POETS OF THE DAY: DEBRA KAUFMAN AND SUSAN M. LEFLER

The poems by Debra Kaufman and Susan M. Lefler weave together in all sorts of interesting ways, beyond the obvious. Both deal with family and grief, yes, but beyond that, their voices entwine stylistically and tonally. I'm pleased to feature their new books today and encourage you to order them, keep them side by side, and turn to them especially as night falls. Their poetry waits to offer up its riches in the silence of nightfall. Or the early morning hour when one stands with a cup of coffee looking out at the world, remembering Czeslaw Milosz's prayer from "On Angels":

day draws near

another one
do what you can.

Debra Kaufman has given much to the literary community in her part of North Carolina. A playwright as well as poet, editor, teacher, and enabler of other writers, she embodies what is most admirable in our North Carolina literary scene.

Debra's new book can be found at Jacar Press's website--www.jacarpress.com. Jacar promises to become one of the South's most important small presses.

• • We're Never Ready

    Here we gather,
    motley, at the wake.
    
    This one hasn’t had her roots
    touched up. That one’s stuffed
    
    into his best suit coat.
    One has black grease under his fingernails.
    
    Another teeters on too-high heels
    saying Jesus, Jesus—
    
    half-prayer, half-curse.
    We gather brassy,
    
    shabby, befuddled,
    to witness this body—
    
    yellow rose on blue lapel,
    fresh haircut, no necktie—
    
    his body without his laugh,
    his breath, the pain.
    
    

    Autumnal Equinox

    Sugar maples blaze at sunset;
    leaves swoop and skirt
    the chilling wind like chimney swifts.
    
    A boy leaps into leaves,
    calls to a neighbor’s Irish red,
    as light falls, a cat’s white shadow,
    
    on his grandmother’s lap.
    Her hands rest there,
    her grandmother’s hands,
    
    the same boniness of wrist and knuckle,
    dry fingers nearly flammable in the smoky air.
    She smells ripe pears
    
    and feels her body drawn
    toward the darkness that rolls in
    earlier each day.
    
    Heat and light retreat,
    and evening covers everything
    except the boy, whose hair shines
    
    silky silver light
    as he tosses armfuls of color
    upward, like sparks.
    
    

  

  Susan Lefler has been in several of my workshops, which means I'm by no means objective when it comes to her work. I've watched her grow over the years into a writer who knows her material and can work with it without flinching, asking the tough questions, lowering the windlass at the well, as Seamus Heaney has described the poet's growth. Her first collection, Rendering the Bones, comes fully rendered itself, a mature poet's voice reaching out to us.

  
  

  
  

  
  

  

  
  
  Charlie Hughes has made Wind Publications a treasure trove of some of the best poetry being published in the South. Visit his site--www.windpub.com--to view his catalog. Charlie is a fine poet himself and a longtime supporter of Appalachian and Southern writing.

  
  

  
  

  
  Rendering the Bones

  
  The trouble with grief,
  I think as I boil the bones,
  is that you grow accustomed to it.
  Empty space, where all you have left
  is old dry bones.
  
  At the rest home where my father lives,
  his neighbors pedal their wheeled chairs like
  little boats along the halls, their eyes empty
  as hooked fish. These old ones know
  dry bones don’t live.
  
  Against her shriveled breast,
  an old woman clutches her plastic doll,
  touches its cheek and croons to it.
  Her reedy cry follows me down
  the narrow hallways of our loss
  
  where I hear her again,
  as I stand at my stove,
  clutching my mother’s spoon
  in my hands,
  rendering the bones.

  
  
  

  Analysis of a Perfect Storm

  
  

  
  

  The eye where the wind lies quiet

  must be round and smooth as silk pajamas

  
  

  and very, very still, and those who stand

  in its center must rest in its infinite

  
  

  curve as if held in the arms

  of a mother while outside, the wind

  
  

  gathers. There must be a pupil

  in that calm eye to watch in all directions

  
  

  as winds build toward their dead intent

  and the pressure drops. No holy habitation

  
  

  here, no safety net, no freedom for the guest.

  Trapped in a hospital cube, I listen

  
  

  with my parents to steel voices

  while one hope after another collapses,

  
  

  sucking our breath. Outside, the wind

  picks up again and my father stares transfixed,

  
  

  rehearsing escape routes

  even as water rises and the eye

  
  

  passes over.

  
  

POET OF THE DAY: Linda Parsons Marion

Linda Parsons Marion has been a friend for many years, though I see her rarely. Her new book titled BOUND has just been published by Wind Publications, Charlie Hughes's fine press in Kentucky. Linda's poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Cornbread Nation 2, Negative Capability, Nimrod, Potomac Review, CALYX, Helicon Nine, Atlanta Review, Poet Lore, among others. Her work was nominated for a 2006 Pushcart Prize, and she has received two literary fellowships from the Tennessee Arts Commission, among other awards. Essays and poems have also appeared in The Movable Nest (Helicon Nine Editions, 2007), Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia(University Press of Kentucky, 2003), Her Words: Diverse Voices in Contemporary Appalachian Women’s Poetry (University of Tennessee Press, 2002), Sleeping with One Eye Open: Women Writers and the Art of Survival (University of Georgia Press, 1999) and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III: Contemporary Appalachia. She lives in Knoxville with her husband, poet Jeff Daniel Marion.

(Cover art by Suzanne Stryk)

Birthmark

High on her luscious thigh, we point
to the map of our corner of the universe.
Faint and violet, a nebula yet unprobed
by the world’s curiosities, we are drawn
to its small burst, star rising in the east.
We’d lasso it to earth if we could, fall
prostrate in awe, shouting glory, revolve
elliptical around the blue-hot core, let brilliance
shoot from our fingertips. Now she crawls
out of reach, xylophone and spinning top
her planets to conquer with flags of grasp
and drool. When her legs lengthen, taper
to womanhood, will this constellation fade,
our worship unmarked, will our wanting hearts
look up and remember this brief heaven?

Sprout

The gardener I never reckoned on, she sows
with the fire of a zealot—rows cowlicked
in garlic, snow peas fence-latticed, mounds
studded gold—my daughter bends to earth’s
pure bidding. She’s living up to her baby name,
called Tater for the sun-brown quickness on nose
and arms. She means to mine these coffers
for yields unborn, sequin the counter with
a gracious plenty. Her reach is the surest we know,
to feed and be sated, even as she nurses
a sprout on her belly’s milk, all of us waiting
for the fruit made flesh, for the muskmelon
to twirl its sweet mouth in pearlized clay
yearning toward first harvest.

THE GIFT OF POETRY FOR THE HOLIDAYS: Janisse Ray's " A House of Branches"

Before she became the acclaimed author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Wild Card Quilt and Pinhook, Janisse Ray was a poet, a calling she has never abandonedd. Nor has it abandoned her. How heartening, therefore, to see her first love given its full-throated voice in Waking in the Forest! These poems are indeed about waking up, looking around at the world, and discovering how to live within it. Often they seek relationship with that world, speaking to the birds, for example, and begging of them, "Oh kinglet, Oh oriole/tell us what you know.” Janisse Ray know show to listen to what our world has to tell us, and she knows how to transform that listening into language that kindles our imagination, which after all desires nothing less than to be utterly alive in our landscape. “No matter how rich/we become, or old,/ or unable, won’t /some part of us desire to weave/a basket in which to forage/the last of the grapes? “ the poet asks. Ray’s poems weave for us such a basket. They show us how to gather and cherish the things of this world.

To order this book, go to Wind Publications, where Charlie Hughes, poet and editor, runs one of our best regional small presses. Or for a signed copy, order directly from Janisse Ray, 895 Catherine T. Sanders Rd., Reidsville, GA 30453. $16 for paperback, $27 for hardback (includes shipping.)

(Janisse Ray talking with my brother, Charles Stripling, at the Joseph F. Jones Ecological Center in Baker County, Georgia)

Riding Bareback Through the Universe

The earth does not move steadily,

spinning at one speed through the heavens,

but with the motion

of a wild stallion at full gallop

across a painted desert,

which is sweep and fall, sweep and fall.

The earth is waltzing.

Its cloud-tail streams behind like a comet’s.

Not only the earth. Every heavenly body

once thought steady, plodding even,

flings itself along with senseless joy.

In the sky an ecstasy of stars

stampedes through the universe.

You and I ride standing

on the back of earth,

feet firmly planted, side by side,

our love for this life

so thunderous and billowing

so wild and powerful

we finally understand celestial motion.

Around us thousands of leaves

leap up and down on their stems

and summer flowerheads

surge with the wind.

Field Guide for Wildlife Clinics


The goshawks in their cages
do not wish to hear recordings
of the boreal forest, a particular
longing of wind in aspens, calls
of saw-whet owls and the skitter
of red-backed voles in leaves.

Nor do broken-winged warblers
in wicker baskets desire the
piped music of eastern deciduous
slopes in late spring, exaltations
of redstarts and thrushes, a honking
of cranes like sky-flowers.

Nor record for the swallow-tailed kite
staring with one good eye
the relief of waves lapping a beach
after migration, purl of dolphin, yaw
of curlew and boat-tailed grackle,
wind arranging black needlerush.

There is no returning.
Better to play Nina Simone, oh
children, go where I send you.
Or Van Morison, Etta Mae Baker.
In your own room, broadcast
swamp-moans while you sleep.

Secret


I know where
the ribbon snake
lives--
under the maple
by the barn.
One day when I
was there
a dead leaf
crackled like fire
and I saw her,
slip of green
I followed
around the waist
of the tree,
through already
dying grass.
When she turned
to face me, eyes
burning, she
studied me.
I -- wanting
to feel her softness,
her certainty, the stove
of her tiny heart –
touched one finger,
only one,
upon her perfect tail.
At that moment
the tree opened
and she wound
inside,
passageway
dark and narrow.
Long before
I turned away,
no doubt,
she lay
on her mat of earth
at the bottom
of the maple,
among the roots,
strip
of brilliant
kindling.

Boat Ride at Wakulla Springs

By lying about the fare and hustling them

past the ticket counter, we hoodwinked

our parents onto a flat-bottomed boat

that circles the Wakulla River.

They preferred a flea market, they said,

where you can take something home, until

the river wrapped its arms around them

like sleepy children. Disappearing sun

struck wide across the swamp, alligators

on high tussocks. Moorhens with scarlet

beaks scuttled among swaying grasses,

unchaining great pearls of apple snails.

Our father, on and off his feet, praised

the deer, anhingas with wings outspread,

water snake draped through wild roses,

gray log knotted with seven Suwannee cooters.

Wood ducks parted the blue pickerel-weed.

Turkey vultures, readying for night,

lowered by the dozens in easy loops, knitting

a black curtain slowly through the cypress.

When the ride ended, it was true.

We walked off the boat empty-handed.