On a Sunnier Note

Even while the tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico plays itself out, I remain a happy wife and poet.

The picture here was taken from the lanai of the condo that Roger and I bought this month where we'll be living during the winter beginning this December. It's about seven water miles upstream from the Gulf on the north banks of the Caloosahatchee River. A quiet place and one we're looking forward to furnishing and settling into: our snowbird abode. It is a dream come true we didn't know he had until a few months ago. And now it has happened: we have a Florida home in North Fort Myers.

We've also had good fortune with Roger's health. His hormone therapy continues to work and his new PSA results reached an all-time low-low of 0.05 this month. The cancer is under control for a while longer and he's doing quite well with it. A bit chubby now around the middle and subject to -- ohmigosh -- hot flashes, but all in all quite well.

We have an energetic summer ahead. On Monday next we depart for the Wild West into the desert southwest and then onto the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Be prepared for images and poems from across the country in the three months ahead of travel for us with trusty Alis Elizabeth Trailer behind the van and the two of us singing along (if you can call it that) to "Here Comes the Sun."

On the literary front, I am pleased to report that Salmon Poetry has taken my full-length book, Athabaskan Fractal and Other Poems of the Far North for publication in mid-2012. I'm on Cloud 999. It's quite a breakthrough for me and I'm pleased that the collection has a home...only 10+ years in the making...and another two before it's born. Lots of time to enjoy anticipating.

For more about Salmon Poetry, go to http://www.salmonpoetry.com/

Spring has been not only the most pleasant one I can remember -- came early, came warm -- it's been otherwise fertile for my poetry. I've seen many poems appear on the Web and in print journals, among which is River Poets Journal where I'll be featured poet this spring (coming soon to http://www.riverpoetsjournal.com/RiverPoetsJournal-Links.html).

Here are a few more links you can check out now if you're curious:

http://wildgoosepoetryreview.wordpress.com/ (two poems)

http://www.deadmule.com/poetry/2010/04/karla-linn-merrifield-%E2%80%93-four-poems/ (four poems)

http://wildamorris.blogspot.com/ (poem + analysis)

http://home.earthlink.net/~tinyviolet/thecentrifugaleyepoetryjournal/id1.html (two poems and my latest regular book review column)

I hope you enjoy. Remember: Poetry heals. And celebrates. And furthers the sacred.

Love,

Karla

Kiss of Death

I pause this morning to try to grasp the magnitude of the Gulf oil spill. As far as I know the fish in this photograph, taken on a Florida Gulf beach last winter, probably a victim of the frost kill, died of natural causes. It's one of the lucky ones. I just can't comprehend how many fellow fish and countless sea turtles and cormorants and pelicans are going to die a slimy, suffocating death because of the arrogance and greed of the robber baron BP. Never before in human history -- a short one in the scheme of things -- have we seen such devastation, and it's only just begun.

I hate to put a damper on your day. But it's good, I think, to pause before this holiday weekend and honor the newly dead and dying. And to have faith in our president who's got a mighty grasp on the situation and is doing right by us. Barack Obama has the wisdom to do the right things. And he is. The job is Herculean but this is one man who's up to it. We must do our part and stand by him even as we grieve.

Blessings to Earth this Memorial Day Weekend,

Karla

Spring Is Sprung

Forsythia and Bradford pears, daffodils and wood violets -- all abloom as we make our way north from the Okefenokee Swamp where we spent a weekend, the warmest in many southern weeks. Now in North Carolina for a few days with our family, we look back on that idyllic weekend in the great wetlands of Georgia, remembering our kayak outing on Billy's Lake (lower photo) and walks on the boardwalk through the swamp where I took the upper photo of Red Blanket Lichen (an endemic species) and Old Man's Beard (an epiphyte aka "air plant") growing on a smooth-barked Dahoon Holly Tree.


Like the Everglades, the Okefenokee is to me a sacred place, and both are mercifully preserved thanks to the National Park Service in the case of the 'Glades and the National Wildlife Refuge System in the case of the Oke'. Both places have been muses to me over the years.

So as we turn our eyes toward the warming sun and bask in its rays, enjoying the blossoming of trees and flowers, I'll leave you with this poem about the Okefenokee, written several years ago and still applicable.

Happy spring...and see you from the home front where we are due to arrive on April 3.


***


The Epiphyte on Plato’s Trees

by Karla Linn Merrifield


What it is to capture
the imagination
of a poet to go with her
into longleaf pine flatwoods
or follow her into the heart
of the Okefenokee Swamp
to be in southern Georgia
beneath its maritime
or its vast half-land inland
island canopy to be held
in its sway:

chiggers snagged in a swag
of Spanish moss itself
caught in the snarl
of live oak on twisted limb

saw palmettos netted
in thorny catbriers climbing

partly on terra firma
partly in tannic water
a black gum, a tupolo
in a coppice
in the understory
in the hardened grasp of
a strangling vine

it is a great entanglement
this forest of words
that has arisen with
some million gripping tendrils
a composition in green
profligate enchantment
where you are meant to be
one standing still

Winter Reflection

I'll say one thing about this winter: The cold -- yes, even in Florida -- has given me much time to reflect. What with three frosts (to date!) and a hailstorm earlier this week, it hasn't been kayaking weather. And the cold has taken a toll on this plein air poet who's so fond of sitting in the great outdoors to pen her verse. Still, hiking and thinking go together nicely and, with added layers to keep the brain warm, I've enjoyed letting both poetic and prosaic ideas float into my head and away with no intentions other than to listen to the ideas and let them evaporate on another gust of north wind.

One thought that did take root is that beauty survives regardless of the weather forecast. Sounds rather mundane doesn't it?! But true. So, on a chill morning along the Ochlockonee River on the Forgotten Coast of Florida's eastern panhandle, I watched the sun rise in puissant splendor, warming the North American continent toward spring, if not firing up the day much above 50 degrees.

A poet friend of mine, Tom Holmes, always urges readers at the end of his e-mails to "Find beauty." To which I will add: Let beauty find you.

Here's to the coming of spring but with joy in the grip of winter.

Island New Year's Greetings

New Year's Is for the (Tropical) Birds

Frigatebirds wheel fractals
in infinite turquoise skies.

***



Roger and I spent New Year's Day on Garden Key in Dry Tortugas National Park, a constellation of small tropical isles 70 miles west of Key West and actually closer to Cuba than the Keys!

After a tour of Fort Jefferson (once a prison for Confederacy soldiers during the Civil War) and some snorkeling (notherin to write home about, alas, but the water was soothingly warm), I stretched out on my back on a beach blanket under the warm subtropical blue skies and watched some 50 magnificent frigatebirds wheel effortlessly across the blue. It was a half-hour of pure bliss.

We also had a close encounter with a burrowing owl who was not burrowing but rather perched in a niche in the brick walls of the ammunition repository at the fort. Who, who, who knows what he was doing 70 miles at sea on a small Gulf island!

Tomorrow we'll be back in the Everglades for a week of hiking and kayaking in my favorite place on Earth! And, as 2009 National Park Artist-in-Residence, I'll have a return engagement with a poetry reading on the 9th at the Coe Visitors Center.

From there we'll be settling down in the Western Everglades' Ten Thousand Island area for a month on Chokoloskee Island. More to come from the Gulf Coast!

Happy New Year to All!

Wood, Sand, Water

Visual Aid


Complexity is underrated,
the trees teach us.


***

My snowbird sojourn is well under way. I write this morning from Jekyll Island, GA. However, the adjacent image, "Uprooted," was taken a few days ago at Hunting Island State Park in South Carolina, my favorite state park in all the land where we always stop en route south. In recalling that memorable visit (several beach walks!), I wrote the above poem. It's a scherzo, a form developed by friend and poet William Heyen and one restricted to 13 syllables, not including the title. Each scherzo must also include a rhyme as does "Visual Aid."

Hunting Island will recede further into the distance as we make our way later this morning to Georgia's lovely Crooked River State Park for three days beneath the rare long-leaf pines in the habitat of gopher tortoises. I will breathe the tidal rhythms of the St. Marys River and ponder further the miracle of diversity in Nature.

In Snowbird Season

Today is our last day at home; we head for points south tomorrow morning at daybreak, a 294-mile run to Carlisle, PA.

But I take a few minutes' rest from the whirlwinds of packing van and trailer, savoring our home on a wintry, gray morning. Beloved husband Roger is off to nearby Albion to tend to repairs on the minivan. Seems after 132,000 miles -- most of it pulling Alis Elizabeth Trailer -- Bore the Van needs new struts and related suspension work. Unplanned, unexpected, this duty calls him off on one more last-minute mission. Men's work.

It gives me some time to bask in the glow of a candle, listening to Simon & Garfunkle's Concert in Central Park in the comfort of the library one last morning. I get to do poet's work. Drafting a sonnet, revising a poem I wrote last week.

And quietly reveling in this morning's good news: Literary House Review has nominated my poem, "According to Instinct" for a Pushcart Prize! A second nomination! Yehaw! Thank you, LHR!

Soon I will turn my thoughts to my winter to-do list. The mundane calls.

Be well, friends and visitors.

May you receive the many gifts of the Universe this holiday season. And fellow poets? Write on!