Garden of Words

Paragraphs About Poems: Provence

The second poem distinctly related to Nikole is "Provence". It is a poem thick with the places of our honeymoon in southern France, and I really wrestled initially with the fact that it was so littered with place names. Once I stopped wrestling, stopped trying to turn it into some deeper story, I was able to finish it.

I'm not sure the bulk of the poem does justice to the final stanza, which originally began the poem. I could live in that single stanza for a long time.

Read "Provence" here.

The Baby Factory: Separated at Birth

It's hard to determine from this series of photos whether Thea favors Molly Ringwald in "Pretty in Pink" or Mike Ness of Social Distortion.

Please notice the surprisingly clean floor in the background. This photo was taken moments before Thea proceeded to move all of the beans and pasta from her tray to the floor -- sometimes it's because she thinks Rilo is being starved, sometimes it's because she's just done, sometimes she's just having a good time.

Please notice that she a) is not wearing her standard "eating shirt" and that b) her shirt is clean. We call that luck around these parts.

Paragraphs About Poems: My Grandfather's Art

I mentioned before that my grandfather died before I was born. I spent a long month trying to imagine who he was from a collection of artifacts I inherited when my own father died -- his paintings, his letters. He was an artist, and he was a commercial sign painter, and he owned a small grocery store on Mulberry Street between Stuart and Grove avenues. When his own father was dying, he and my grandmother took him into their home. My grandfather wrote in a letter to his brother of the pain of seeing their father lie in bed, staring at his own face in the mirror as life bleached from it. That is, honestly, all I know.

It was all I needed to know to write another poem thick with beautiful imagery.

"My Grandfather's Art" started in my old apartment during a rainstorm, as I listened to the wind and rain push through open windows. The rest almost literally flowed out of me while I sat, except for the word aestival. I don't know why I felt so compelled to use it. I like that it ends as it began.

Read "My Grandfather's Art" here.

Our Dog: Handsome/Devil

Although she's a bit of a nut and skittish as a colt, our little Bernese Mountain Beagle is quite the cutie. Except when you get an extreme close-up at just the right angle of her fierce underbite. Then, she just looks sort of freakish.

The Baby Factory: Water Baby

Nikole had already taken Thea to splash around in the water area of the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden children's area, but when I was confronted with a half-day of watching a restless toddler who had just learned to walk it moved right up on my list.

I was surprised that there were only four other kids splashing in the water when we arrived just after 4:00 on a hot Saturday afternoon, but also pleased. It meant that I could let Thea stroll around barefoot, mesmerized by the streams of water jetting up from the ground and cascading around her.

Next time, I'm putting her in a bathing suit.

The New Office in its Orange Glory

If I painted all four walls vibrant orange, I would go insane within a day.

I'm in the process of relocating to a permanent office space, a suite that I'm subletting from Zeigler|Dacus Marketing at 110 East Cary Street. My new space is relatively large -- perhaps 16x20 -- which gives me room for a couple of desks and a small, casual conference area.

Step one was getting a wall painted.

Step two will be organizing my books, files and assorted desk items.

Step three? The impossible task of furnishing a casual conference area with smart, stylish furniture on the cheap.

Cat in the Box

The worst thing about having a baby? The cats and dog get virtually no photographic attention.

The upside -- for one of the cats, anyway -- is that Thea's accessories provide plenty of interesting places to take a cat nap. The other morning I discovered Harvey nestled in one of Thea's canvas toy boxes, surrounded by stuffed animals.

Paragraphs About Poems: Leaving Greenhill Road

My stepmother and father moved to a farm in a small Quaker community in North Carolina when I was in my early teens -- after several years of long weekends, several a month, spent visiting her father there. It was her grandparents' farm, and it was where I learned how to split wood, string barbed wire, slaughter pigs, hunt, swim in red mud ponds and enjoy college basketball. I don't do any of those things now, but all of my weekends and summers spent with them at that place, and with that community of amazingly caring people in Saxapahaw, left deep impressions on me.

My father died on that farm just four months after being diagnosed with cancer. The anniversary of his death, his wife -- my stepmother and dear friend -- was diagnosed with cancer; she died days before the anniversary of their wedding.

Nikole and I went to visit her a few weeks before she went into hospice. We walked the woods of my youth, and I knew that I would never walk them again. And I knew that as important as that community had been in the creation of my core, I would never really return to it.

I wrote the last stanza of this poem, "Leaving Greenhill Road", one afternoon, the spring after Amy's death, as I quietly placed plants we removed from their gardens into my own yard. She taught me about love, about faith, about friendship. And she taught me about plants.

Powerful gifts, all.

Read "Leaving Greenhill Road" here.

Paragraphs About Poems: Engagement

Since I wrote about an ending yesterday, I thought today should return us to beginnings.

I proposed to Nikole in November of 2004, and gave her a ring of red, polished sea glass that our friend Nancy had molded into a gorgeous piece of jewelry. I was also working on this poem, "Engagement", at the time. It was the first piece I'd written specifically related to Nikole and our relationship, which was significant in many ways.

I tried to capture the promise inherent in starting something with someone, of pausing at the moment it begins.

Read "Engagement" here.

Paragraphs About Poems: Elegy for September 10

"Elegy for September 10" ranks extremely high on my list of poems I find immensely satisfying to revisit, reread, reexamine.

I actually flew out of New York City on September 10, 2001. Summer broke that weekend along the East Coast, and the skies were crisp and clear and cool. I had been in the city on and off for a year, working on a very broken marriage and filled with the belief that fixing it was just the thing you did. When I left early that Monday morning, it was with a sense of possibility and tentative plans to quit my life in Richmond and relocate.

The poem started with fragments, dredged from somewhere deep within. The first four lines emerged almost unscathed through weeks and weeks of revision, as I polished the poem down to as raw and lean a state as its language demanded. What emerged was a piece of writing that distinctly captures the hope, the pain, the longing -- for closure and for implosion -- and the hint of something truly terrible in the air.

That, of course, came a day later when New York fell in on itself and my marriage fully unraveled.

Read "Elegy for September 10" here.