Notable Books by North Carolina Writers: January, 2006

James Applewhite and Jonathan Williams

As a new year begins, the phrase "ring out the old, ring in the new" keeps nagging at me. I don't want to ring out the old at all. I want to keep the old always in clear sight, especially our older poets who have done so much to prepare the way for our emerging poets, whether as teachers, mentors, or influences. These are the voices that will continue to resonate in North Carolina literature, no matter the year in which we find them.

This month we feature two of our most enduring voices, Jonathan Williams and James Applewhite. Both have recently published volumes surveying their careers across decades, from their early work to the present, and both will help us ring in another year of showcasing and celebrating North Carolina poetry.

             -- Kathryn Stripling Byer

Selected Poems, by James Applewhite

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005, www.dukeupress.edu

To learn more about James Applewhite's life and work, click here.

Visit with Artina

She lives in a house whose color is bone left out
In the weather, over-lap siding gone pallid as wood ash.
A sheen condenses out of the air on the polished grain.
Three little ones, their hair braided up in corn-rows,
Flock at her skirts, touch hands to her knees for comfort.
She is seventy, rake-handle thin, her shanks are bowed,
Her hip is troublesome ("some days I jes can't go");
Peculiar highlights luminesce on her cocoa skin.
Her hands are white inside, and shape whatever
She says in the air, or touch her three to be good.

"That ten dollars a week I used to get -- I was study'en on it
Yesterday. I raised Joseph, Bernice, Wilma Doris, and theirs,
An they didn't never go hungry, we always had more
Than cornbread and greens 'a sett'en on the stove" (lives
Of collard greens pile high in the room) "I did it, Lord,
And now I feel good, jes like the little birds 'a sailing
In the air" (her fingers are bones for believable wings).

"Back when I worked for your folks -- I felt burdened down,
Like everybody else was higher." The right hand hovers
Over the left, in a different world. "For three years I dreamed
This dream, when I got down sick. It was all a dark cloud."
One palm wipes the air full of darkness over
The plastic flowers, the brown-earth sofa. "And a great crowd
Of people. They was troubled, trouble was among 'em.
I was to lead 'em, I was among 'em but I was apart.
I walked in the middle between 'em but I was far off."
Her hands have quarried cloud-pillars from the troubled air.
"An so I could get 'em there, he gave me a star."
One sure finger, in all the blue spaces of her room,
Picks out this point, maybe floating lint or a sungrain
Alone, places it, a star, in the middle of her forehead.
"An my mother, an my grandmother, what was Mothers in the church;
I 'scerned 'em on a hill, a way off." Her palms smooth the air,
She makes white robes with her palms. "I 'scerned 'em on a hill."

"These were the words that were give me: 'by the grace of God
I shall meet you.'" The house of her skin is strangely sheened,
Like sky-reflection polishing boards, or color
Rain water has caught from the air, in whatever low place.

January Farmhouse

Snow on ground and
Brown weeds above: patches
Like fragments of dinner plate
Where sun brushes clay.
The washboard wall is in shadow,
Holds skim milk light
The way a bedsheet hung out to dry
And catch cold's cleanliness
Gathers sheen from the sky.
The white boards appear
Translucent, like a woman's skin
When she is old and left alone
The January afternoon;
Seem translucent with enclosing
Light I see through an upstairs window
Collected in a dresser mirror;
Or see from glimpsing
Through front and back windows,
All the way through those rooms,
Through this still afternoon
In her life and back into sky,
Where sun slants clearly
Without clay, or broom sedge,
Or skin to make rosy, there
Where wind's too thin to be seen.

Foreseeing the Journey

The fan inhales one continuous breath: through
This upstairs room I am lying awake in, foreseeing the journey.
This creek, this street, this one row of houses, diagram Town.
As simple as the world. As air and light. Old birthplace.
Tomorrow we'll go with the current, canoe around snags --
As I guide my son through the thicket of childhood --
Past moccasins uglier than the Biblical serpent.
Passion-flowers as in Rousseau's jungles.

This four-bladed beating, as of great hawks crossed,
Sucks moths from their flight, with light's
Exhalation, draws foil-glint wings from the corn.
Its rumble surrounds me. Our bungalow lifts off, zeppelin
With roof, shadow more angled than a biplane bomber.
I seem Huck Finn visiting a house on the flood.
Books from around me hover their pages. With Zane Grey
And Edgar Rice Burroughs, presents bobbing up like helium
In the attic -- my Christmas models in a loose formation --
I fly in the flock of these presences, owls with the heads

Of dead relatives, the photograph of my mother's brothers
Sailing in the ghost wind, until the huge cry they feel
Becomes one with the wailing of the fan,
This rest what I can do and no more fear.

Almon who told me the Cyclops' blinding
Looks so beautiful there, delicate of feature, shy
With sister, ignorant of the years of high school teaching,
The loneliness to come. But not consumed
By my mother's weeping, for all who have died,
Her father Mercer's fall under his buggy,
I fly in this house and its history
As in Lord Greystoke's plane above the trees.
Would any of us be born into the world
If we had it to do over?
Through this sleep of the unborn and of spirits
The propeller tom-toms a message.

The attic fan in this window, ill-designed,
Dangerous, great blades unshielded, drive belt
Exposed to the unwary night walker,
Put in by my father in jack-leg fashion
Like everything down east, by him who lost
His fingers to an air compressor belt,
Seems the risk of all living. I'm flying too high
But in the dawn light chill I reach down
To find a blanket green as leaves.
I pull up the jungle over my body.

Southern Voices

If you understand my accent,
You will know it is not out of ignorance.
Broom sedge in wind has curved this bent
Into speech. This clay of vowels, this diffidence

Of consonantal endings, murmurs defeat:
Caught like a chorus from family and servants.
This is the hum of blessings over the meat
Your calvary spared us, echoed from an aunt's

Bleak pantry. This colorless tone, like flour
Patted onto the cheeks, is poor-white powder
To disguise the minstrel syllables lower
In our register, from a brownface river.

If it sounds as if minds were starved,
Maybe fatback and beans, yams and collards
Weighed down by vitamins of wit, lard
Mired speed, left wetlip dullards

In cabins by cotton. But if bereft
Of the dollars and numbers, our land's whole
Breath stirs with its Indian rivers. Our cleft
Palate waters for a smoke of the soul,

A pungence of pig the slaves learned
To burn in pits by the levee. This melon
Round of field and farmer, servant turned
Tenant, longs for a clear pronunciation,

But stutters the names of governors, Klan
And cross-burnings, mad dogs and lynchings.
So ours is the effacing slur of men
Ashamed to speak. We suffer dumb drenchings

Of honeysuckle odor, love for a brother
Race which below the skin is us, lust
Projected past ego onto this shadow-other.
So we are tongue-tied, divided, the first

To admit face to face our negligence
And ignorance of self: our musical tone
Of soul-syllable, penchant for the past tense,
Harelip contractions unable to be one.

Light's Praise

Light which is being in the world
        while others aren't, how you strike
the leaf, which frost has thinned like skin
        (translucent to your probing, veined),
my thought still tender with the wound of
        what is not and what is yet. Light,
in my years left in the sun, let me rise
        within excitement, knowing, like a body
from a dive, breaking surface continually
        toward your pinpointed velvet,
your early coming to dew and birdsong.
        Harp me, responsive to your praise, permit
my lips, through your returns, to speak an
        awareness -- extending to farthest stars,
from tissue of leaf lit green within.
        Light, existent from the start, not to be
extinguished by my or anyone's exit, circle
        on yourself, oh self-subsistent seeing, await
new leaf to illuminate. Infuse my doubt,
        glow in the sphere of your nature.

Grandfather Wordsworth

You remembered waiting for the horses that would
        bear you to the death of your father―the day
tempestuous dark and wild, your companions
                                 a single sheep, a blasted hawthorn.

Reinventing this proleptic sorrow, you knew
          the hanged murderer, a woman with pitcher
on her head, garments vexed and tossed
                                 by a wind of visionary dreariness.

This intensity sanctified loss, lifting violet by
           a stone into poetry. On Grasmere peaks
you climbed near stars, fathered yourself from
                                                the living nothingness past hearth fires

and language. You hated Robespierre,
                learned guilt, knocked sense into the gilded diction
of your day with "Sir Patrick Spens" and Coleridge's Mariner.
                              Your voice spoke familiarly to me

from a school anthology. The scenes your words
          had painted moved, I knew from inside it another
climate and time. You inspired my first few poems―
                                 you and the good doctor Williams.

Next year, walking to Grasmere felt lonely
          and free, sunshine thin in late summer. Stephen
Gill at the museum outlined your favorite walk,
                                William, with Dorothy: away from

Dove Cottage, around the lake, over a small mountain,
        and back. When I looked down from that peak
on Grasmere Lake, I felt complete. Words in my inner
                                hearing spoke. Ancestors moved,

their moods raged and ranged in rain and
        blown mist. Grandfather Wordsworth, your wind
hit with sleet mixed in, rattling my poncho
                               with a blast out of Scotland.

Wandering wherever it blew me I faced into ice,
          seeking the highest place, a farther pasture --
clambering stone walls, forcing my steps through
                              gorse that pierced my socks

toward the tarn with sheep like wooly boulders.
             Clouds gone, rainbow over, I covered a scrawny
hemlock with my sky-colored poncho and walked apart―
                                the wind then drying it, flickering it

into blue flame. The name then streaming my breath,
             William, held your name and my wife's
against the Atlantic distance. This banner
                                of desire carried me to Liberty's

for a William Morris fabric, then to Windsor where I
             purchased the antique scuttle, once too dear
as we'd admired it, together. Casting love into these things,
                                I winged with the quick days home.

The scuttle shines today on our hearth, worth more or less
             as we remember or forget. Men were immortal
and omnipotent, Shelley whispers, if Intellectual Beauty
                                haunted us in permanence.

Did he ask if my gifts could recompense
             my wife for loving her intensely in absence?
We met at the airport, William, our embrace
                                like Eve's and Adam's, after.

Jubilant Thicket: New & Selected Poems, by Jonathan Williams

Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005, www.coppercanyonpress.org

To learn more about Jonathan Williams's life and work, click here.

Five Trail-Shelters from the Big Pigeon to the Little Tennessee

1. Davenport Gap

the tulip poplar is not a
poplar it is a magnolia:
liriodendron tulipifera.

the young grove on the eastern slopes of
Mt. Cammerer reminds me
of the two huge trees
at Monticello, favorites
of Mr. Jefferson;
and of the Virginia lady
quoting Mr. Kennedy:

the recent gathering of
Nobel Prize Winners at the
White House -- the most
brilliant assemblage
in that dining room
since Mr. Jefferson
dined there
alone...

a liriodendron
wind, a linodendron
mind

2. Cosby Knob

DeWitt Clinton (besides
looking like Lon
Chaney on tobacco-tax stamps)
comes to the eye
in clintonia borealis --

of which fair green lily
there are millions
on this mountain,

it is a mantle
for fire-cherry, yellow birch,
and silver bell

3. Tri-corner Knob

here the shelter's
in a stand of
red spruce and balsam fir

for dinner: lamb's-quarters,
cress from the streams
on Mt. Guyot,
wood sorrel, and
cold argentine beef, chased with
tangerine kool-aid

4. False Gap

no Schwarzwald stuff,
keine Waldeinsamkeit,

no magic grouse, no
Brothers Grimm -- just
Canadian hemlock, mossed and lichened,
like unto maybe
Tertiary time...

too much for a haiku?
you hike it and see

5. Silers Bald

just in front of the
round iron john
in the beech grove

the fresh bear droppings
give you

something
to think about

Dilmus Hall, Who Assures Us He's Been Right Here in the Flesh
for about 4004 Years One Way or Another, Delivers Some Gospel:

you have eyes
outside
and eyes
inside

your heart
is full
of eyes

to communicate
you put the two
together

amen!

The Ancient of Days

would that I
had known Aunt Cumi
Woody

C-u-m-i, pronounced
Q-my

she lived in the Deyton Bend Section of Mitchell
County, North Carolina many years ago

there is one of Bayard Wootten's photographs of her
standing there with her store-bought
teeth, holding a coverlet

she sheared her sheep, spun
and dyed her yarn in vegetable dyes,
and wove the coverlet

in indigo, the brown from walnut roots,
red from madder, green from hickory ooze, first,
then into the indigo (the blue pot)

Cumi, from the Bible
(St. Mark 5:41)

Talitha Cumi:
"DamseI, I say unto thee, arise!"

she is gone, she
enjoyed her days

Three Sayings from Highlands, North Carolina

but pretty though as
roses is
you can put up with
the thorns
             Doris Talley, Housewife and Gardener

you live until you die
if the limb don't fall
             Butler Jenkins, Caretaker

your points is blue
and your timing's
a week off
             Sam Creswell, My Auto Mechanic

The Hermit Cackleberry Brown, on Human Vanity

caint call your name
but your face is easy

come sit

now some folks figure theyre
bettern
cowflop they
aint

not a bit

just good to hold the world together

like hooved up ground

thats what

Daddy Bostain, the Moses of the Wing Community Moonshiners,
Laments from his Deathbed the Spiritual Estate of One of His
Soul-Saving Neighbors

God bless her pore
little ol
dried up
soul!

jest make
good kindlin wood
fer Hell...

Three Thefts from John Ehle's Prose

every night
the possums climb higher
in the persimmon trees

*

a red pumpkin
in a row of yellow pumpkins
in a field

*

better' n
a creek
fulla syrup

Mrs. Sadie Grindstaff, Weaver & Factotum, Explains the Work-
Principle to the Modern World

I figured
anything anybody
could do a lot of I
could do a little
of

mebby

Aunt Creasy, on Work

shucks
I make the livin

uncle
just makes the livin
worthwhile