The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by A CLOSER LOOK: Betty Adcock
Betty Adcock’s voice—self-possessed, memorable, original—sings through such glorious images as these:
Late June spins a thickening twilight, birdsong threading needlepoint through the weave of heat and lengthened shadow. [from “Backyard: Evening Variations”]
and
Beneath iced bush and eave, the small banked fires of birds at rest lend absences to seeming absence. [from “January”]
Her voice no doubt owes some debt to several particular sources: certainly her origins in rural east Texas, its rolling hills and deeply wooded landscape, and the mild twang and musical drawl of its spoken language; her long relationship with the jazz flutist, Don Adcock, her late husband of more than fifty years; and her self-education as a poet—no BA, no MFA, no PhD (“Except for one class—with the wonderful Guy Owen—I have had no teachers. I never spent time in wonderfully seedy bars or cafes with like-minded souls—some of whom may actually have published something!”). For Adcock, “Controlled freedom, as in mainstream jazz, is what interests me.”
Betty Adcock is the author of seven books of poetry. She’s
won two Pushcart Prizes, the Poets’ Prize, the North Carolina Medal for
Literature, the Texas Institute of Letters Prize for Poetry, the Hanes Award
from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and Guggenheim and NEA fellowships. She’s
taught at Duke and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. For a number of years, Adcock was Writer in Residence at Meredith College.
In her poems, she hopes “to tell the truth and find that it is music.”
Read more about Betty Adcock:
A Selection of Poems by Betty Adcock
from Widow Poems
(Jacar Press, 2014):
The
Widow’s House
seems to be coming apart—pieces Everything floats as if gravity has
left the place. It’s not
from Slantwise
(LSU Press, 2008):
Roustabout
I was twenty-two, pretty maybe. It was a small town county fair: hot dogs, freak show, cotton candy, and heavy wheels laden with light, all tuned to the gaudy air.
The Octopus—remember that one? Eight arms like extended girders, the thing was a metal Shiva juggling worlds: a cup spun at the end of each madly oscillating arm, every cup overfull of squealing kids or lovers drunk on the whip-sharp unexpected torque toward the expected rapture.
He was maybe twenty, bare-chested, tanned and gleaming in the southern September night, a kind of summer in the lights that played across him as he pulled levers set to arm the bright contraption with speed and plunge, with whirl and rise. His hair was almost red in the lights’ translation. Not many riders yet, when suddenly he leapt onto one of the metal arms in its low sweep and rose with it. And laughed.
I thought it might be for me, this showing off. He jumped onto the next arm as it rose, went up with it, then landed easy on the ground. He vaulted the lowered ones as they went by, stepped up again, and down again, then ducked under so a steel arm grazed his cap. How long ago it was. How long did I stand and watch that wild control before I turned to find my husband and my child?
He’s likely dead now. Or deep asleep in some wine-dark room, some ragged dream. I think no golden years follow that life, though I still see him shining new against black sky and turning stars— chancing it, taking on the monster, winning, dancing it.
Backyard: Evening Variations
Late June spins a thickening twilight, birdsong threading needlepoint through the weave of heat and lengthened shadow. The thrush’s madrigal, rilling silver along the rising dark, stitches summer’s flowers on the long train-whistle’s dopplered ribbon.
The long train-whistle’s doppler ribbons tiger lily’s going day, blood-rust zinnia, sunflower fringes troubled with finches. A cardinal chips as if at granite-colored cloud. To what island do they go when the world is out of light?
When light is gone, where do the birds go? In full night, all green leaves disappear— only the birch trunks vivid, as if moonrise brought an errant winter to snatch them bare. Watch how the sun goes raveling down waves of suddenly brilliant clouds, drowning
all that is not cloud and color. That’s when the vanishing speak their exit: towhee’s torqued query, bluejay’s final quip, the thrush’s braiding-downward fountain ceasing. Now the bat’s high notice warps and wimples. Now fireflies prophesy.
The one loom fabricates, again, the stars.
Housekeeping
We bought a roofed box for birds. They never came. We nailed it higher in the oak, and got for tenants one dark, unspecified snake,a bat the color of cinnamon, and finally, a flying squirrel with regular habits. No wings unless you count the squirrel’s gliding skin or the bat’s leather. The snake, of course, was earlier.
In another house I was learning never to quarrel with means of ascension. Let rise whatever will, in whatever way is possible. Or several.
Barrier Islands
Skirts or the continent, ruffled in heavy pavane or sand and tide or frenzied in capriccios of gales, can sometimes tear like lace in the turns as of dancers wearing the wind, wearing the moon.
Salt-drenched beloved of the hurricane, their drift is longer than the sea’s step in, step out; partners the storm but answers no augur. Edgy, we say, or something new. Cutting edge, we say.
This power’s like the slow velocities of art, shape-shifting stillness, all time in motion, all motion trying to be form.
from lntervale: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press, 2001):
Better than Brancusi. Nobody has ever made an object stripped that bare. —Picasso
After the Fall, after the plummet from pliable green and lambent shadow, all impression of the garden vanished. Imprints of blossom and fruit, entangling vine, leaf and animal and bird in their once and perfect forms— these have been excised. Exile has pared this image; implement and need have come
And the mild, vaporous dawn that could not die is lost. Lost, the life on which wild world engraved itself, blunt kinship with beasts and stars in that before where bloodshed daily was unconscious and undone.
Not yet begun: the known, our waking dream, labor of time and the mistaking mind. Soft Minoan frescoes are not quite imagined. Inconceivable the Attic art that will be born in grace and die diffused in ornament. Languages, philosophies to be caught in the nets of possibility, faiths and wars and kingdoms—none is yet.
Luminous, seeming to be made purely of tenuous light, this figure clasping its own form is born altogether of earth that has given such reflection again into our hands, a charm, a grave conjecture thin as the new moon.
This candle we may bear as we have done before into the sepulcher.
January
Dusk and snow this hour in argument have settled nothing. Light persists, and darkness. If a star shines now, that shine is swallowed and given back doubled, grounded bright. The timid angels flailed by passing children lift in a whitening wind toward night. What plays beyond the window plays as water might, all parts making cold digress. Beneath iced bush and eave, the small banked fires of birds at rest lend absences to seeming absence. Truth is, nothing at all is missing. Wind hisses and one shadow sways where a window’s lampglow has added something. The rest is dark and light together tolled against the boundary-riven houses. Against our lives, the stunning wholeness of the world.
Sister, that Man Don’t Have the Sting of a Horsefly
However, woman can never be a poet. She is a muse or she is nothing. —Robert Graves, The White Goddess
But doubling’s a specialty among us. She looks from my mirror, that other’s face nobody suspects me of.
Part of the light in my eyes, blind Texas sun I grew under, color of brass, her face is loud as a street band as flat. I know how it feels standing behind the “Eat-Here” counter in the bus station, still as flypaper, waiting for the next one. She’s that kind of weather, never taking no and never going far, lighting up one after another.
The bastards don’t bother her, wanting that brassy light she’s got, wishing she’d get out of theirs or at least take one of them home before she marries a plumber. Years she’s been mopping up after babies and truck drivers. Nothing they say surprises her.
Topsail Island
January absolves the village. Summer left no flags. I’m living just now alone in a room on stilts. Whatever silts this way is what I’ve got.
It’s clean. Even the fake flowers left behind on a porch step are stripped of pretension. They bloom no-color, original plastic.
Perhaps I am here to practice.
Surely at night these houses break and sail on perfect silence into the world’s dreams of vacant houses. Then we all move in, without even a lamp or a suitcase, until the morning’s drydock light establishes them again, crooked and empty on their bad knees.
Miles under a blue sun, sand in my shoes, my heavy parka on: this is the way the child whispered I’m the only one. So many swimmers pulled away from my hands. Not one of them reached back. I’m learning the stroke, stroke, afloat and purposeful along these paths following a windful of gulls and grackles.
For now, the island’s mine, talking a cold tongue blue, the light shot through with birds. The stretch of script behind the tide I’ve got by heart, though every day a new translation lies down in the clarity of salt.
The shells are millions of new doors, all open. In the dunes where long grass bends to trace every tick and tock of wind, the dead dry fast. Beak and crabclaw hold what can be held. The tern’s dropped flightfeather knows its own weight at last. Like this I mean to weather.
To My Father, Killed in a Hunting Accident
R. L. S., 1904-1974
under the flares of longleaf pine alone with the gun in your arms. And watching, as you were always watching. This was the way trees are under the sun plain as a hand, such waiting its own place, without time, and printed with the squirrel’s passage and the small yellow sounds of grass. The sky of it was the oldest circle of hawk and sparrow.
Holding the gun, remembering to think of holding the gun, you held a lifetime bent to the minor gods of a particular and passing kingdom. Its history waited with you—this light only daybreak on the first kill you shouldered, this sun splayed on your great-grandfather’s bear. Did your daydream search those red seasons, knowing each of their beasts, fur, hoof and jawbone, for a trophy you could perfectly own? Did you think again of that emblem, the knife you once lost by the muddy Sabine, water rising, you fourteen and lost too on your pony? Telling that story, you were always sure the one blade you needed was back there.
I cannot guess your careless thought, how it unfolded in pine scent, some strand of memory or need unwinding too taut and suddenly broken just there on a buried edge, your father’s father’s gun taking on a weight that shifted utterly because of a low branch rock underfoot or a root the stumble because the world does turn over turn over and kill because the world does and the sound of it dies out and dies out in the hot thick light, and ground can shake like the hide of a thing enormously alive.
You got to your feet for hours holding your opened belly, cicada-hum braiding through red pain hope love terror gripping the backbone.
You were standing when strangers found you.
I who am daughter and stranger find you in every weather of sleep, the fox’s lent eyes seeing for you, the will of the gutshot deer holding on where the bobcat in darkness brings out its wreath of claws, and the smoldering remnant wolf lays a tribal ghost.
I have nothing to give you but this guesswork and care; oh careful as the long women who bring wildflowers to graves in that country, I place live birds in the hours you stood for. And to me you have given a history bearing up its own animal, the alien close kin and enemy who eats in my house now that the weapons are given away.
Poised in any prayer I make for light, to catch the way it glances off the world, your ignorant knife is praising the river, praising currents of canebrake, pinewoods, thickets under the wild sky— whatever lives there lost, and whatever is helped to die.
Rent House
I can’t think why I’ve come to see this house with no resonance, temporary years between the real houses: that one I was born to, the other I traveled from. The interim is here, habitual, stupefied summers of brass and blue enamel, smudged backyard grass of fall. Everything that was here still stands except the cannas. The journey of the same cracked two-strip driveway ends the same.
Before this, the short life it feels like dreaming to remember: field and barn, pecan trees, the rambling gentle house holding its own wide skirts of pasture, fluttering henyard, and my live mother close. The town doctor’s had that place for thirty years, all the pecans, sunset behind the fence rail, a bed of asters in the filled-in fish pool.
The last of childhood left me in yet another house, five unsteady porches, grandparents, a spread wing floating me along until I simmered into leaving. Years ago, a retired contractor from Houston restored that one to unremembered splendor.
This narrow house between. I look a long time, thinking I need imagination, but there’s nothing to be made of such temporal defeat. How long was it we lived on this back street behind screens billowing with rust? I remember how long one afternoon
I wrote my whole name broad and hard in crayon on every single windowscreen in this house, and then was punished. Forsythia is the name of those flowers I watched darken in the wallpaper.
All night I’d listen to the child next door cry and cut teeth. Now he’s a lawyer in San Francisco. I matched his howls with those I kept back. Both our voices ran down the moony street alongside crossed adult allegiances that roamed, like ghostly wolves, the nights of any town so old.
Nobody rented in a town like this. Why did Papa bring me here to this aunt who makes me braid my hair? Where is my mother? Where’s the calf you said was mine? What happened to the trees? Then they’d drive me out there so I’d see fields dizzy with briers, the derelict house large and sad and creatureless. Until I lost even my loss, got used to a cramped hallway and a makeshift life, the tight backyard with no hen in it.
And it was here I staked a claim: from any room I could look up to see my name purple or lime green against the sun, or clearer, lamplit on the night outside. Nothing they tried would get it off those years I thinned down, toughening, asthmatic with grief and discovery: how the self, amazed, swam up like bone through the lost landscape, through the mother’s vanished flesh, through all remembered and all future home, to build garish letters on the riddled air, knowing there’s no place else. Not anywhere.
Four from the Spider
Enact yourself between fixed points, but loosely—let the wind anoint clarity with death, and death with light. Live on the sheerest opposites.
Dance in a thin but working order Choreograph a net that severs with just such difficulty as makes it worth the making-over.
Take what comes, food or the random blown, with indiscriminate self outspun. The world is everything that sticks. Choose. Then count illusion’s tricks.
In the season’s final filament be caught. Nothing—not saying grace nor closing argument— attaches to your having been the wheel you turned in.
Digression on the Nuclear Age
In some difficult part of Africa, a termite tribe builds elaborate tenements that might be called cathedrals were they for anything so terminal as Milton’s God. Who was it said the perfect arch will always separate the civilized from the not? Never mind. These creatures are quite blind and soft and hard at labor chemically induced. Beginning with a dishlike hollow, groups of workers pile up earthen pellets. A few such piles will reach a certain height; fewer still, a just proximity. That’s when direction changes, or a change directs: the correct two bands of laborers will make their towers bow toward each other. Like saved and savior, they will meet in air. It is unambiguously an arch and it will serve, among the others rising and the waste, an arch's purposes. Experts are sure a specific moment comes when the very structure triggers the response that will perfect it.
I’ve got this far and don’t know what termites can be made to mean. Or this poem: a joke, a play on arrogance, nothing but language? Untranslated, the world gets on with dark, flawless constructions rising, rising even where we think we are. And think how we must hope convergences will fail this time, that whatever it is we’re working on won’t work.
Time after Time
An Australian sound engineer has developed a unique way of clearing the tire hiss and clatter out of vintage jazz recordings. —Associated Press
Time: it does things out there among the galaxies. Clatter and hiss? Perhaps. That’s one metaphor for distance,
which is time. And our remembering? There’s less and less, the dissonance of now and then no longer audible when mechanics cancels difference.
So out with the scritch of decades, the sizzle and scar of error, remembrance’s waver, susurrus of mortality, dust-riff, blues-ether.
We will turn them into us, our sound loud as a spotlight, bright as an electronic toy, cleansed of those troublesome sixty years and that old distortion: joy.
Poem for Dizzy
written after discovering that no poem in The Anthology of Jazz Poetry is written to, for, or about Dizzy Gillespie, who was cocreator (with Charlie Parker) of bebop, the style that ushered in the modern jazz era
Sweet and sly, you were all business when the old bent skyward horn went up. Sometimes it went up like a rocket, sometimes like a gentle-turning lark high on a summer day. It could blow an island wind snapping a line of red and yellow clothes hard against blue. The breath pouring into that banged-up brass inclination heavenward gave us lesson number one: Be. Lesson number two came naturally.
And you were serious as sunrise. Those who scoffed or bristled at the little stageside dance, the cutting-up, the jokes and jive, have all gone off to other targets. And you, Dizzy, you’ve gone off too, asleep in your chair, leaving us bereft. There was nobody better.
But there were lives the poets would want more— for tragedy or politics, harsher experiments: Bird’s drugged vortex into gone, Coltrane’s absolute, Monk’s edgy monologues, the demon Miles Davis posed as, then became. But you played clown, put everybody on. You played the house, but played a soul into the horn. And you outlived them all. This too was real jazz.
Talking, you were evasive, slant as a riff around a melody, more private maybe than anybody knew. I remember your one week in our town, 1970: afternoons you’d wander with your camera. Putting his flute back in its case, Moody told us: He does that every place we go, walks around for hours by himself, just taking pictures of wherever it is he is. Lesson number one.
You looked like the face of South Wind in my childhood picture book, like the best cherub Italy ever chiseled above a doge or saint, rich man, or pope. What were you storing in those blown-out cheeks all the years? Your darkest jokes? some brand-new pure invention, notes outside our hearing? Or perhaps some simple tune we’d never have made much sense of, the one about hope. The one about oldest love.
from The
Difficult Wheel (LSU
Press, 1995):
White Rhinoceros
Immense, stuck with two nose-horns, they’re ghostly cousins of the unicorn’s first draft, though that is hard to credit. Two sit, two stand in the sand trucked in to make a plain. It’s African terrain as Carolina U.S.A. imagines it. Complete with lifelike boulders of concrete.
Not really white, all four have rolled the sand into a final skin. We’ll wait all morning for the largest one to move not much, the great head a kind of engine pulling the body like a Macy’s giant balloon. It’s said they’re fast. Perhaps that’s just momentum. Any serious motion they began would have to last, and increase. But we won’t see them run. In this world that’s found them, they cannot have begun, not for our money or their own lost currencies of rut and territory.
When one lies down, the shape’s a complication. No place to put the huge, pulled-taffy face. A vasty nostril’s squashed, the lip’s displaced. No place to put a horizontal half-ton leg and foot. Bone, flesh slab, and leather undertake a cosmic squirm, a quake for antique comfort’s sake.
How life has yearned all ways for more of itself!
We think the rhinos dream. We think that the same way we guessed from a distance they might be fiberglass. Closer, we saw two bump like dreamy train cars, their eyes not looking anywhere but looking nonetheless. We think they listen. The small ears twitch as if they listen. What image comes to them, what voice? Some surreal version of Lost World from late-night television? Or can they imagine only this blurred landscape of made indecision, this air drilled with Carolina birds?
Perhaps the others gone or nearly missing sing to these? Perhaps the Aurochs sings four hundred years of darkness prototype of all our cattle, bull that held Europa. And does the Quagga, onomatopoeic, cry out the name heard by the Hottentots who gave it back? Perhaps the Blue Buck answers reverie in our rhinos who now are nearly myth themselves, who may be humming as the Tiger hums far under consciousness, a vanishing. If the discarded continents, snowy with ghosts, make such a music—if behind the forehead’s massive boneplate the rhinos know that shadow descant ringing— we do not think for us. We think the fey rhinoceros. We think that.
A Death
the right decision—the gentle veterinarian says we did. Now I’m allowed to hold him wrapped in a blue towel against the cold of the metal table. He lies in my arms and purrs as he would at home, secure while death crawls along a vein, then skids into his eyes. They stop, alarmed, then fixed, then not.
Just a cat. But all of life is just one or another. And each one may live so much, so far. And must. The world’s not just. A natural end for him would be only narrow and deeply cruel— as we secretly feel ourselves to be, taking him home in a box. How naturally even kindness runs the same round course as everything: a planet, not a sun.
Siphnos, 1987
I have seen the sun break through to illuminate a small field for awhile, and gone my way and forgotten it. But that was the pearl of great price, the one field that had the treasure in it. —R.S.Thomas, “The Bright Field”
Just past our neighbors’ lemon trees heavy with their eggs of light, one plot of ground was measured out by stone walls whitewashed to shining— something I might glance toward, walking on. It was as blunt as any field in Wales, as full of weather in a place where weather likewise mints the farmer’s coin. But this piece of land was given over.
I’d never seen wild flowers in such riot: empurpled, gilded, smeared with the blue of icons. And wide-faced poppies crowded luminous as figures in the stained glass of cathedrals, the blood of saints in them. I hadn’t guessed Greek sunlight could repeat at certain moments everything that’s been said about it—molten gold, honey, wine—pouring overmuch on April’s prism, making rich even the wooden donkey saddle waiting daisy-bestridden, beneath an almond tree.
In air so clear, any sound will carry until it seems almost material beneath a sky that holds its clarity the way St. Spirodon’s blue dome above the dark chants holds perfection. A fisherman in the village square was calling the names of his catch, red mullet leaping in his voice. The priest’s donkey clattered past in a stutter of yellow. Behind the stone church, a woman in a moan of black skirts combed her child’s hair softly with a song green as the turning sea. And surely the ragged wail sent down by the goat lost on the mountain bore the violet bruises of despair. I stayed the morning there, in thrall to something in particular. Memory has taken it: white wall, the shine of voices, the blossoms plying like gaudy fish their sea of wind. This was the bright field, the burning bush that startles stone to words. It outstays Mycenae’s gate, Delphi’s high and sibilant ruin; the laws already broken of matter and of time.
Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |
