Nestlings and Feathers

When flipping through my summer sketchbook, I came upon my painting of a dead bluejay nestling—a colorful sack of guts. 
I then thought about those other intimate dramas of vulnerable birdlife, often witnessed through dew-soaked remains or simply 
a heap of fluttering feathers. So I chose to create a video using Dan’s poems “Maelstrom” and “Hawk Feather,” mingling our 
responses to those moving encounters.
                                                                                                   — Suzanne 


"Maelstrom" and "Hawk Feather"                                                                          

_____________________________________________________________________

Maelstrom

    (Or Dance of the Fallen Nestlings)

Splayed on the dark

   roadside by a wind

that whirled against

   our screen all night,

tossing sleep into

   strange streaks of

dream, and sucking

   three wet sacks of

bluejay life from

   hemlock boughs into

a ringlet of bright

   dancers, mouthing

cries of ecstasy

   above blue wing-

stubs nearly grasped

   like fragile hands,

still featherless,

   upon an urn in

late May’s icy

   light.

Hawk Feather

A tail feather

was all ... breeze-

spun to the wood-

pile.  Fawn-brown

ribbed with touches

of soft black —

stirring the ire

of our backyard

woods, like code,

that balmy noon.

Grackles, crows

shrieked down as

one from linden

boughs.  Demon

guardians of the

heartpulse buried

in each hidden

heap of fluff that

bright spring

noon?

_____________________________________________________________________

“Maelstrom” and “Hawk Feather” first appeared 
in Puerto del Sol and Shenandoah, respectively. 
Then, together, in our collaborative chapbook, 
Field Notes (Rubicon press, Edmonton /
Alberta, Canada, 2007).

Two Poems by Robert Morgan

For the September Red Eft video, our guest poet is Robert Morgan.

The minute I read Morgan’s “Brownfield,” I dog-eared the page. I knew I'd go back to it someday, for it spoke to my belief that we 
might find grace in wounded places. In fact, I’d once created a painting of my own that it immediately evoked, a work I titled Landfill.  

I merged that image with Robert’s telling words for this first piece on the video.

The second poem, “Jar Fly,” offers its grace to a small often-ignored insect: the mysterious cicada, who—like us—creates 

love ballads.

                                                                                                                            —Suzanne

[For more about Robert Morgan see the bio and links below.]

“Brownfield” and “Jar Fly”

________________________________________________________________________________

Brownfield

The lot that’s poisoned by a spill

of toluene or gasoline

and tons of industrial swill

and drops of mercury dispersed

among the bits of asbestos

and rusting nails and tangled coils

with scattered beads of Styrofoam

all tossed among the posts and beams

of rotting wood and toads of grease,

exploded garbage bags and inks

on asphalt floes, and silty sinks,

is touched in one remote spot by

an ironweed’s purple mystery.

Jar Fly

The cry is more a seethe than song,

high in the oaks, a call at once

bone-dry and juicy, blast so loud

it seems a thousand rattlesnakes

are giving furious warning,

so wild it’s near impossible

to spot the source. The insect, called

cicada in most places, here

was known as jar fly, since the kids,

if they could catch one, sealed it in

a jar and watched its finger-small

anatomy vibrate inside

the amplifying bulb to light

the evening calm with serenade,

with fanfare, rasping anthem.

But what was usually found in woods

was not the tiny rock star itself

but just the husk of skin it shed

before it soared into the trees

to rock the lazy summer breeze

for hours on end with love ballad.

________________________________________________________________________________

 “Brownfield” and “Jar Fly” were published in Terroir (Penguin Books, 2011).  

Robert Morgan is the author of fourteen books of poetry, most recently Dark Energy (Penguin Books, 2015). Morgan

has also published nine volumes of fiction, including Gap Creek, a New York Times bestseller. Among numerous awards, 

he has received the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from

the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. Born in Hendersonville, North Carolina (where he’d collected cicadas, himself, as a boy), he later moved to upper New York where he’s taught at Cornell University since 1971. 

For more about Robert Morgan, visit the author’s website: http://www.robert-morgan.com

Naming Colors

The nuances of natural color never cease to amaze us.  And so I created this video where Dan meditates on finding precise words — 
and I mix precise combinations of paint — to match the color of a simple berry. 

                                                                                                                                                 —Suzanne 

 Naming Colors
 


_________________________________________________________________________________

Naming Colors

“Soapy purple — no, deep soft

   pink — those berries” . . .

All my conscious life

I’ve striven, blind to other

earthly orderings, to get

them “right”: without

clear gainful 

purpose? 

        You’d

swear I was a painter,

potter, or at least some

dyer of fine cloth,

seeking ideas . . .

        But no such

chance, with unclear

goals & gently

trembling

hand. 

       Just inner need

to pierce small moments

of the day: this ritual

that from my youth

I’ve naturally

adopted.

      Now older

& so often foggy-minded

when I rise, can tell my

morning clarity of mind, my

cast of eye, by how quickly

I cease groping.  How

quickly I’m satisfied with

my first “mental

match” —

                 sometimes

shared with my artist wife,

when trimming growth

       around the yard, or on

       our “viewing” walks down

rural paths.  

                 Companion

I trust the most, more

       skilled & industrious,

       in many ways,

than I . . .

                And so I wait

       on tenterhooks, while 

       feigning nonchalance

       (another of our

       games) for her

       response:

 “I believe they’re more a cloudy

      rose, those berries . . . "

_________________________________________________________________________________

Suzanne Stryk   Naming Colors    30" x 22"    mixed media  on paper     

The Naming Colors painting appeared in "Love," an exhibit at Second Street Gallery 

(Charlottesville, VA  2006) curated by Leah Stoddard. The show featured collaborations 

between writers and artists. The images in the video are details from the painting, including

Dan's handwritten poem.

Notes from the Field

With Spring now fully arrived, I’m once more soaking in all the buzzing and peeping around the yard. The caterpillars are slinking through 
the fresh-green leaves, and I’ve already been slapping a few bothersome mosquitoes while lunching on the deck beneath our hill. So for
this month’s Red Eft video, I've decided to mingle three of Dan’s short poems inspired by those very creatures, while merging his human 
imagination---past and present---with their observed behaviors.
                                                                                                                                                        -- Suzanne

Field Notes: 3 Short Poems by Dan Stryk


_________________________________________________________________________________

                  Caterpillar Life

   I leave this caterpillar life

       behind (the long

            night

 sluffed in my morning

      bath), to set

                                               out again: slightly

                                                   above

                                                      the Earth . . .

        Birth of a Mosquito

                Arising in my

                tearduct

                on this muggy

                night of

                wakefulness,

                to swirl

                on through the

                vortex of

                my eye socket,

                swooshing

                through rank

                nostril-

                hairs — then

                out!  That

                single whine

                returning

                to its ruby

                source, a

                despised breed,
                to live.

                                         

             Child’s Sin?

                

            How could this tiny treefrog

                    whose glistening green legs

            I’d sundered from the rough

                     pinebark he’d clung to,

                             stuck

            to restless fingers in Japan,

                     hop into my life again,

                               in

            bright-green dream, this stormy

                     night    so many years
                           beyond?

                                                   

_________________________________________________________________________________

    

"Caterpillar Life" and "Child's Sin" first appeared in the journals American Tanka and Harvard Review, 

respectively. All three pieces in the video then appeared in our collaborative chapbook of epigrammatic 

poems and complementary paintings and sketches, Field Notes: Stray Musings in Brief Forms (Rubicon 

Press, Edmonton / Alberta, Canada, 2007), and later "Caterpillar Life" and "Child's Sin" were included 

in Dimming Radiance: Poems & Prose Parables (Wind Publications, 2008).

Two Poems by Felicia Mitchell

For the March Red Eft video, our guest poet is Felicia Mitchell.

I've often found it strange that when painting a wild animal, I've glimpsed its essence most fully only after cleaning my brushes 

and flicking off the studio lights. So encountering Felicia Mitchell's parallel concept in "One Green Heron at Dusk" was like a 
summons to my own deep feelings in her act of photographing the wild. 

While in "Bat Moral," the second piece in this two-part video, Felicia is startled by discovering a bat in the grass outside her 
home, inspiring an unusual meditation on the struggle for peaceful coexistence between all creatures in the natural world.

                                                                                                                                                         -- Suzanne

For more about Felicia Mitchell, visit www.feliciamitchell.net
or www.press53.com/bioFeliciaMitchell

"One Green Heron at Dusk" and "Bat Moral"        



_________________________________________________________________________________

One Green Heron at Dusk

That green heron needs a telephone pole
as much as I need a camera in my hand
but there it is--making do without a tree 
or without fish that used to be in this creek.
Tomorrow it will fly somewhere else.
This evening, nothing is the matter.
Dragonflies fly, the green heron eats.

Straining my neck as it shifts its neck,
I am seeking the perfect image of this heron.
That is the one I will leave by the creek,
the pictures in my camera just shadows 
of a time that has come and gone 
like the fish that used to swim here.

Later, if I close my eyes and clear my mind, 
I will see a green heron as patient as a green heron
without a camera lens between us.


Bat Moral

Sometimes a bat is just a bat.
It's not an omen, or a vampire,
or a rabid threat to your good health.
It's just brown, and lonely,
as confused as you are sometimes
when you turn to find someone
and he has turned another corner.
A bat can be as warm and fuzzy
as you want it to be, or cuter,
but it's still not a good idea to touch it
even when it ends up in the grass 
wrestling your dog at four in the afternoon
where it should be hanging upside down
like a good bat in the rafters
or turning some corner to find the woods.
Bad dog, bad bat, I'm okay, you're okay,
but it's still not so good to fight,
not mammal to mammal,
not at four in the afternoon
over who or what belongs in the yard
or who or what should go which way
when there are so many paths to choose from.

_________________________________________________________________________

"One Green Heron at Dusk" was anthologized in Sunrise from Blue Thunder (Pirene's Fountain, 2011). "Bat Moral" was first published in Terrain.  Both poems appear in Waltzing With Horses (Press 53, 2014)

A Walk in the Snow

My recent walk — or should I say trudge? — through a snowy, sub-zero landscape brought to mind Dan’s poem “Snowblindness.”  

That poem in turn inspired our February video, a tribute to this blustery yet beautiful season. 

Our guest artist is Southwest Virginian landscape painter Kyle Buckland, whose work deeply explores the spirit of the Southern 
Highlands, and the shifts of season and time of day upon them, while also exploring the richness of paint itself. Along 
with Kyle’s winter landscapes, I included a few of my own drawings of withered grass and brittle stalks emerging from the 
white canvas of snow covering the hill behind our home this winter. 

                                                                     — Suzanne 

 [To learn more about Kyle, visit www.kylebuckland.com]

Snowblindness




___________________________________________________________________________________

                               Snowblindness

                       One must have a mind of winter . . .  

Only the red dogwood’s

brilliant scar in the whitescape

down the river

leads me on.  And still

the burning cold’s shrill light

spreads through me,

                      as always

mid-December

when the crust sets hard

as calcium,

             and throbbing bones

might keep a sane man

from his daily 

trek along the river bank

in constant glare.  

                       But let  

another man partake

his brittle glee

unmocked,

           that morning walk’s
“insanity,” his thumping

breast swelled ardently

within.  

    Snowblindness,

the pure sting of heaped

brilliance: luster

of an emptied mind,

    stunned seeing

       in and out.

___________________________________________________________________________________

An early version of “Snowblindness” appeared in The Artist and the Crow [Purdue University Press, 1984]; 
the present version is forthcoming in Back to the Source: Selected Poems and Parables (1980-2014)
[San Francisco Bay Press, 2015]. 

Requiem for a Thrush

Last October I found a thrush dead on the asphalt outside my downtown studio.  I scooped up the olive-brown bird — limp 

but still so exquisite.  Then placing it on my drawing table, I studied those intricate feathers around beak and eye, while sketching 

its stiffened scaly feet.  And I couldn't help but think about the difference between natural death and the senseless death of road-kill.  

It then occurred to me that I might one day create a video with Dan’s poem, “If I Were GOD,” as a requiem to all those creatures 

who die from our blundering ways. 

                                                                                                                                        — Suzanne

                                                                                                                   


_________________________________________________________________________________

     If I Were GOD . . .

Thrushes would not plunge

       through ice-storms, snapping

                   off those hulking towers

                          I’d allowed to rise

& thrive, nor suck into

       great engines streaking

                    shrilly overhead —

                           nor would I let them

slap against the blind

       herd of smeared windshields

                    zapping glibly through

                           VAST DAYLIGHT on My

thoroughfares below.  Nor

      would they perish in lost flocks

                    flung to chill waves

                             by shocking shifts

of climate that, when dreamy,

       I’d allowed.  I’d beg Myself: “No

                    more.  No more mistakes.” 

                          But in My SECOND

COVENANT, I’d now so much

       more carefully devise, of balmy

                    days of Grace for feathered sprites

       so intricately fashioned on

                  the third day of My ART,

                          I’d touch their slumping

spirits with hushed sighs of mild

        breeze, those fragile bodies

                    stammering with aches so fine

                            they’d soothe / as, chirring,

they’d float down through sunlit

        updrafts, buoying a most gradual

                  

                   descent . . . till sweeping through

                           the tree-limbs, past those

 bare nests where their brief lives

        had begun, they’d settle

                     oh so lightly
                                into brush.                               

  

sketchbook page, thrush

_________________________________________________________________________________

"If I Were GOD" was first published in Ascent, Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota.