3 poems: Sybil Pittman Estess

Poet Laureate nominee Sybil Pittman Estess will read from her new book— Like That: New and Selected Poems -- at the Friendswood Public Library on Thursday, March 26 at 7pm. Sybil Pittman Estess, Ph.D. has been nominated for Poet Laureate of the State of Texas for 2015, and was one of eight finalists for Poet Laureate in 2009.  Her previous poetry volumes include: Maneuvers, 2010, by Inleaf Press; Labyrinth, Pecan Grove Press, 2007; Blue, Candled in January Sun, Word Tech Communications, 2005; and Seeing the Desert Green, Latitudes Press, 1987. 

Also, Ted Estess, University of Houston Honors College Founding Dean, will read from his latest book, Fishing Spirit Lake.

The three poems below can be found in the Sybil Estess book Like That: New and Selected Poems.

                                              

 

                                             “ENCHANTMENT”

We float on a three-year-old sailboat,

“Enchantment,” bought from Maine.

We leave from Long Island. By motor.

We moor in moonlight, an hour past

Port Jefferson. At midnight, waves

rock, cradle all of us. With open hatch,

we sleep in twin births. No cuddling.

Cold wind on water. The co-captain

couple inhabit main cabin. In night

I think:  not many restore old crafts such

as this one, or pilot them now. Only

learned sailors comprehend “Geo-positioning

System.” Or read satellites. Mark correct

coordinates on charts. But our two loving,

married mates do. She even with her MS

disease. They do not get lost, since they heed

all these angels. They use their depth-finders

diligently. They are aware: without careful

instruments, testing (how this relates to that),

anyone can run aground. . . At daylight

with no dawn on Independence Day, for

six hours our boat points north, slowly.

We traverse the sound by same motor.

No sails, at nine knots. Every craft today

creeps in fog, dangerously. We search

the precarious way over to shore for lost

land. Meanwhile, my old love, all day I

plumb our own depths, alone, by a means

few do. I read poems, collected, called

On Love. Like this boat, these transport me

to new places. They are my sole means

to imagination, the one path through haze.

Mid-afternoon, with no warning, Connecticut

suddenly unveils—solid green marvel.

We are mysteriously there:  July 4: a new country.

The third sea-day, we go north, toward Rhode

Island. I think how yesterday the fog, like

our lives, had been holding us back so long

from solid sun, bright, unbroken.

Mistiness finished, today Newport.

~Sybil Pittman Estess

RETURNING: HIGH PLACE ON LAKE

Nearly twenty summers here. Seven in our house

we built. We two imagined the “here” as if

heaven. As if we ourselves planed these pine

logs. You drew it, facing the water at nearly

9,000 feet. I collected carefully each furnishing

for two years in Houston, scavenged like a rat.

We built dams over any flood of disappointment,

like the beavers do who gnaw here. I envisioned

each of six rooms, what would go where: color,

texture, and theme. That January you ascended

to frozen paradise to prod builders. Two icy weeks

below zero you worked at their sides with hammer

and fur gloves. In May we moved in. I thought

I had never seen such glory, such an image become

life. It was everything we'd labored for. More. Now...

I find nothing much external excites me. Not even

the entire Rocky Range, with its few ice peaks this July.

June's killing fires didn't touch me. (So what if it burns?)

Time with its happen stances has seared us too - like forest

crisps - with its refining blaze. Are outer views now

irrelevant? As your humorous dead brother once laughed,

“Bodies' parts begin to fall off. They're not under

warranty.” At seventy, like these huge Osprey

 here, we dive deep to feed. We have mostly soul left.

~Sybil Pittman Estess

                                                                     THE BEACH

A child plays on sand by waves

out my door at the motel in Galveston.

He pulls something - wagon? No, surfboard.

He waits for his brother to come. Then

he runs away fast, beyond my horizon.

It's 8:30, a Sunday morning.

I was one child In Florida more than

fifty years before. I was a girl, age nine

when Daddy first took us. He soon died. I am

always wayfaring to water. My place is

clear, aqua, 1950s sand paradise. I still see

myself, waiting for my sister, and Daddy. I am

this child.

~Sybil Pittman Estess

Authors Ted Estess and Sybil Pittman Estess at FPL

Art Exhibit: Opening Reception: Corey Beth LaBuff

Monday, March 16 from 6:30 to 8:30pm (come and go)

Corey Beth LaBuff, a Texas based artist, currently resides in Houston. She received her BFA from the University of Houston – Clear Lake. She enjoys working in acrylic, watercolor, soft pastel, colored pencil, graphite, and ink. She also dabbles in printmaking creating linoleum block cuts. Much of her work is inspired by her hometown of Galveston, Texas, her love of the beach, and her love of animals. Her works of art range from greeting cards, portraits, landscapes, themed murals, to Mardi Gras floats and decorations. Her main goal in every piece of artwork is to bring joy and happiness to others.

NASA Flight Director Glynn Lunney at FPL

featured poet Daniel Carrington

Daniel Carrington will be featured at FPL’s off the page poetry series in May of 2015. Below you will find Daniel’s poem The Painter.  Upon invitation he also contributed an Afterword, original to From the Reference Desk and meant to add insight into The Painter and his creative process.

Daniel Carrington is a Houston-based architect and poet. He is a lifetime member of the Gulf Coast Poets and has been a three-time Spotlight Poet at their annual Poetry Out of Bounds event. In addition, he was featured in Public Poetry’s 2013 Summer/Winter Reading Series and has been selected as a Juried Poet for Houston Poetry Fest in 2010, ‘12, ‘13, and ’14, and his work has appeared in each year’s anthology. He is currently working his first poetry collection entitled Mosaics of the Night.

THE PAINTER

ours is a fleshy fruit

beneath overcast skies.

by contrast, the bad apples

with which we battle

are like gnarled fists and knuckles

under the hard sun of heaven.

those sharp shadows that mark

the orchard floor define a dark aspect

that sits alongside simple pleasures,

as mingled as the palette of the painter –

the fields of gold and crows of black.

much is made of this fertile crescent

in which we grow and go to seed,

but what I know is such that

the canvas weft might hold it

if it were not a crime to even speak it.

it is this:

let us be grasshoppers, you and I.

what the industry of insects makes

is a social apparatus, a levee

or earthen dam against which presses

an eager water in which we sense

no enmity, no joy,

just the business of overflowing the valley

to renew the land through violence.

(Originally published in the 2010 Houston Poetry Fest Anthology)

AFTERWORD

“The Painter” wasn’t published until 2010, but its earliest drafts date back to ’06.  Writing this companion piece gave me the opportunity to go back and reexamine those initial brushstrokes in an effort to help any interested readers better understand my process as well as my personal take on the overall composition.  (This is the point where a *SPOILER ALERT* is warranted, though I’ve tried to leave some things to the imagination.)

The poem is grounded in actual events of that not-so-distant time, though to betray them would be like exposing a canvas to prove it’s there.  It serves best discreetly but, much like the events I allude to in the poem, springs to mind at the merest mention.  After all, what battles?  What levees?  It’s enough to say that they served their purpose (in the narrative, if not in reality).  Add to that the withering pace of my workload at the time, and it comes to this: I was tired – plain and simple.  Art, however, is rarely either.

If there is any refuge at all though, I find it in art, so from this very real but somewhat oblique starting point, the poem ventures out into reverie, into a landscape awash in beauty but feathered by dread.  And it was here that I paid a not-so-subtle homage to Vincent van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows, a painting as much framed by levees as the painter himself, stricken as he was.  I like to think there was a measure of solace for him inside his frames.  But there were also the crows.  They’re just impressions of birds really, reduced to a few sublime brushstrokes.  If one were to look closer, they might realize that it is us who color them with our omens – a hallmark of our duality, those inescapable oppositions that define us.

It may be reasonable to acknowledge hardboiled truths, but I find that reason is seldom reason enough.  Recognizing a fact is not the same as reconciling with it.  And it’s at this point that the poem turns on itself.  Weary as I was, having come to this place to find respite, it’s easy to resent reminders that all is fleeting.  In that sense, I think my invocation of Aesop’s fabled grasshopper was more hyperbole than a ringing endorsement of slothfulness.  It’s a plea against extremes made in the most extreme terms – proof in itself of the limitations of reason.

Ultimately, the poem does not offer an olive branch though, not to mankind and certainly not to me.  That I perceived events unfolding around me as adversarial is a fault of perception on my part.  Time and tide will always imperil our levees, and our intercessions in this world are impermanent at best.  To simply understand that wasn’t enough for me.  But by embracing it, I made peace with the Painter.

Daniel Carrington

Other Poems by Daniel Carrington:

Pens for Plowshares and The Minnows' Stare