Over the Transom

by Sonny Brewer

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The Letter

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First Sgt. Casey Brewer, not yet my daddy, not until he got home from the war.

The letter had no return address, but I knew it was from Daddy. He wrote with an unmistakable flourish, an odd combination of cursive and block-style, with random capital letters here and there in a sentence. He only finished the 9th grade. But he did advance quickly to the rank of First Sergeant in General Patton’s 6th Armored Division in World War II, earning a diamond in the middle of the insignia on his sleeve and a landing at Utah Beach in Normandy. Maybe what he did and what he saw with the Super Sixth is what messed him up. Let a bottle of whisky put its shiny boot on his neck, where no German soldier ever got the chance.

I’d only ever had one other letter from Daddy and that one was delivered to me during mail call aboard the USS Intrepid. He congratulated me for following in the footsteps of his father, my Pop Brewer who served aboard the USS Alabama in the first world war, and for avoiding the eyes of men I might have otherwise had to kill in the jungles of Vietnam.

But this letter was about another conflict. The simmering cold war we had with each other since I got too big to take a whipping from him. This letter was Daddy hoping for some kind of stand-down between us since my busted marriage was a man’s dose of some hundred-proof reality medicine that might help me see differently.

I’ve written some books that have been published, novels and such. And, damn right I have opened Word files to write about him and me. Got 40,000 words into Distilling Daddy. And ditched the project when I imagined myself standing on the fifty yard line at Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa, maybe a homegame with Ole Miss—though by whose invitation to take the field I had not worked out—where I’d take the mic and ask who in the stands had a mean-ass daddy growing up, one who drank too much and hit too hard, who was gone a lot, and good-freaking riddance. Silence would fall. Dead silence. All but, like, four hands would go up. And those people would lower their heads, wondering how did they rate the slight, keen to know where were their crosses, what necessary wounding had they missed on the road to salvation.

So I would only blink, and nod, hand the mic back to a man in a crimson necktie, and walk off the field. And go to my computer and save the Daddy document to a file called Unfinished Manuscripts. Forty years ago, maybe I’d have put the pages in a Chiquita banana box with a removable lid and slid it under my bed.

I’m 71 now. Daddy died 35 years ago. I never answered his letter. But I’ve read it many times.

The letter showed up in my mailbox within a couple of weeks of the divorce from my first wife, the mother of his first grandbaby, my daughter. He held her on his forearm in a blanket, staring at her with wet eyes while I and my sister looked at the camera for the picture that I still keep in a doctor’s old black leather bag under my desk.

The man knew something about divorce. He pointed that out in the letter. For Daddy had been a good-looking man who could dance like the leading man in a movie musical, who looked a little bit like Clark Gable with his slick black hair, and who drove fancy cars. And all of that figured in the seven wives he had.

Talking about my own bust-up, he said in the letter that now I would know that life can “throw shit in the game” and maybe turn a man hard, maybe make him do things he’d not do on his better days. That’s as close as he could get to expressing something like regret for some of the action scenes that had played out between us, where there was no hero to bounce in and say pick on somebody your own size. Mama tried that one time and the outcome is one of those archived clips that plays in my mind when some surprise switch gets flipped. It did not go well for her. That was not mentioned in Daddy’s letter.

But I mentioned it, wrote it down, though it didn’t get a stamp and envelope. It’s a scene, with small changes, in a novel I wrote. A friend of mine, a lady here in town, told me on the sidewalk one day she’d not be reading my new book. Said she read a little bit of it and knew that boy and she was just not going there.

If I went to see a therapist and I took the letter from Daddy that I still have, she’d likely give me an assignment to answer it. I’d let her read the letter. He’s moved on, she’d say, and there’s no forwarding address, but if you’ll write an answer to him, maybe you, too, can move on. She might say for me to take my time and go deep on that part where Daddy said I was always his favorite, and he couldn’t understand why I’d always been so cold to him. Pushed him aside, he wrote. He allowed he could only hope and pray that maybe now, with me tore loose from childish senses and dropped into a man’s world of heartbreak and disappointments, things could get better for us.

A year ago, I wouldn’t on a bet or dare do shadowside homework. But today I’ve started the letter to my father at the top of a clean, white page. Dear Daddy, that’s all I’ve got so far. I crossed out Dear Casey because I have never called my father by his first name, not to him nor to anyone else when speaking of him.

Same way I start a novel, I’m thinking about what I’ll write before I get busy with pen and paper. That stage of walking around bumping into lampposts and stepping into potholes while noodling on the range and sweep of what to say. A newspaper friend said he’s got to get his lead in his head, got to get that nut ‘graph sharp as a spearhead meant for killing before tearing loose after prey in the open grasslands. That way, he says, he’ll meet his deadline in half the time he needs. And nail the story every time.

I don’t know that I’ll nail my letter to Daddy, but I’m thinking I’ll come pretty close to what I want to say when it’s done. Just like novels and stories, everything gets set right in the rewrite. And I’ll rework lines until they’re honest.

I’ll tell Daddy about this coronavirus isolation, how it’s at least put me in touch with the man he thought I’d conjure into when I got that divorce. I’ll tell him he was foolish to have thought I’d sit still with myself back then. And I’ll tell him he was just stone nuts to think I’d have invited him to sit with me, that I’d ever have asked him back then what kind of crap was he living with that wouldn’t let him be my daddy.

But now I’ve been solo in my cabin since March and some ghosts have come calling that Dickens could have sent my way, their stories too familiar to turn away from. Only now that I’m an old man and single again, however, do I have ears to hear. And probably only inside the walls of this pandemic could relevant nuances of meaning have surfaced in my psyche. In four months I haven’t been inside anyone else’s home, or inside a restaurant or Home Depot or O’Reilly Auto Parts. Four times I’ve sat outside with a visitor fifteen feet away. Twice I got together with half a dozen people in aluminum folding chairs under some big oak trees. I’ve consigned myself with purpose to this solitude like a Trappist monk who bites down without medicine on the toothache pain of separation from society, questing with singularity for some kind of spiritual light in a gloomy fog, bound and determined to see through the storied darkness of the soul, though prayers echo off silent walls.

But I won’t get into all that Thomas Merton stuff with Daddy.

I’ll keep it simple. I’ll tell him that just today I threaded his belt into my cargo shorts and wore it all day. Thick leather two inches wide with a bronze Mack Truck bulldog buckle that’s not my style and I kept it covered up under my untucked t-shirt. He would tell me the hand-tooled belt monogrammed with his name was meant for jeans and cowboy boots like a trucker might wear. Like the trucker he was when he ordered the belt.

And that would be my cue to tell him I never really fastened onto what it must have been like for him, how it must’ve opened some cracks to find himself driving a log truck for pay when he was only twelve, sunburned and shirtless, and staying here and there with uncles and cousins because my Pop Brewer and Big Mama had divorced and put a state line between themselves so they wouldn’t get in each others way while starting new families. Three half siblings on the Mississippi side of the line, and five half siblings on the Alabama side, and Daddy didn’t get in the way on either side.

He was not a son or a boy in that situation, he was odd man out.

Though he must have believed when he was three and took his mama’s hand as she left my grandfather and the pair of them walked twenty miles to catch a bus to start a new life that he was his mama’s only boy. When that dream came unwound, something in him started unraveling. I’m sure it did, know it’s true as well I know I share a last name with the kid he was.

I’ll write and tell him he has grandsons now, two young men who might have called him Pop Brewer, had they got to meet him. I’ll say I gave to my oldest boy the ring he gave to me, the one with the magic ruby star sapphire he bought on the streets of Bangkok. I’ll tell Daddy about my flash of insight when I was forty. There was a bright clear moment when I suddenly knew that his gift of the ring to me at my high school graduation was to replace the plastic gumball ring he made me throw out the car window when I was nine, telling me no son of his would go around thinking some damn penny ring was magic. In the letter, I would ask did he watch my eyes when he handed off the ruby ring to me to see did it make everything right with us. And if he were here now he could watch my eyes and tell his grandsons about how a real man can turn loose his grip on grudges, let love drag up a seat at the table.

And he could tell them how he made his own way, without anyone’s help, and finally got out of the log truck and signed on for a better paying job with the army, lying through his teeth with practice and a cockeyed grin about his age. No one doubted he was a man in full. No underage kid could fight the way he fought, learn to kill so clean. He was not afraid of the devil in any disguise.

I’ll write and tell Daddy that I was set back in my chair when I found in one of his keepsake boxes the yellowed and musty-smelling newspaper account of him taken prisoner of war by the Germans. I read of his escape after beheading a guard with a folding shovel and jumping from a rolling jeep to run into the woods where he dug a hole with that shovel and covered himself with leaves until he heard the voices of American soldiers three days later. I’ll put in the letter that, yes, maybe I can see Jack Daniels as an ersatz therapist for nightmares come groaning for him in nights that called back those memories.

I’ll even write down something about him losing my mama. She must’ve been a fight the soldier hated to lose, a failure that nearly broke him. Though he talked her into giving him another shot and they got married again. She was his wife number four and wife number five. And I’ll say something to Daddy about seeing clearly now how those Christmas Eve long-stemmed yellow roses presented to my mama cost him his wife number six. I’ll let him know I get that it was really a lot more than flowers for an ex that made him pack up and leave her.

Number seven didn’t last long enough for me to meet her, so I can’t bring her up. Nor numbers one through three, whose names I haven’t learned, though my sister discovered that we have a half sibling three years older than me, if he is still alive.

I will write and tell Daddy I could not see then that our troubles weren’t between him and me. I will tell him I’m not sure I could walk a mile in his hobnail boots. And if I could walk where he did, now that I better know the road he traveled, I’d say something about earning wages paid in the coin of a higher realm.

I will say in the letter that I can see the amazing grace in a thief on a cross being set free for eternity without baptism or any profession of faith, that it’s none of our business to justify that outcome, because we really don’t know a damn thing about what breaks or justifies another man. Such judgment is for higher powers.

In the letter to Daddy, I will not write that I’m sorry it’s taken so long for me to get back to him. That would be a regrettable line. Hackneyed and dishonest and unfair. It’s me I’ve taken a long time to get in touch with, and that’s a letter I’m still writing.

Sonny Brewer,
Waterhole Branch, Alabama

Good Thread, and Stitches That Hold

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It’s the last day of April, the last day of National Poetry Month. So I’m going to play a little catch-up on this page with some poems that I love. I did not write them. I love them all the more.

These days are hard on people. All this standing back from one another. All the suspicion and worry. How will we manage? Where it might be lurking, this virus. For one reason or another, according to some loose association in my mind, each of the poems I include help me loosen the knot of loneliness. And remind me, more than ever these days, it’s a little more we, and a little less me.

Work has been a good distraction. So I’ve been absent from this page working on a stage play adaptation of The Poet of Tolstoy Park. I just finished the first draft. It’s parked on the window ledge like Granny’s apple pie, cooling, before I go back and have a taste and find what needs spitting out, and what does it need to brighten the flavor.

I pray you are yourself these days creating something. In the garden, or the kitchen, at the desk in the study, or the easel in the sunroom. In the workshop or at the sewing machine. Wherever and whatever. Anything that puts back some of what’s falling away.

I’ll make a comment or two, before or after the selections. Maybe trying to tighten up those loose threads for why I picked the poem. And, I hope you’ll Google the poet and go deeper into the talent suggested here.

The Knockdown Question by Les Murray

Why does God not spare the innocent?
The answer is not in the same world as the question.
And if I could answer it,
you would shrink from me in terror.

I think of grandmothers and babies, and all the good people in between who, every instant, are not spared. I think of the “insiders” like John the Baptist, and Jesus whom he baptized; and, Thomas, Simon the Zealot, Philip, Simon Peter, Matthias, Matthew, Jude, James son of Alpheus, James son of Zebedee, Bartholomew, and Andrew; and, Paul who wrote the letters. I think of Stephen—and Saul’s hand in that killing. How none of these were spared. Why, indeed?

If the poet could answer the knockdown question, he says you would shrink from him in terror. And what answer, what insight into the life-and-death motivations of God, would make a man wither in fear? Might the poet think the innocent are targeted? That would recoil the devout and the faithful. And, yet, Les Murray was a devoted Catholic, on a par with Flannery O’Connor.

Maybe this next 800-year old poem from a Sufi priest offers a radically different answer.

The Tent by Rumi

Outside, the freezing desert night.
This other night inside grows warm, kindling.

Let the landscape be covered with thorny crust.
We have a soft garden in here.
The continents blasted,
cities and little towns, everything
become a scorched, blackened ball.

The news we hear is full of grief for that future,
but the real news inside here
is there’s no news at all.

But where’s the path toward Rumi’s tent, so we, too, can get “inside here”?

Leaves of Grass (from the preface) by Walt Whitman

This is what you shall do:

Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches, give alms to every one that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others,
hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
have patience and indulgence toward the people,
take off your hat to nothing known or unknown
or to any man or number of men,
go freely with powerful uneducated persons
and with the young and with the mothers of families,
read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life,
re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book,
dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
and your very flesh shall be a great poem
and have the richest fluency not only in its words
but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes
and in every motion and joint of your body.

And Whitman also invites us to look to nature for courage, for evidence of providence.

Song of Myself [Book 3 of Leaves of Grass]
Section 31:

I believe a leaf of grass
is no less than the journey work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect,
and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels….

Many years ago, on page 47 of William Gay’s debut novel The Long Home, I read a paragraph that staggered my mind, caused me to make a small sound in my throat and shake my head. What? Who in Heaven’s name writes like that? The previous pages—and the rest that followed—were equally otherworldly. But this ‘graph. Well.

And I knew as I followed the story that the author was describing a Sunday morning after a big drunk in the hills of east Tennessee. The time was during Prohibition, and the roadhouse that hosted the Saturday night binge was hidden from the law back in the woods. The sun was coming up and it was going to be a scorcher and there were terrible bad hangovers revving up as some men and a few women scattered among the bushes found themselves waking up, still alive. But barely. Here’s the paragraph formatted to look like a poem.

The Long Home by William Gay

Morning. A hot August sun was smoking
up over a wavering treeline.
Such drunks as were still about,
struggled up slowly beneath
the malign heat slowly and painfully,
as if they moved in altered time,
or through an atmosphere thickening to amber.
The glade was absolutely breezeless
and the threat of the sun imminent and horrific.
The sweep of the sun lengthened.
Windowpanes were lacquered with refracted fire.
Sumac fronds hung wilted and benumbed as the
whores and smellsmocks rose bedewed
from the foxglove and nightshade.
Strange creatures averse
or unused to so maledictive a sun
they were heir to a curious fragility as if,
left to the depredations of the sun,
their very flesh would sear and blacken,
their limbs cringe and draw like those of scorched spiders.
The cool breath of the abyss drew them
through the undergrowth like
a magnet aligning iron filings on a glass slide.

And that last line, there’s the hereafter for our sufferings. We will come out of this tangled undergrowth.

Two poems that lean me toward the promise of something cool.

Dove that Ventured Outside by Rainer Maria Rilke

Dove that ventured outside, flying far from the dovecote:
housed and protected again, one with the day, the night,
knows what serenity is, for she has felt her wings
pass through all distance and fear in the course of her wanderings.

The doves that remained at home, never exposed to loss,
innocent and secure, cannot know tenderness;
only the won-back heart can ever be satisfied: free,
through all it has given up, to rejoice in its mastery.

Being arches itself over the vast abyss.
Ah, the ball that we dared, that we hurled into infinite space,
doesn’t it fill our hands differently upon its return:
heavier by the weight of where it has been.

Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower by Rainer Maria Rilke

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

(Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29)

In Italy it started, where homebound they sang from the rooftops. And the feeling spread. And hope was lifted.
& When We Woke by Aracelis Girmay
It rained all night. It did not rain.
I strapped my life to a buoy — & sent it out.
& was hoping for a city whose citizens sing
from their windows or rooftops,
about the beauty of their children
& their children’s eyes, & the color of the fields
when it is dusk. & was hoping for a city
as free as the rain, whose people roam
wherever they want, free as any real, free thing is free.
Joyful. Green. & was hoping
for a city of 100 old women whose bones
are thick & big in their worker hands
beautiful as old doors. & when we woke,
dear reader, we’d landed in a city of 100 old women
telling their daughters things. & when we turned
to walk away, because we did not think we were citizens
of this strange & holy place, you & I, the hundred old
women said, No, No! You are one of us! We are your
mothers! You! You! Too! Come & listen to our secrets.
We are telling every person with a face!
& they stood us in a line facing the sea,
(because that is the direction we came from)
& behind us there was another line of women
& another, & we sang songs. & we filled the songs
with our mothers’ names. & we filled the songs
with trees for our mothers to stand under,
& good water for our mothers to drink. & we filled
the songs with beds for our mothers to lay down in
& rest. We filled the songs with rest. & good food
for our mothers to eat. We made them a place
in our singing, & we faced the sea.
We are still making them a place
in our singing. Do you understand?
We make them a place where they can walk freely,
untouched by knives or the police who patrol
the borders of countries like little & fake hatred-gods
who patrol the land though the land says, I go on
& on, so far, you lose your eye on me.
We make our mothers a place in our singing & our place
does not have a flag or, even, one language.
Do you understand? We sing like this for days
until our throats are torn with singing. Do you understand?
We must build houses for our mothers in our poems. I am not sure,
but think. This is my wisest song.

_______________________________________________________________________________

The month of May ushers in blueberry season here. And that is its own kind of message and blessing. God’s gift to the innocents.

Picking Blueberries by Laura Gilpin

A summer shower but sunlight towards evening
I was leaving to pick blueberries
when you called, telling me of your mother’s death,
not unexpected, but your voice was brittle
as twigs broken by a sudden storm.

A full life, she had
children and grandchildren,
people she loved, those who loved her,
an emptiness now
where her life held tight to others.

I wish I could lift you out of the darkness
to bring you here to pick blueberries with me
in the last of the evening light,
to taste in each small globe
the warmth of the sun
the richness of all that is good and sweet
in this world.

I wish you could know
the comfort of picking blueberries in the evening
feeling in the last light for the ripest ones,
the ones that pull away easily
from the stem, eager to let go,
like your mother, falling gently
into God’s waiting hand.

All Those Stars

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I should have seen something coming. But I didn’t put it all together until yesterday when my energies were all burning bright and the psychic winds were blowing from just the right direction. That’s what happens on your birthday. And yesterday I marked the entry into my 72ndyear on the planet. So, of course it would be the day I’d see how all the signs fit together.

First there was just one of these gossamer chutes, some thin and dainty seed floating on a silver silken halo of fine and thin filaments like a tuft of pure white cotton. There it landed right at my feet as my little dog Bobby and me headed for the car. At first I thought it was from a dandelion. And then I bent down to pick it up and realized I did not recognize it at all. But I knew I would claim the prize, another talisman for display at my writing desk. I pinched the seed ever so gently and turned around, heading back into the cabin to find a spot for it. Immediately, I decided to nest it into my dreamcatcher.

I took a picture and sent it to my friend Martin, and asked him to tell me, please, from what plant did it originate. He did not know. And he knows everything about about our coastal flora and fauna. I put the picture through my Google Lens app and it told me I’d captured a caterpillar. I took another close-up shot and tried again. This time it said dandelion. Not even close. (One of you will know and will reply to tell me. For now, we’ll move on.)

When I got back from my trip to the store, there on the boardwalk to my cabin was another of the chutes. This time lightly attached to a piece of a broken oak branch. Too pretty to pass up. I had to walk very slowly so I didn’t dislodge the chute with that whiskery plume made for flight. Once inside, I tucked the stick into an opening on the base of my old Tiffany lamp. In the few days since, I haven’t spied another of the airborne seeds.

And now that I have deciphered their message, they are all the more special to me. Here, let me tie a thread around this.

A friend had few days before given me a collection of her favorite poems that she bound together in a little book. I put it beside my antique typewriter, and later that evening, standing at my desk, I did the thing that I am wont to do with books of poetry: I let it fall open to the poem of its choosing. And there on the right-reading page, opposite a totally blank left-reading page, was a poem of nine lines (of course—my thing with 9s). I stood there and read slowly, and with the last line, where the poet herself tied a golden thread around the image of her thoughts, my eyes were wet and my throat was tight. I felt it coming on and didn’t try to man-up against the urge rising from my chest.

I stepped back and sat down in my chair. I could not, nor did I try, to shake off the emotion that in my life of reading poems has happened only one other time. But, even then, not like this. Some few minutes later, I was released back into the mundane, I went to Amazon for a book of the poet’s work. I found two copies from used sellers. One for $899.99, and the other, listed in “very rough condition” for $4,401.74. The spell I’d been under at reading from this poet, was dashed and broken against a cold cliff of capitalist greed. Or something like that. Anyway, I used rough expletives.

Then, having once been a used bookseller, I turned to Advanced Book Exchange, or ABEBooks.com, my first source for hard-to-come-by titles. I found seven copies. Two paperback reprints for $158.51 and $163.26. The five used hardbacks started at $500 and went up to $721. I did not click buy on any of the offerings at either site.

Then I Googled the poet. She was from Fairhope! She had landed her book with Doubleday in New York and had won the prestigious Walt Whitman Award for Poetry. She died here in 2007 at the age of 56. Not only was she a poet, but she worked most of her life as a nurse devoted to improving patient care in hospitals around the country. She had the same last name of a man with whom I have been friends for forty years. I called Martin. I call Martin about many things. I asked him was she perhaps related to my friend. “His sister,” he said. I thanked him and asked could I read her poem to him. He said yes. I began, felt my voice begin to break, struggled on through to the end and quickly got off the phone. I don’t know why the poem drills straight into my soul and pokes a hole there. I am also glad it does.

Next day I was wrapping up with my art director in San Francisco the design of my new book of prose and poems called Syllables Go By that went on sale today wherever you buy books. I asked could I share a poem with her. “Someone else’s,” I said. She agreed and I emailed it and before the day was over, she texted me to tell me she’d just read the poem. “I am transformed,” she said. Then, next day she emailed to me a little script she wrote up between herself and her husband, a recap of their conversation when she’d also shared the poem with him. I wish I could send her work around the world and back again, and everyone would talk about it.

I called my friend, the poet’s brother, and within the week found myself seated with him in his home, hanging on his every word as he answered my questions about his sister with stories all the way back to their childhood. Then he told me how the poem I love was born in his sister’s imagination when she’d been a little girl. He told me that she saw the subject of her poem in an odd little out-of-the-way roadside museum their father took them to on a weekend trip.

My friend turned and disappeared for a moment and rejoined me holding in his hand a copy of a book of her poems. I told him about the scarcity of her books and the wild internet prices. Then he read to me from the book two other poems, his own favorites, that were equally powerful works of art. And I saw why she won the poetry prize that she did. Then he handed the book to me and said he had inscribed it for me, that his sister would be very pleased for me to have her book. “I have two other copies,” he said. I took the book and held it to my chest and thanked him, mumbling something—I can’t remember what.

When I got home, back to my cabin, back to my desk, and put the book down there. Only then did it register with me that the image on the cover was a dandelion. With chutes on the fly. A cover photo of what, in the real, ornamentally floated mere inches above the book.

And so last night, at an author event at our Page & Palette bookstore, where I introduced the writer to a room of 50 people, I asked, “By a show of hands, how many in this room of avid readers and fans of books and authors know the name Laura Gilpin?” Three hands were raised. “Then I’ll introduce to you, not only Mandy Haynes, the author I’m seated beside,” I said, “but also Laura Gilpin, a Fairhope poet you should come to know.” And I did so by reading to the room, in a strong and manly voice, the beautiful poem that made me come undone when I first read it days before.

I did not mention the pair-of-chutes (yes) I found nor the image on the book’s cover. I will (as I continue to wonder why) talk about that marvelous and magical synchronicity when I do a reading from my own little book at Page & Palette on St. Patrick’s Day. I will also read aloud another of Laura’s poems. And I will do so every time and anywhere I am invited to read from my book. I have offered to help, if I may, to bring back into print Laura’s poems. Maybe some other little girl or boy, that way, can find the inspiration to one day raise their own voices to praise mystery and beauty and truth as Laura did.

Here is her poem that I love:

The Two-Headed Calf by Laura Gilpin

Tomorrow, when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass.
And as he stares into the sky,
there are twice as many stars as usual.

 

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