My good friend Isabel Zuber is both poet and novelist. We met 30 years ago at a writers conference led by A.R. Ammons in Critz, Va. A native of Boone, NC, she has lived her adult life in Winston-Salem. Her first novel Salt was published by Picador, and her chapbooks of poems have been published by the NC Writers Network (Annual chapbook award) and Persephone Press. More of her work may be found in the archives of ncarts.org, as well as in several anthologies, the most recent being Southern Appalachian Poets (http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/) and Clothes Lines. The following poem is from her forthcoming full-length collection Red Lily (Press 53)
Nightward
A last enormous freedom
is to run into the dark,
barely enough day left
to see vague hydrangeas
massed along the drive and junipers up like spears
against the sky. Bound then in the dusk with all that
can be there light says is not.
Rush the yard on grass-lashed,
bug-bit legs, turn round
and round till stars collide
with spires, breaking the
huge dinning noise
of all those tiny voices. Such venture is less, or more,
than brave, for dew’s sweet
or bitter, and there’s always
the lighted doorway and
the sense that if one runs
far and hard enough
there are arms in the darkness also.
Now, that is nice. I can relate to that poem but my experience was different. I prowled in the dark through summer woods, searching for lighted windows that always filled me with a terrible loneliness. I still have a copy of Zuber's Salt which I liked a great deal, especially her portrait of that poor wretch, Wilkie Collins.
ReplyDeleteLovely scene. Took me back to childhood summer evenings, catching fireflies, viewing the Big Dipper, Little Dipper, the wonderous Heavens. Thank you, Isabel for the recollection.
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