Pacific Forest by Robin Gross
Introducing Devreaux Baker
The poems are spare, tactile and textured. They hover between worlds: “I do not know why the ghost of the woman from the pueblo // visits me,” the poet confesses. Her task, she discovers, is to journey to that “core place // where bone meets spirit,” “the other side of air,” through time and “beyond knowing.” What the poet brings back from such shamanic journeying heals as well as instructs us. In her fifth collection, Hungry Ghosts, Devreaux walks us into the valley of loss and grief, bearing eloquent witness to the ravages of environmental degradation. She counters destruction with a piercing attention to Nature and a largesse of insight that deepens into wisdom, and a prayer so that we might “open each day/ /into its own beautiful mystery.”
I encourage you to read more of Devreaux’s beautiful poetry at your leisure. In the meantime, please settle back and enjoy the magnificent poems from the American West that she has selected for this summer issue of Persimmon Tree.
Introduction: Thirteens Poems and More
Healing
pungent, medicinal. A million sticky buds
damp with rain, dropped by wind, trod
by deer, mingle with river air and pine bark,
a tonic for healing.
Walking the dog
at day’s late end, breath clouds my sight
in the faint light of headlamp. Each step
a crunch of gravel or hush of grass, bathed
in humid perfume.
How long in the mist
until I’m saturated?
How long in this life
until I’m healed by what I love enough
to notice?
What the Godmothers Told of Origins
native tongues – these are cell tissue
to us. Paradox is in our marrow
just as ghosts live in the scaffolding of our bones like
native tongues. These are cell tissue:
foxfire on the downed white pine. Our ancients live
just as breath lives in the bellows of our lungs like
wind is-and-inhabits sky.
Foxfire on downed white pine, our ancients live
wings tucked in after celestial navigation, real as
wind is – and inhabit sky.
Herons and fish fly, touch down,
wings tucked in after sensory navigation, real as –
to us – paradox is. In our marrow
herons and fish fly, touch down –
distant lands close to home, foreign voices, native tongues.
A Musical Interlude
Evangeline Benedetti, cello
Pedja Muzijevíc, piano
Allegro
Largo
Allegro
Largo
clothespins
not the sepia
feeling of the apartment
my grandma lived in where
light was a silent thief
dust particles its calling card
she stood at the second floor window
mouth full of clothespins
my two small hands
lifting the wet laundry
out of the basket
piece by piece
our offering to the sunlight
wedged within the courtyard
a sanctuary of light and air
straining to fill the rectangular
kitchen window
her small frame bending
her hands sculpting
lasagna and manicotti
ricotta cheesecakes
and warm chestnut pies
the history
of other offerings
hung across the decades
of Tuscany
held in the lips
of clothespins
fluttering stories
in reds yellows and greens
white blue sheets billowing
filling streets
with their late afternoon shadows
We Hear Our Old Ones Singing
though we live miles apart.
Today we dig.
We gather in a house on McKay Creek.
The woman who will lead us feeds us
pancakes and eggs and juice. We climb
into cars and drive where koush blooms
blooms yellow against wild grass.
We point our diggers. Our leader
sings a prayer song. We dig.
Our fingers grow stiff with cold.
We fill our bags, drive on
for bitterroot. Again, we point
our diggers. Again, our leader sings.
Deer gather on the canyon rim above us.
Our Old Ones are with them. We hear
their prayer song on the wind.
When our bags are full we drive
to the Longhouse. The men drum
and sing as we bring the roots in.
Later, we eat. We laugh.
Such a good day!
A woman mentions the deer.
We hear their song again
Wai’olena
Not the sweet milky ponds, safe for babies
behind the wall of boulders.
This is raw: the thing itself, agitated
by a storm somewhere in the Pacific.
It clears the sludge, old despair caught in bends
in the pipes. Once those pathways are open,
they can always be opened.
“Don’t go there,” is not an option.
Do go there, with purpose.
Yearning is not emptiness.
It is full of the wealth
Of seven decades on earth.
Texas Blubonnets, by Teresa Fasolino
When the Universe Brings Us Back
(A villanelle)
We could fact-baste past years, but instead,
we arrange my scraps of denim and fleece,
and quilt friendship hours with memory’s thread.
Analyze friends, teachers and what was said,
sew your corduroy and wool centerpiece.
We could fact-baste past years, but instead,
discuss choices and how the years have fled.
Stitch your tweed, my linen – a period-piece,
and quilt friendship hours with memory’s thread.
Remember kibbutzim and your hard bed,
join our satins and percales – find release.
We could fact-baste past years, but instead,
we sew in ten kids and things left unsaid.
Your blue bay and my desert offer peace,
to quilt friendship hours with memory’s thread.
Our patchwork becoming a watershed,
binds my lace, your cotton – an altarpiece.
We could fact-baste past years, but instead,
we quilt friendship hours with memory’s thread.
No Fast-Forward or Rewind
of power outages in the thousands. Darkness, eerie sound, space time.
There’s this daily war with finding a different spatial perspective:
altered research, distortion of scientific analysis, a race against time.
Like an addict chasing the dragon, my friend scrolls through
Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and FaceTime.
Time may change me – Bowie’s cranked-up voice
drifts from a passing car – but you can’t trace time.
Some days drag harder than others. All his life he’s felt
anxious about the sluggish pace of time.
She lets her hair go snow-white, nibbles dark chocolate with caramel
and sea salt, sips a robust cabernet. Her motto – embrace time.
The shape of the soul is a square and weighs twenty-two ounces
but never appears on an X-ray any place, any time.
Not all wounds heal. Not Parkland, Pittsburgh.
Not Sutherland Springs. Some won’t erase with time.
After my husband’s death, I walk through solar systems before finding
an underground labyrinth, a circular path I follow to retrace time.
Skunk Cabbage
where the creek gathers itself
into the plenty of a pond.
I was minding my own business
on a path through dark woods,
when I saw their light-filled bodies
standing in order along the stream.
In the green noise of a new spring,
they beckoned me like Van Gogh’s butter moons,
their lanterns the only light in a dank swamp.
The breeze flared a pandemonium of odor.
I don’t suppose anything loves them,
except perhaps flies and beetles.
But what could be better at this fraught time
than these golden bodies?
They rise in stiffness through the mud –
upright stalks, a red spike in a gilded wrapper.
Enormous leaves.
I’m on my knees before them
in this empire of damp. Monarchs of dark,
sovereigns of stench, I worship their giant leaves.
What She Saw
Georgia O’Keefe Museum
Taos, New Mexico
In the last room, this last work she painted
on her own, as her eyes’ maculae blurred
blue to grey, shifting what she saw toward
the edge of sight… she’s laid six bands
of paint across the canvas – black below,
then deep blue, blue-violet, a lucent
blue, dappled blue to crest… but mid-
strata, just above mid-point, she’s let in
a thin horizontal wake of white. Glim
that might be paint. Or canvas left bare
to hint. Making your unknown known
is the important thing, she said, and
keeping the unknown always beyond you.
My sightline’s blocked, I edge closer, seek
to enter her space, to find a way to anchor
shapes with names. Beach, slipping into
ocean. Tide. Night sky. The work offers
nothing but that white streak, light that
floats or closes in her field of blues.
I can’t say which band in these borderless
borders could be one sure horizon,
must surrender to what she saw. Not
equivalence. Not aperture. What she saw
was hover.
Pacific Driftwood by Robin Gross
Gendermandering
by Carol Barrett
my father died, then my mother, I give way,
re-surfacing in memory, their final apartment,
my last birthday with the two of them.
Just this once he chooses not to tell the story,
how the doctor relayed it doesn’t have a handle.
Mom always shushed him. She miscarried
before I arrived. He insisted it was a boy.
She said too early to tell. Still, I could have
been a son, had I come along then, and lived.
So I have not been a boy, twice, for him.
My father would have had a younger brother,
but it was a blue baby, tiny body in the basket.
He hated funerals. Didn’t make me go
when his own father died. Told the rest
of the kids just get in the car. Now I follow
the prepared route, the exit in Olympia
for Highway 101 to Shelton. Arriving at the cabin
in the woods, where I am called to write,
I can’t get the thermostat to work. Could a son?
When my father wanted to correct me,
he would say hey, Boy. I finally announced
I’m a girl, don’t call me that. But some
grief-born map has been guiding my place
in this world. Whenever roll is called,
I speed ahead, pleading just who I am.
Party of One
she whispers to the tuxedoed maître d’ who initially
frowned at her being unescorted, party of one
when someone wants to borrow the empty chair from
her table-for-two she acts unpleasantly surprised
says sorry, but no, smiles only with her mouth
after turning her head for a quick look at the doorway
as if expecting a friend, she gives full attention to
rearranging her silverware and linen serviette
since she can’t draw curtains like they do around a patient
in a hospital, she affects a much-practiced posture of what
she hopes passes for haughty self-assurance
no matter how much attention she gives to buttering the
warm bread, she feels the quick looks of curious eyes
and signals to the headwaiter for her water to be refilled
and exhibits silver tea-service decorum dining alone
in the presence of an empty chair across from her
public persona, the company she prefers.
The Current that Language Makes Visible
basic building blocks that we rely on
to hold fast: twelve constant pronouns,
the two binary articles, and all the lovely
adverbs firmly, articulately, consistently
telling us how to speak, or run, or laugh,
the rational beauty of regular verbs,
the majesty of conjugation, the bafflement
of those mavericks is and was and has been,
will be, would be, could have been, and oh
the glorious persons, places and things
to choose from at any given moment,
an invisible word mall in the brain,
every brightly-colored object a word
with its own thumb print, its denotation
and its smudgier print, connotation,
from which you are free to choose
once you’ve got them on the shelf.
And yes, they do a bit of shape shifting
while you’re looking away, and you have
to get used to new arrivals: Ms., cisgender,
cyberspace come sailing in just as thou
and peckish and bumbershoot stumble
out the door. But the foundation blocks
remain, keeping us safely speaking
to each other intelligibly, writing sticks
and dots and curves that mean specific,
such specific things, the green lantern
by the carved oak door on Sargasso St.,
and though body language is indeed
a marvelous thing, only words can say
This is what I want you to know.
This is where and when. This is how.
Poems by Devreaux Baker
Horse Sanctuary
of the horses at the horse sanctuary.
Each one in their stall waiting for the
footsteps of Ruth, bringing food at dawn.
I think of all the strangers who have come
to stand by their sides, some with
heads bent as if in prayer,
some with hands reaching out to stroke
a neck or touch the small place
that is velvet between their nostrils.
Last night the Buddhist monk said
we are stumbling through this darkness
with our hands outstretched to the light
of compassion, that swings like a lamp
just ahead, guiding us home.
She said let go of fear, keep walking
forward. The horses lift their ears
when someone new enters their field
and then they move to greet a stranger
as if to say, I was new once, frightened and alone
wrapped in great darkness. But this is a safe place
to lay your past down, receive the outstretched hands
of strangers, listen for Ruth’s footsteps at dawn.
Bios
One fine poem after another and then surprise! a musical interlude. I love the cello!
I enjoyed all these poems so much!! Thank you poets and editors for your good work. I already receive Persimmons emails.
these poets have taken the images from their past, my past and your past, tossed them out into the world where they whirled and danced into my heart giving me breath to go into the future unknown as it is