A Poem by Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda

In this video sparked by Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda’s evocative “Deer Running,” her own intimate voice and that of her husband, Patricio Foronda, poignantly entwine.  In turn, representing the passionate yet turbulent union of the famed Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Suzanne conveys the spirit of Carolyn’s own empathic vision of Frida’s deep emotional suffering underlying her vibrantly painted “The Little Deer,” where roused by the dual ordeal of chronic spinal damage fused with her soulmate’s infidelity, she paints the wounded creature — surreally endowed with her own keen gaze and dark knit brows — pierced by ruthless arrows, like a bleeding St. Sebastian.

                                                                                                                                                             — Dan

                                                                                                                             

[For more about Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda, please see the bio and links below.]




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                                    Deer Running

                                    Beneath a coarse sky, I flee
                                    through an enclosed glade,

                                    Run toward the light,

                                    little deer.  Catch hold of

                                     my limber frame: a young stag’s

                                     crowned with massive antlers.

                                    brightness sizzling above

                                    the glazed, forest floor.

                                     Arrows gash my chest and flank.

                                     Crimson trickles from wounds,

                                      Raw sienna spools

                                      a well-worn path

                                     my pursuer crouched behind a tree,

                                     the trunk’s exposed roots swollen

                                     in the distance.  Birdsong

                                     pulses like waves bobbing

                                     like the flawed design of my human

                                     form, stones in my soul.

                                     crystal notes. Run toward

                                     the hymns, nimble deer.

                                     And you, Diego, place one leafy,

                                     golden branch withering before me

                                    Let loose your foe’s nine arrows,

                                    trembling in your hide.

                                    as I prepare to die and resurrect

                                    as growth: green bark,

                                   Do not fear death. Your wounds,

                                   their indelible marks will heal

                                    green branches at the foot

                                    of your shadow,

                                    as I push away lightning

                                    from the barren plot,

                                   swallowed whole

                                   by sun’s unerring rays.

                                    where your body collapses

                                    in a radiant spool.

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"Deer Running" appears in The Embrace: Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (San Francisco Bay Press, 2013).

About Us

Carolyn and Patricio Foronda share a love of the visual arts and recently began collaborating to produce paintings that celebrate nature. Eighteen years ago after moving to Virginia’s Middle Peninsula, they established a NWF Certified Wildlife Habitat to preserve the natural land surrounding their home. Daily, they attract an array of birds, butterflies, and other wildlife. Currently, they’re raising Monarchs and releasing them daily during the summer months.

Patricio is a native Chilean, who grew up in the highlands of Bolivia and earned his degree as a veterinarian in Brazil. His admiration of the visual arts originated in South America, where he watched Quechua Indians in the Bolivian highlands craft musical instruments, jewelry, and colorful shawls. He started painting in Brazil and expanded his knowledge of art by taking classes and by attending lectures at museums. He has exhibited his work in South America and in art galleries throughout Virginia.

Author of seven poetry books and editor of three anthologies, Carolyn served as Virginia’s Poet Laureate from 2006-2008. Her numerous awards include the Art-in-Literature: Mary Lynn Kotz Award for The Embrace: Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Carolyn also works as an abstract colorist painter. She finds inspiration for both her art and poetry from her natural surroundings and from viewing artwork by such celebrated figures as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Georgia O’Keeffe. A lifelong educator, she conducts art-inspired poetry workshops through the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ Statewide Partners Program. For more information visit her website, www.carolynforonda.com.


Photo of Carolyn and Patricio Foronda by Michael Kunzinger

The Heron's Eye

Recently I felt muddled while painting -- distracted by restless bouts of altering this and that, to no avail -- there 

was nothing to do but quit the day.  So I drove off for a calming walk at our local wetland in Sugar Hollow Park. 

What fortune to spot a green heron then, patiently stalking minnows in the murky swamp. How I admired that bird's 

intense focus!  And standing there on the boardwalk, I felt the essence of Dan's "Master Heron."     

                                                                                                                                                        -- Suzanne                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

          

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                                     Master Heron

                       St. Marys fishing village,

                         coastal Georgia

 “Mud Scoggin” — in humble Georgia

     dialect that hides uncanny

 mastery each dusk you stalk

     the boat-dock within moments

 of the risen tide swelled ripe

     with squirming bream.  Perched

 on the edge of bobbing skiff, or

     tightroping the wires hooked

 to planks / until a silver murmur

     clouds your eyes & sets your

 rolling neck into a greenbrown

     hunch.  Your samurai beak,

  time after time, piercing

                                              the ocean’s heart!

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“Master Heron” first appeared in the Harvard Review, 

and later in Dimming Radiance: Poems & Prose 

Parables (Wind Publications, 2008). It will be included 

in Dan’s forthcoming volume Back to the Source: 
Selected Poems & Parables (San Francisco Bay 
Press, 2018).

Subway Vision

It’s odd when what we’re reading merges with where.  So it is when Dan’s interior meditation
on a William Carlos Williams poem fuses with the visages of fellow train travelers.

Our thanks to guest artist Ann Ropp for her haunting images of isolated faces (selected from
her watercolor series titled “Ancestors”).
                                                                                                                   -- Suzanne

[For more about Ann's art, see the bio below.]



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                   Note to Doctor Williams, from a DC Subway,

                          in the Lull Between Christmas

                                  & New Year’s Eve

                               “To give a damn”

                               (and to not give a damn) —

                                most difficult resolution!

                                William Carlos Williams

                                when your Christmas greens went up in flame

                                by your own hand (town father’s and life-giver’s),

                                at once a conflagration and a prayer,

                                I breathed that thickened heat

                                with you . . . .

                                             Writing this on a train,

                                your book in hand,

                                I dwell on faces purified, this moment,

                                by the task of being human,

                                simmering, I imagine,

                                                       with the slow incessant flame 
                                                       of gentle sorrow.

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An earlier version of "Note to Doctor Williams … " appeared in Dan's original book of

poems, The Artist and the Crow (Purdue University Press), and will be included in his
forthcoming selected volume, "Back to the Source: Selected Poems & Parables" (San
Francisco Bay Press, 2018).
_________________________________________________________________________

Ann Ropp has exhibited work in galleries throughout the US and Europe, and is also the
recipient of a Southern Arts Federation / NEA Fellowship.  Since earning an MFA from
Columbia University (NYC), she’s maintained a studio in Johnson City, Tennessee.  In 
2011, Ann and Suzanne first collaborated on an unusual series of drawings, later exhibited
as “Two Characters in Search of a Title” at East Tennessee State University’s Tipton Gallery
(see Scott Contreras-Koterbay’s lively review in Antennae: The Journal of Animals and
Visual Culture at http://www.antennae.org.uk/back-issues-2013/4583481046
issue 25, Summer 2013).

 

Ann Ropp in her studio

      

Bewitched

And now for something a little different . . . 

     
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  Pumpkins

They deceive us.  And we them.

Carving our kids’ whims into

their plump & gusty flesh,

handfuls of scooped seeds

mounding the newspaper-strewn

floor, bent to the scarred oilcloth

saved from the year before,

we huddle in the circle of their

scent — acrid & still — blades

tracing grins already inked into

their bland & swollen skins

that we might alter, always, if

we dare — slight frenzy, grimace,

calm — by one swift slice or angle

of the wrist.  Our kids, all goggle-

eyed, watch on.  And on we carve,

refining lines — the razor’s edge

of their gapped teeth — not

quitting where we might, now

hardly conscious that we carve

for them . . . .  Finished now.   

  

They stare, queer, droll, triangle-

eyed, crescent mouths agape.

Our kids squeal with delight.  

Days beyond festivities, the

neighborhood grown calm 

again in chill fall’s leafless time,

they lean from the porch ledge,

dull orange, spent, features

caving in & turning pulp.  We 

watch them now the most,

& feel them kin.  Their smiles

as they rot, become more real.

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Dan Stryk's X-ray







"Pumpkins" first appeared in The Southern Humanities Review, 
and later in Dan’s first full-length volume of poems,The Artist 
and the Crow (Purdue University Press). This revised 
version will be appearing in Back to the Source: Selected 
Poems & Parables [San Francisco Bay Press, 2018]. 

"Shell" by Shinkichi Takahashi (Translated by Lucien Stryk)

Back in the 1970s, when still living among the cornfields of Illinois, I remember listening—spellbound—to my father-in-law’s bold 
resonance when reading us his translations of Shinkichi Takahashi’s contemporary Zen poems. Four decades later that voice 
blent with a Japanese poet’s vision moves me still—stirring the cycles of life and death while I paint the wavy image of a conch. 
And inspiring me to weave that painting into a video combining both their spirits with my own.

                                                                                                                                      -- Suzanne


 


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Shell

Nothing, nothing at all

    is born,

dies, the shell says again

    and again

from the depth of hollowness.

    Its body

swept off by tide—so what?

    It sleeps

in sand, drying in sunlight,

    bathing

in moonlight.  Nothing to do

    with sea

or anything else.  Over

    and over

it vanishes with the wave.

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Dan’s father, the American poet and translator of Buddhist 

literature, Lucien Stryk (1924-2013),* was instrumental in 

bringing this highly unorthodox Japanese writer (already 

locally renowned for poems melding experimental

freedom with traditional Zennist thought) to the attention

of the English-speaking world in Triumph of the Sparrow 

(Grove Press), a comprehensive volume of the 

Zen-inspired poetry of Shinkichi Takahashi (1901-1987).  

Lucien visiting Takahashi in the latter’s Tokyo study (1970). 

*See "Featured Post" (top left of this page) for a video based on two of Lucien's original poems.

Two Poems by Linda Parsons

Linda Parsons’ poems “Midsummer” and “Summers Ago” drew me like a moth to a light for the way they connect the poet's inner life with 

wonder for the natural world. In this cold season, she kindles memories of warmer times when those jewel-winged cicadas and furry moths 

wove into the tapestry of our own worlds.  

                                                                                                                                                —Suzanne 

"Midsummer" and "Summers Ago"

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Midsummer

Under the old redbud in the boulevard,

sound umbrellas our heads, lifted as to thunder,

Near oh near, they cry above us, and together,

though deaf in their midst, we speak the names

we have learned in lives brief and long. Cicada,

says my granddaughter, given by her mother.

Jarflies, I counter, word my grandmother broke

with half-runners on newsprint spread in our laps,

far, so far on that glider, that porch, those burnished

evenings. In the dying down, the four-year-old

affirms the stamp of science: ci-ca-da, not yet

surefooted in the gloaming, the papers we’ll flatten

with corn shucks, oilcan she’ll fetch for our rocking

to and fro. In the new ringing, like all deepness

wrung from pitched joy, we look and look

for the red eyes, the jewel wings, near,

          oh near in the shattered still-lit night.

  

Summers Ago

          Wings and wings

of summers ago, millers and cabbage moths

bartered for a minute more on this bright earth,

greedy hopes flung night after night at the porch

lamp. Globe heaped high, nearest their one hot

desire, thorax and antennae like the bony dead

in hunger times and war.

          To spark the new bulb,

I scoop handfuls from the socket, flutter

hundreds to nandina and spurge, wiping

my hands of silvery lives. In nervous flight

over ticking grasses, in waning incandescence,

summers past sawed a fiddle-dee-dee.

          We bargain the same,

for one day more in the sweetest arms

Brief filaments redeemed in a pool of amber,

driven ever toward the light, we batter

our constant hearts against the screen,

winter’s gray rattle circling. 

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"Midsummer" and "Summers Ago" appear in This Shaky Earth, Texas Review Press, 2016 

Both poet and playwright, Linda Parsons is an editor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She served as poetry editor of Now & Then magazine for many years and has received literary fellowships from the Tennessee Arts Commission, as well as the Associated Writing Programs' Intro Award and the 2012 George Scarbrough Award in Poetry, among others. Parsons' poetry has appeared in journals such as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Asheville Poetry Review, and Shenandoah and in numerous anthologies. This Shaky Earth, published by Texas Review Press, is her fourth poetry collection. Her dramatic adaptation, Macbeth Is the New Black, co-written with Jayne Morgan, was produced at Maryville College and Western Carolina University. Her play Under the Esso Moon was selected for the Tennessee Stage Company's 2016 New Play Festival and will receive a staged reading in 2017. Parsons' work is leavened with a hunger to understand the upheavals of childhood and its growing pains, to be fed full to bursting on life's vegetable immensity, to face the passing seasons with grace, where all she knows of this black-eyed earth is perishing even as it flowers. 

Thinking Small

“I’m a fool for tiny things . . . ” -- when recently recalling that line in Dan’s poem, I was inspired to make my own "Witness" video 
full of gnats, mites, and, of course, my take on those "crickety-looking things" forever chirping around us  . . . .
                    
                                                                                                                                         -- Suzanne




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Witness 

Lately I’ve slowed the speeding day

by fixing my gaze

                         on the smallest

                         things:

     gnats the shape of an eyelash,   

     mites minute

     as grains of salt.

                          Tonight

it’s a crickety-looking thing.

Bent legged.  Pale-green translucent

wings.  No larger than a crumb

of morning toast, & too near

the drain where I brush

my teeth.

                I’m a fool

for tiny lives — admiring

their silence.  I’ve borne them

away from daily harm

                  on paper scraps

              slid

   under wings,

           crushing them,

        at times,

with well-meant

kindness . . . before making it

             clumsily

         down the steps,

    & out

to the garden

where I try to place them

on something

green. 

            Like this one

    that seems too slight

    to survive my

                         touch,

& I can’t stand here

all night long!

             So into the kitchen,

   rinse & spit,

         then back again

for one last look.  It’s

gone. 

           Oh tiny breathing thing,

godspeed!

                  I really

     meant to save myself

& don’t, for certain, know

from what.  But you?

                      If you’ve

dared to hop

                     or creep

                                   or flit

     into another night, I’ll

trust my own small life

once more to dark

                                                                             & sleep.


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“Witness”  first appeared in Artful Dodge.