Amputated Moon

I pulled Judy Jordan’s “Carolina Ghost Woods” off my bookshelf again tonight. It’s a cold and clear here in the deep south and Jordan’s poetry called to me in the wind. “Carolina Ghost Woods” was first published in 1996 by Louisiana State University Press, and Jordan writes that she submitted this book for three years as a “first book” before it was awarded the Walt Whitman Award in 1999.

I found Jordan’s book in a small independent book store in Eureka, California. The cover art drew me to the book but it was the poetry that caused me to actually pull out my wallet. The first poem, “Sharecropper’s Grave” sets the tone:

The night is hoot owls, wind-whistled flue, babies bundled in burlap.

Breath of another child, mid-gasp.

The alliteration causes the reader to shiver in the cold and continues throughout this poem:

Small holes, secret graves,

children scattered around the iron fence.

Not even a scratched stone. . .

The night full of cries they will never make.

To read the title poem,“Carolina Ghost Woods” is to travel into the mythos of the south, to hear what the dead whisper,

When the leaves shudder to the muddy ground

and snow under the gutters puddles red,

when the bird lifts, the rabbit shivers in clumped grass

and the fox shrinks into the bramble,

when the shadow crosses the pitchfork’s broken handle

and the hinges of the shed door rust,

let me believe someone is there.

Each poem in the book reveals another story from Judy Jordan’s life. They are woven together to bring the reader through the death of her mother and the violence of being on the streets, homeless. Ms. Jordan joins the reader in this journey with her breath and voice and we walk the ghost woods together.

A Taste for Falling

Maybe it was the cold pulling through darkness stippled on darkness,

washing the world loose so I walked untethered,

floating above the frost-traced stubble of corn

in the trembling night to the rock-ledge above water.

If there was a moon, it fell from my hands

into the wild flowers we call white tears,

fell through nights textured liked dreams.

But there was no moon.

Only me hungry enough to peel bark from birch trees,

aware always of the river’s slosh and drift,

aware always of how the slightest movement

swallows you in cold’s toothy grin.

. . . .

Buy the book or find it in your library. Settle down with a fire in the fireplace and the lights dim, read “Caroline Ghost Woods” from start to finish . . . you won’t regret it.

The ocean is a hand-hammered plate

from my grandmother’s corner hutch

smooth, dark pewter-gray

I run my fingers along the rim

out to the horizon

Pamela Olson, 3/05