheville
Citizen-Times, wrote of Julia Nunnally Duncan that she is one of four
Western North Carolina "poets to watch." He remarked that her poems
"make the greatest possible use of line breaks, so that individual
phrases glow like haiku observations. Metaphors develop naturally and
emotionally." In a recent article in North Carolina Literary Review,
Jeffrey Franklin observed of AN ENDLESS TAPESTRY, "Duncan always makes
the place solid, the people real, the situation, in all its emotional
complexity and perilousness, rendered with a deceptive simplicity that
quietly resonates. . . .[Her] people are as recognizably human as any
in Shakespeare[.]" Like our other readers for December 6, Julia
Nunnally Duncan is at once a dedicated writer and an experienced
teacher; she has served as a full-time English instructor at McDowell
Community College for nearly two and a half decades. At Malaprop's,
she will read selections from AN ENDLESS TAPESTRY and from her
manuscript, AT DUSK.

CARPATHIA is Cecilia Woloch's fifth poetry collection. Published in2009, it went into a second printing about two months after itsofficial publication date. Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-winningpoet, has written of CARPATHIA, "The poems . . . are guided by anexquisite lyricism and heartbreaking emotional honesty. . . . This isa gorgeous book by a poet who is passionately alive in the world."Cecilia Woloch has traveled widely and taught just as widely, offeringpoetry workshops for children and adults across the United States andin several locations abroad. She serves as a lecturer in creativewriting at the University of Southern California and is foundingdirector of the Paris Poetry Workshop. The recipient of numerousawards for her writing, teaching and theatre work, in 2009 alone,Cecilia Woloch has been recognized as a finalist in the CaliforniaBook Awards of The Commonwealth Club of California for her 2008chapbook, NARCISSUS; as a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize inPoetry at Nimrod; as the first prize winner of the New Ohio ReviewPrize in Poetry; and as a Fellow at the Center for InternationalTheatre Development/US Artists Initiative in Poland.
Please join us in welcoming three distinguished poets on December 6,and begin your holiday season with poetry!

Poetrio: Kathryn Stripling Byer, Julia Nunnally Duncan, Celia WolochSunday, December 6, 2009, 3:00 p.m.Malaprop's Bookstore/Café55 Haywood StreetAsheville, NC 28801(828) 254-6734http://www.malaprops.com/