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.

Adrienne Rich came here a few months ago courtesy of the Bankhead Visiting Writer’s Foundation and the University of Alabama. She spoke her lines of poetry to a packed theater in the middle of this mid-sized southern city. Even though the event was free to the public, I found it difficult to believe that there were that many people here who would devote an evening to hear a poet.

The performance was somewhat marred with sound problems that were mostly worked out after a couple of poems. She sat on stage and read a variety of her works, emphasizing the newer poems. Unfortunately, she did not read, “Diving into the Wreck”, the first poem that introduced me (and many others) to her. I am choosing to share parts of that poem here; the entire poem can be found at Poets.org.

Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich
(excerpts)

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
. . .

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.
. . . .

Adrienne Rich’s poem has always had the ability to transport me into the blue and black water with her. Her lines allow me to know that it would be okay to enter this space awkward and untutored. The rhythm of the poem is sometimes fluid like the environment she describes and sometimes broken, perhaps to reflect the difficulty and loneliness of the descent to the wreck.

The words written and spoken by Ms. Rich continue to have the ability to transport the reader/hearer into the difficult place, where breathing does not come easily and the tools that are carried may not be the ones most needed.

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

I came across a video on YouTube by U2bianSynic that uses music, video images, and Adrienne Rich reciting this poem. I hope you enjoy it.