For My Father

This is Mattie Lee Pamplin Dingler in her later years - probably taken in Texas where she died in 1962. She was my father's grandmother - a woman who could mix any of her herbal remedies with molasses to get him to swallow it. She raised her family on a small farm in Arkansas. I wish I had known her for I think we had many things in common. Instead, I took the stories my father told me about her and wove them into a novel. Some of the threads are truth and many of the threads spun out from my imagination. 

So to honor my father on Father's Day I pay tribute to his grandmother with this excerpt from my novel, Daughters of Time.  Enjoy. 

Chapter Two

Mississippi 1891

Twilight and the road stretched ahead through the tall pines. What was it her ma use to say? Oh, yes—twilight was the most dangerous part of the day—the time when the dark and the light met—the time of in-between.

“Mind yourself now, Mattie—a person can get lost in the in-between time with no sun to guide you and no real darkness to hide yourself in. You mind yourself, child.”

So here she was, alone at twilight on a long road that was in itself about being between things. Or between places, as it were. This road, from her daddy’s farm where she was born sixteen years before to her daddy’s new farm that she had never seen. Here she was in this place between the two in the time of in-between. And no longer a girl, but no one could think of her as a woman, could they? What was she then—just an in-between?

“Life’s nothing but a journey, Mattie-girl,” that was Pa speaking, leaning against the wagon loaded up with all their worldly and not-so-worldly goods, and Ma up front, with the youngsters behind riding on quilts and the feather bed. “A journey has no end, not even in the dying. You just keep on walking to someplace new—leavin’ Mississippi ain’t quite like dyin’ though to look at you all white in the face has gotta make a person wonder…”

That was Pa, all right, his big, rough hand on her shoulder trying to look like everything was fine, though they were leaving her and going off to Arkansas, and she would come later—all on her own. That’s when he gave her the crock of her Ma’s cherry jam and told her to save it for the trip to the new farm. And now here she was at twilight, walking down the dusty road that led through the pine forest and out of Mississippi and into her new life in Arkansas. An in-between, not quite a woman but no longer a girl—some kind of new person. And the gray crock of cherry jam was safely tucked into her knapsack—untouched, because it was all she had left of Ma and Pa and Mississippi.

Invocation

Photograph © Denise Sallee 2013

In 1995 I owned Raven in the Grove, a women's bookstore and art gallery, and found my world expanding in strange and wonderful ways. My all-too-brief period in the store was the only time I have felt truly myself. I flourished, at least emotionally and spiritually, in an environment entirely self-created. It reflected who I was and who I remain - though that person, Me, is no longer free to be. The importance of the experience remains - reminding me of my own unique potential - and brings me hope.

It was at my store that I discovered the poet May Sarton through her books placed lovingly upon my shelves. She reached me because her poems reflected my own thoughts, desires, and memories.

It was in 1995 that  her publisher, W.W. Norton, sent me a card announcing May's  death.  I felt honored to have been part of bringing her words to those who needed them - as I still need them - and now I share this poem with you. I know that Ella Young would also have resonated with May's words.



Invocation by May Sarton

Come out of the dark earth
Here where the minerals
Glow in their stone cells
Deeper than seed or birth.

Come under the strong wave
Here where the tug goes
As the tide turns and flows
Below that architrave.

Come into the pure air
Above all heaviness
Of storm and cloud to this
Light-possessed atmosphere.

Come into, out of, under
The earth, the wave, the air.
Love, touch us everywhere
With primeval candor.

Bee-loud glade

Today, I spent a few wonderful hours with my friend Kathy who has recently become a bee keeper. Her land is a-buzz - both with bees and with blooms. Happy bees, happy blooms.  I brought with me Carol Ann Duffy's volume of wondrous poetry entitled The Bees.  I discovered Duffy while living in Ireland - she was being interviewed on the radio and she read a few poems. I was hooked.   I read very, very little poetry written after 1950. I think many "poets" think that writing prose in short lines is the same as writing poetry.  Wrong, very wrong.  Each word should be thoughtfully, consciously formed and perfect in its relationship one to the other. And the words should render not only meaning and imagery but we need to smell them, touch them and hear them - let them buzz among the blooms.


Virgils' Bees

Bless air's gift of sweetness, honey
from the bees, inspired by clover,
marigold, eucalyptus, thyme,
the hundred perfumes of the wind.
Bless the beekeeper

                              who chooses for her hives
a site near water, violet beds, no yew,
no echo. Let the light lilt, leak, green
or gold, pigment for queens,
and joy be inexplicable but there
in harmony of willowherb and stream,
of summer heat and breeze, 

                                         each bee's body
at its brilliant flower, lover-stunned,
strumming on fragrance, smitten.

                                                 For this,
let gardens grow, where beelines end,
sighing in roses, saffron blooms, buddleia;
where bees pray on their knees, sing, praise
in pear trees, plum trees; bees
are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them.

Photograph © Denise Sallee 2013

Robert Duncan - Poet

The Wampum Snake by Mark Catesby circa 1740 Minneapolis Institute of Arts

 

The Wampum Snake by Mark Catesby circa 1740

Minneapolis Institute of Arts

I never know when Ella will make herself known to me  - whisper in my ear or take my hand and lead me toward a new discovery. Today was an Ella day. While at work at the college library I decided to take a moment and look at the new book shelf. My eye immediately went to matching volumes by the California poet Robert Duncan who was born in Oakland in 1919.  I knew immediately that there would be an Ella connection.  He was raised by theosophical Hermeticists who undoubtedly knew Ella. Duncan mentions Ella when he is describing his Bakersfield high school English teacher, Edna Keogh - an Irishwoman who knew Ella. This is what Duncan says of Ella:

"She [Keogh] had had a link among her friends [in Berkeley] in a gaunt, beautiful, touched, old woman, Ella Young, whom I in turn as a student in Berkeley once heard tell of those Irish circles, of poets who practiced magic, of women who saw into what was beyond the common sense, of that folk who dwelt upon the margins of fairy."

Duncan discusses his life as a poet and his words remind me of Ella's own words. Kindred spirits, indeed.

"In my conversion to Poetry I was to find anew the world of Romance that I had known in earliest childhood in fairy tale and daydream."

Here is an excerpt from Duncan's poem Ode for Dick Brown...

III

Restore, restore the mystery to the land

and to the hearts of men restore

the mystery. In memory, bright Mnemosyne's

rich tapestry of voices, revelations,

and persisting scenes, the luminous

reasonable and mysterious oak thrives.

The source of our lives makes each man sacred…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Wampum Snake, above, I came across while helping a student. Days like today, thanks to Ella, I remember why I am here. 

Robert Duncan:  The Collected Early Poems and Plays. Edited by Peter Quartermain.

Robert Duncan: The H.D. Book. Edited by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman.

The Blessings of Spring

Joyous as Spring she came,

Anemonies like flame

Broidered the way:

Gauze flylets on the wing

Were there for cherishing,

And little birds to sing

Aubade and roundelay.

Excerpt from The Shadowed Wood 

Smoke of Myrrh (1950) by Ella Young


Photograph © Denise Sallee 2011

Sara Bard Field

Ella Young's close circle of friends, or as she would say "comrades," in California were as eclectic and as interesting as her circle had been in Ireland. They shared a vision, often expressed in poetry or in paintings, of a world deeply connected to the power, the beauty, the creation and the destruction of nature. They called each other by secret, magical names. They honored the turning of the great wheel with rituals on the wind-swept sands of the beach and in the leaf-shadowed twilight of the redwood forests.

Sara Bard Field (1882-1974) was one such comrade - a courageous and passionate woman whose home in Los Gatos she shared not only with her husband, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, but with the cultural "movers and shakers" of the San Francisco and Monterey areas. The great photographer, Ansel Adams, sought Sara out for questions of spiritual importance even as he sought out Ella's advice in his quest to be a poet.

Palo Corona 

Photograph © Denise Sallee 2013

So here is a poem by Sara Bard Field written after the tragic death of her son, Albert.

The Windy Hour

I walked a little while alone
Upon a wind-wrapped hill
And suddenly, as by command,
My soul grew listening-still.

Listening like the deaf and dumb
Who hear with haunted eyes
Fearful of learning life, half-true
And learning life, half-lies.

And this is what was softly said
Upon a wind-wrapped hill:
"Tomorrow shall you, like your soul,
Lie motionless and still.

Lie motionless and old and numb - 
Closed your ears and eyes
For death shall make an end of truth
For you - and end of lies. 

"For death shall make an end of truth
Save the one truth of sleep;
No ear need hear that silencing
No eye need watch it creep."

The Jumping Off Point

I've been thinking about a life of risk taking, of starting over, of wanting so badly the new, the different…


Have I been jumping forward all these years only to have landed where I began so long ago?