A CELEBRATION OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR AND THE MUSIC OF THE DEEP SOUTH

Growing up in the deep South, I heard a lot of story-telling, on front porches, on the party-line, in kitchens, in beauty shops.   But the singing I heard (outside of church, I mean) was sung by our black neighbors and farm workers.  Background music, I grew up thinking of it, but when my friend, poet doris davenport, scolded me, saying, "We are tired of being background music for white people," I realized she was right, and more important, that I was wrong in thinking of that singing as "background music."  It was, as Evie Shockley sings in her poem, "a background in music. " 

On this day when we celebrate the life and words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I remember those voices, how their songs wove their way into my deepest self without my knowing it, and how I am still trying to learn how to harmonize with them.  

   Legato

.”..we sang everything there was to say.”

doris

                                             ---Evie Shockley

---a background in music  (from the new black, Wesleyan U.P.)

Evie

When the bell 

rang out noontime,

they lounged under oak trees
and drank from a mason jar

sweet tea    the taste

of a lemon slice lingering

at stovetops

and wash basins

cradles

and deathbeds

their voices kept

rising and falling 

like wind riffling 

cotton fields  

folding sheets

scrubbing floors,

spinning mayhaw juice

into a red thread

they were all the time

 singing

but we didn't listen

because it was backdrop

to what we sang

back ground

and ground back into

darkest leaf mold

that covered 

the root of our other

life     theirs

with which we never learned

how to harmonize.

Pembroke Magazine, 2012

With Doll, Patsy, and Lois, at a wedding celebration for Lois's son. 

NEW YEAR'S EVE, 2011

Roaming around the yard with my camera, I couldn't let 2011 go and had to photograph the sunset on New Year's Eve last year. The trees stood fast, casting their sarabande of naked limbs against the sky.

 I love how the sun hangs on, throwing all its passionate self into its leavetaking, especially on a day like this, pulling dust, clouds, all shades of the spectrum into its farewell.  The brush and limbs weave a tapestry, an embroidery needing no human handiwork.

The dogs at the door way wonder what the heck I'm doing wandering around in the near dark.  Have I found a cache of bones, a buried secret, an intruder to chase?   Why won't I come back in and scratch their bellies?

I think, too, of the friends we've lost over the past year, caught up now in whatever lies within this glorious light of leavetaking.  Patrick Morris, J.P. Holmes, my dear friend Elizabeth's son, too young to be taken away, Harriette's husband Don, Jean Pittillo,  Richard's Peggy, so many....
        
"Walk in the world for us, " they ask.  And so in this New Year, we set forth.

TO BLOG OR NOT TO BLOG

(Trees through the blue glass on my kitchen window sill}

To blog or not to blog, that is the question several of my facebook friends' posts.  Blogging uses up a lot of time, and in the midst of a busy life, not to mention in the midst of late middle age, I feel the urge to blog less than before.

  

Still, here it is, a clear sunny morning at the end of 2012, and I'm sitting in my easy chair looking out at the mountains.  And the trees.  The trees I watch every morning, noon, and evening as they settle into darkness, which now that the solstice has passed, will be shorter and shorter until in July I can look out my bedroom window at trees I dream of climbing, winding my soul around, as I drift off to an early bedtime.

    

 I've tried to write poems about this, the mountains and the trees framed by my windows.  "The magic of windows and doors," as my novelist friend Vicki Lane calls it.  The magic is in the calling. Come here, come here, our windows and doors beckon. Here is darkness falling, here is light rising up, here is your own face in the glass after dark has taken hold.  Your own face through which what is left of outside flows through just enough to haunt, to beckon to you.  Come inside yourself.

       

At the year's turn, we do that, whether we want or not.  Resolutions, what are they but an inner journey into what we believe we desire.  Fewer pounds, more friends, less moralizing and judging each other, including ourselves.  "Help me not to be so mean," a Flannery O'Connor character prays.  I pray the same, that the meanness that so easily seeps into everyday can be kept at bay.

       

Meanwhile the sun journeys across the clear sky, the bare trees shine like silver, and I sit here blogging my way through the short while before noon.
    
       Another lunch to prepare.  Butternut soup,
        turkey sandwiches.
       A glass of wine.

(Winter dawn through my bedroom window)

       Another year's window about to open.
  

A Sheaf of Christmas Poems

Going through old computer files yesterday, I found these Christmas poems, originally part of the manuscript that became BLACK SHAWL. I saw Mary in these pieces as being here in the NC mountains rather than being a young girl in Nazareth over 2000 years ago. The reader at LSU Press suggested they be dropped, that they functioned better as a small chapbook of poems to be published later. They've waited ever since. As well as I can remember, they were first printed years ago in a journal whose poetry editor was my friend Janice Townley Moore. The Georgia Journal, I believe was its name. Anyway, here they are again, two days before another Christmas. The photos come from sunsets in S. Georgia and holly bushes, as well as waxing and full moons, here in the mountains.

BLUE

is her color

because it was always the last

thing she saw through

her window before losing

count of the heddle’s

beat. Blue hem

beyond reach, she

dreamed herself

wearing it, skirt flaring

out of the narrow glass

where she saw turning

and turning her own image

till in a swoon

she might gather up into the blue

lap of heaven

the stars and the moon

as if they were no more than

the first fruits of May,

the wild strawberries

she loved to eat as she carried

them home to her table.

AVE

This wind!

She cannot hold her bonnet

against it and lets go

the sashes. A kite of blue

calico sails away over

the fields while a child laughs

and points at the spectacle,

blustery March making light

of her modesty till not a hairpin’s

left clinging, her heavy braids

tumbling like bell-ropes

around her. So here she stands,

skirt swelling forth in its manifold

emptiness, as if she’s come

to the edge of a sea

and hears far out a voice

calling, gull maybe,

though she lives nowhere near

water and she knows her name

is not BEATA.

OH MARIA, MARIS STELLA

what have we made of you,

when you were happy enough to be nursing

your baby, ignoring the tumult of heaven,

the scuffle of shepherd’s feet.

Wise men on camels meant little to you,

their frankincense, myrrh.

You could take it or leave it.

What good would it do you

whose only concern was the milk you felt

slowly beginning to thicken your breasts?

Or the worry that Joseph had not eaten,

you should have brought along more

of your grandmother’s journey-cake,

more of her dried figs and almonds.

No seafarer's daughter, you grew up

to quail at the stories of drowning men

merchants brought back from the sea ports,

for you were no braver than most women.

You liked to think of yourself as a drop

in the Lord’s deep and, save for a scribe’s

error, you might have stayed "stilla maris"

forever. You had no desire to be star

to whom mariners cried out

for centuries, struggling to grab

hold your sleeve as they’re sinking.

YOU SIT

looking out at the straggle

of sheepherders leading their flock

to the hovel where you are still groggy

from childbirth. You wish they would go away,

seek out some other to worship,

for you are too tired to look blessed.

But it is expected of you.

Now and for two thousand years you must

lift up your eyes from your infant

and hear us out, bearing

such words as could almost make you

believe you are beautiful.

JOSEPH

And what of you, Joseph? Still lost in the barn

shadows, stroking your beard

while the curious goats crowd about her,

as if they have already guessed who she is,

not just any poor country girl born

to the tending of livestock. When she calls,

you do not go near.

Is the sight of such bringing forth

more than you fear you can bear?

Not to mention her blood

and the odor of animal everywhere.

All night you stand in the dark stall knowing

your name never crosses

her lips. How much longer before you will go

to her, man enough at last to look

upon God in His baffling dependency?

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.