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CONTENTS - Click on blue title to read 5 - Dedication -Click Here 7 Sue Holloway- A Cygnet’s Requiem 9 Kevin Carey- Drawn to Your Light 11 Claire Zoghb- By Numbers 12 Carol Leavitt Alteri- Selectman Casting Out Roots 13 June Frankland Baker- Variations on a Theme 14 Barry Ballard- The Perishing Weight 15 Frederick Bassett- Accidents 16 Jack Bedell- My Son Discovers the Draw of Water 17 Sherri Bedingfield- Devotion 18 Polly Brody -The Good Daughters 19 Bradley Buchanan- The Breakfast Dishes 20 Michael Carrino- Autumns Return to Maple Pavillion 20 Robin S. Chapman -Cougar Stories 22 Lois Lake Church- Did You Give Up Your Body 24 Robert Collins- Tree of Life Connecticut River Review is dedicated in loving memory to Sue Ann Holloway December 24, 1944 - April 10, 2007.
"I believe there's hope for the future, but we have to acknowledge the place of wonder and beauty that is our connection with the world."-Sue Holloway Sue. A. Holloway, PhD, age 62, of Guilford, CT, died April 10, 2007 at the CT Hospice in Branford. She was born in South Bend, IN, December 24, 1944 to Donald and Ruth Ann Holloway. She was the beloved mother of William Eron Gerard of Arlington, VA, Monica (Gifford) Manning of Muskegon, MI, and Noah (Dianah) Gerad of Rockford, MI. She was the cherished grandmother of Savannah and Sierrah Manning of Muskegon, MI. Her mother Ruth Holloway; brothers, Jack, Donald, Michael, and Patrick Holloway; and a host of nieces and nephews also survive her. She received a Doctorate of Education from Michigan State University. She loved to teach, and most recently held a position at Xavier High School of Middletown, CT. She was the former editor of the Connecticut River Review, the author of Swan in the Grail, and Artemis's Arrow (audiotape). Her many passions included: writing, photography, bird rescues, and nature advocacy. Sue touched many hearts with her sunny smile, and her encouraging words, and all who knew her will miss her.
A Cygnet's Requiem Only yesterday on grass lush from rain five cygnets paraded in a queue beside the pond. Bellies protruding they balanced on tiny webbed feet and walked tall, heads up, stretching imaginary necks. Only days old, they skittered, playful, as if tomorrow were theirs in a waggle of a downy tail, a wave of a wisp-of-wing. Follow me. At mama's sweeping tail they clustered; her long neck a guide. High cheerful peeps sang, we're coming. But a kayak crossed their world, bringing chaos and trumpeting alarm, scattering youngsters in five directions, diving and disappearing. Four found safety; one remains only a painful memory in elusive watery vortex of lurking snapper, dragging delight from this bright world.
Kevin CareySaturniidae Lepidoptera Actias Luna:Drawn to your lightFor Sue Holloway Yo pronuncio tu nombre / En las noches oscuras Cuando vienen los astros / A beber en la luna… - Si Mis Manos Pudieran Deshojar- Garcia Lorca
The gentle flutter-thump across his heart had startled him with opposing globes of light: Full moon and sinking sun, he stood between two wings of day, when blood and nature’s breath were even, moving through the hues of leaves and limbs. One hand against the small of back, the other on the elbow of a hoe, he drew deep, felt his sweat run. Perhaps it was these pheromones which called her to his chest, perhaps the silver tag he wore around his neck engraved, “Because you are afraid to love, I am alone.” This sudden slap-flap made him jump; became a bug that beat above his shirt. He screeched and swat. She fell beside his feet, her limb-wings spread—landing flat, inert. A butterfly he thought. But no…a moth! (whose stillness stretched four inches ‘cross the ground.) Her limbs were pale green with yellow stripes which ran along the sides, a line maroon across the front defined her silent span. Each wing-limb held a spot, transparent eye, encircled by concentric rings of gold then blue. She stared at him and he at her. Each bottom tip of wing seemed to dip forever into long and narrow tails. She was so stunning stunned, so beautiful! He bent to get a closer look, afraid to touch her fragile frame, he begged, “Oh God, please don’t let her die.” Perhaps his breath, perhaps his plea had made her stir then fly, a gentle flutter-thump along the air. He never knew her name until he sat one night beside the crescent light of Sue.
By Numbers
After your second surgery I didn't trust my memory, programmed your numbers into my cell phone
while you bounced from ER to SICU to “regular” room
to skilled nursing facility to rehab —
even a disastrous 10-day stay at home — then back to the ER.
As soon as I pressed ENTER it was time to EDIT.
Here are your last numbers —
MOBILE: rehab number WORK: nursing home HOME: hospital
until, EDIT— HOME became hospice.
I will not DELETE them —
now that numbers no longer reach you — still want only to SAVE you. Selectmen Casting Out Roots I Along our sanctuary where Hammonasset runs, Leyland Limited Liability Corporation invades, and bears false testimony for mansion city, Madison Landing, crowding out tidal river zone that connects marshlands and roots.
Selectmen and associates bury letters of protest and separate us from the shoreline by a corridor of diesel 18 wheelers, hummers, and triple trailer trucks.
One selectman says, birds must accommodate to our life style. Condos and urban apartments five stories high block views, so we can not hear or see seaside and sharp-tailed sparrows, piping plovers, blue herons, bitterns, golden sandpipers, or king rails.
II At Hammonasset, stars of wild flowers animate wooded glen with trilliums in roundelay bulldozers devour mulleins, milkweeds, thistles, clover, Indian paintbrush, asters, wild carrots, lady slippers, mayflowers, marsh marigolds, roots struggling underground to grow unseen.
No haven for oak tree, beach plum, fluttering marsh wren, moss weaver, cord grass, and cattail. Hermit crabs in secluded homes with pairs of startled eyes stick out of mud. Painted turtles are helpless before backhoes.
I am the bloodroot bleeding where the oaks fall.
Variations on a Theme
What comes through the carpeted, draped air of my room: rhapsody played by Rachmaninoff, recorded before I was born.
I lift the spruce cone I gathered on the first walk after illness. Arrangement of scales overlapping- each curved open—suddenly dropping a seed, with its papery wing, into my hand.
Yesterday, on my walk, the red setter, old and calm, rose as my host when I approached his yard. Tail pushing through the air, slow current, he padded to me, reached out with his nose, his soft ears, to learn what I had brought him.
The Perishing Weight
Sometimes the mind spreads a geometric web over our windows, dividing the sky, the battered earth, and our arriving life into shapes we can manage. And when each fear is tapped and vibrates, we race to snare the sacred, wrapping it in a cocoon suspended like a pendulum weight. Our wounds hem the edge of its promise, seal its sphere.
And when the sky escapes and the moon outlines our worry in neon, we paint prayers into the arrangement of stacked scenes, scurry from the disproportions, and groom our sensors for the perishing weight of what the wind fills, of what we can believe.
Accidents
Grace is the way out, you want to say but don’t, knowing how it sounds when you’re not the one who backed the car over your two-year old, or killed your best friend on a hunting trip. But I’m always empathic and thankful too for the soft patch of luck beneath my trembling feet.
Things were very good for a neighbor. A second place in the country with pastures for horses, forests for beauty and firewood. The chainsaw revved its sharp teeth until the oak began to fall. Timber, the father cried. The oak, with a mind of its own, twisted and lodged against a smaller hickory, bending it like a giant bow drawn to its limits. One whack from his ax, and the hickory snaps with a sharp backward thrust — a missile locked on the daughter’s head. The living could not believe their eyes.
Only a lumberjack could have known. That, we assured him often. But would facts ease the sorrow? Or even the drag of years? Then the answer came with one loud report.
My Son Discovers the Draw of Water —Samuel, Gulf Shores, 2005
He was still getting used to the sand between his toes when the cool Gulf water crashed around his thighs, knocking him back, then drawing him closer to home.
It took barely a second for his face to go from complaint to laughter, for him to feel the rhythm of the tide, to taste the salt
splashing his smile. Three steps forward, two steps back. Again and again. All light and love. It wasn’t until the water reached his chest
he realized this was more than a game of chase, more than simple joy, and that all pleasures come with a price. He turned to shore and cried for us to bring him back to the heavy sand.
Devotion Mother places a glass bowl on her counter. Clear and bright, reflective, it captures the gold morning light, spins it to spots, scatters them across her walls, a net of rainbows. She fills the bowl with liquid.
Outside a concave stone collects water beside her blue pansies.
Mother, one leg almost an inch shorter than the other, carries her thick soup, in the bowl, on a plastic tray, very slowly, through the sun wedges in the hallway, to the back room for my father.
She will fill him again, in her way, he smiles at a lifetime of her devotion. The Good Daughters never come empty-handed: plastic bags swollen with laundry, brought washed and ironed though they haven't bothered to iron their own for years; simian mitten-puppet peeking from coat pocket-- perhaps this will coax a smile to vacant features; apple, shiny and vitamin-rich antidote to the steam kitchen menu, carefully peeled and handed in crescents to a parent who pushes away the tray's mounded, pale broccoli.
They sigh and wait, in elevators making lethargic ascents, opening on corridors lined with cells-- units in which now live passive or ranting, those who raised them.
They water, from a Dixie cup, plants drying in pots too near vents pouring heat day and night-- "do not touch" posted above the thermostat.
They recognize themselves in each other's eyes, the mix of tenderness, anxiety, impatience, rue.
Some go from geriatric visit to parental home, there to rummage and sort and order. They will discover private truths: the scholarship given up for marriage, a younger woman's letters in an office safe.
Yet these daughters will return again to push a wheelchair or sit by an institutional bed.
These daughters lie awake each night, aging no more a distant fable, envisioned in their own flesh real, terrible and sad. The Breakfast Dishes
Strawberries leave their kisses on the cutting board; there is marmalade on the uneaten crusts. The past is a luxury that we can't stomach, and that no amount of romance can rescue, although it had a bold, fresh taste so recently. Once the zesty rinds are swept to one side, leftover blueberries keep their flawed shape; the brightest flesh of delight is gone, and the rest is wasted, however sweet. Autumn’s Return To The Maple Pavilion -ink and colors on paper/hanging scroll Huang Junbi, 1898-1991
You returned since your essence never left. In callow youth, fevered and in flux, lusting for meaning, you cast off family, home.
Now there are white streaks in your thin hair. All expectations altered – birds in flight, ambivalent amid the old strumming life. Bare, crooked tree branches wait for winter.
Now you recall in sharp hunger your youth in shades of haunting reverie, all you hold lightly as regret, heavy as assurance.
In Maple Pavilion, autumn has again prevailed. Summer’s haze only a hollow memory. Everyone is certain what you will discover – cold shadows of the past, curled in autumn mist. Robin ChapmanCOUGAR STORIES The first time a cougar entered my thought Gary Snyder extolled the delight of the cougars’ return to California mountains, the art of the wild, and I repeated the story in Petrarch’s village, northern Italy, dinner at the villa, where my seatmate’s face clouded with anger– his sister a runner, killed by a cougar on those California roads.
The second was our honeymoon, canoeing Utah’s canyonland, where kayakers found tracks as big as dinnerplates circling the waterhole and a cougar screamed as they filled their canteens. And now, learning the difficult art of keeping distinct the shy mountain lion of myth and the creature criss-crossing my path: this cougar, who’s ranged Tunnel Mountain for years, who sits outside town doors watching for cats and dogs, who walked off only grudgingly as the men in green opened noisy fire: local knowledge what’s required to live in the actual world.
I rehearse the wilderness virtue of wariness: look around. If cougar, make noise, appear large, move slowly away. Do not run. Do not play dead. And fear, that cougar of metaphor that will always range the woods: learn to recognize its haunts, read its tracks, grant its place in our world. Did you give up your body parts freely
In the ward I'll take your arm, sister, hold you if you stumble. Once my rival, one step ahead, now at last you need me. I’ve moved past envy like the rows of empty beds, their taut sheets white as new bandages, and remember your call in deep darkness. I struggled up from sleep. and dreamed: infant Jimmy, sleep-slack in my arms, pale skin flawless, till on his leg a gash opened like a red shriek. Midmorning, tea in your kitchen. An officer detailed the attack, Jim's presence of mind: he called for help, calmed a hysterical private, talked a soldier through a tourniquet. Phoned home. But more. In transport, the rest of Jim’s right leg was amputated. Brave efforts to save the left: severed femoral artery, blood loss, shock. Airlift to Germany. Critical condition.
Impossible. He phoned you today. Just a small mishap. But the officer recited AC16826061.
You gasped for air, doubled over, moaned: a cornered animal.
Now in Walter Reed's amputee ward, you'll face your broken son. When you falter, I’ll hold you, sister. I’ll avert my eyes and shroud questions I ache to ask: Was our freedom worth both legs? A hand? The right side of the skull? Tree of Life
“What if he now reaches out his hand and takes fruit from the tree of life also, eats it and lives forever?” —Genesis 3: 22
Whatever happened to that other tree growing wild in the rear of the garden— the deepest reaches—as far from the gates of Eden as almighty God could plant it, dazzling, deep-rooted, lofty, having the hardest and darkest wood by far?
What if Adam and Eve had found it, plucked and bitten the bitter fruit depending from its swollen branches, the very staff of life though starchy and dry, and swallowed its pulp without any urging from the serpent?
How might their fate and the fate of all their descendants differed? Might that single trunk have spread into an enormous orchard and they and we empowered to live forever, eating that fruit today as eagerly as apples and finding the meaty flesh just as sweet?
Yet God so coveted that tree and its power he dared not warn them not to eat its fruit nor let them know that it even existed, preferring that our first parents should fall, suffer the pain of knowing good from evil, but not share the glory of being divine.
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