North Carolina Poet of the Week

How I have always envied those large bouquets of roses being carried out of the florists' shops on Valentine's Day! Each year I long for one, so why not, this year, make my own bouquet -- of poems not roses? Poems last longer, after all, and their words linger longer in the memory than the hot-house blossoms sold in florist shops and supermarkets. Our bouquet of poems gather together the many manifestations of love, from the whimsical to the sublime, with a lot of variations arranged in between.

Robert Watson indulges his attraction for a drugstore clerk, for example, and Dede Wilson, in a delightful use of traditional quatrain, urges kisses and more kisses. Laurie Capps, in a poem that echoes the aubades of the troubadours, writes of her last night with a beloved old dog, while Julie Rowell celebrates her love for her brand new baby. Love of place adds color to our Valentine bouquet, as well. Debora Kinsland Foerst turns to the Hungarian writer Miklos Radnoti's poem "I Don't Know" -- his hymn of love for his beleaguered country during World War II -- as a model for "I Do Know," her love poem for her Cherokee home. Bill Duvall confronts the things that get in the way of love, and Chris Vierck charms with his little Valentine song. Gibbons Ruark writes to his wife one of the loveliest love poems we have in contemporary American poetry. Here also are poems for daughters, for mothers, for love waiting to happen and love interrupted, for the way light falls on the skin of the beloved. We don't have a love poem to chocolate, though. Maybe next year!

Here's February's schedule:
January 30 - February 5: Ron Rash
February 6: Kathryn Stripling Byer
February 7: Michael White & E. M. Schorb
February 8: Juanita Tobin & Phillip Shabazz
February 9: Robert Watson & Banu Valladares
February 10: Laurie Capps & Julia Rowell
February 11: Fred Chappell & Ruth Moose
February 12: Bill Duvall & Chris Vierck
February 13: Debora Kinsland Foerst & Sally Logan
February 14: Gibbons Ruark, Dede Wilson, & Michael McFee
February 15 - 19: Sally Logan
February 20 - 26: Robert Watson
February 27 - March 5: Tanure Ojaide

Be sure also to click Notable Books by North Carolina Writers for a sample of poems by this year's winners of the North Carolina Writers' Network's Randall Jarrell/Harperprints Chapbook Prize. All poems posted on the Council's web site in February, as those for previous months, will be collected on the first day of the month that follows and posted here. I hope this feature brings both pleasure and illumination. Enjoy! -Kathryn Stripling Byer

February 10, 2006: Laurie Capps & Julia Rowell

My Last Night with Chloe

Against this hollow evening, her head
grows heavy with a love I can barely
hold. Solemn as a stone's breath, all day
this love passed quietly between us,

folding into her soft ear, then tucking
under my sweater's worn arm, and now
riding along the gentle sway of her spine
as she moves off the couch, into the kitchen.

Still believing in miracles, she watches
each bite of biscuit and ham moving
to my mouth, and lifts a paw of age-yellow
nails, foot husk-rough against my thigh,

as though I could forget her hunger.
The dishes empty for the day and candle-
flames pulled into smoke, she stretches,
becomes a snakeskin sloughed away, lost

along the dusty carpet by the window.
Her blood barely moves to the grey squirrel
grooming on the wet walk outside, her voice
mossy as an old fence, no longer hard

with the crack of chopping wood. Later,
as I lift her, lay her in the comforter's crumpled
down, she rises on legs like knotted grey wool,
collapses on my pillow, and the night is full

again, I have all this: her cracked nose pressed
to my palm, and the arc of her white-dusted tail,
shot with the stars of twelve good years, curving
towards the pull of her constant, tired dreams.

Laurie Capps was raised in western North Carolina and is a 1996 graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She returned to the Raleigh area four years ago, after stints in Boston and Monterey, California. After surviving a varied work history, which included jobs as a nanny, factory worker, hospice volunteer, mental health counselor, and freelance writer, she decided to pursue the writing and study of poetry full-time. She counts herself lucky to have the support of two poetry critique groups, the Chapel Hill-based Poet Fools, and the Greensboro-based Bare Rock Poets. Laurie hopes to continue her career in an MFA program this fall. Her work has appeared in Tar River Poetry.

Red Look

My littlest Valentine
wakes prematurely
from nap, not even awake,
he is in that empty place
between sleep and wakefulness,
with that unsettling wild-eyed look.

Blinking at the stranger
he slowly recognizes
and smiles.

Julia Rowell lives in Durham, where she writes poetry and teaches third grade. She is co-host of the daily poetry blog MOM AND APPLE PIE. Work by the poet has appeared in the Birmingham Arts Journal and in the January, 2006, issue of Verse Libre Quarterly.