A Delicate Balance by Bette Ridgeway
The Revenance of Reverence
1
It abandons you, leaves you parched and dried-out
on the desert floor . . .returns in dribs & drabs,
passing epiphanies—the adagio of that mourning dove
on your lawn, the minuet of the song sparrow,
golden blurs of the goldfinches,
the attar of magnolia as you wander,
the joy of your dog with a new tennis ball.
So you stagger back, return to exigencies,
blueprints and dead space, unfueled
with sacred ambrosia, thirsty for succor . . .
there is no such word as revenance,
only revenant, you, absent only to return
then vanish again into the worthless imbroglio,
that heap of desecration, the coffee grounds
and cantaloupe rinds . . . until you catch
her smile as she stretches luxuriously on a divan,
annuls all dross, renders you bodhisattva.
2
Caught up with Jack & Diane in the Promised Land,
Diane, a classic looker, Jack, a woe-begone moper . . .
so I invited her for a whirl on the Audubon Carousel
and we circumnavigated the arena to the beat
of John Philip Sousa—a wooden place it was,
her hair aswirl with the drafts, Jack sulking
on a bench somewhere, the calliope relentless
and deafening, shafts of sunlight blasting
through the stained-glass windows up high.
Ah, for a moment I assumed victory,
a knight-at-arms rescuing the fair damsel
from a life of monotonized dreariness.
But Jack prevailed, the safer, steadier
type, an aficionado of numerals and appendices.
I, bon vivant & ne’er do well, wound up
on the same solitary bench among a flock
of ravenous squirrels and pigeons
with no satiating popcorn to placate.
Hope springs ephemeral, want eternal–
the diurnal sine wave of a loaf of blasé
speckled with a few nuggets of marvelous.
3
From St. John’s Dark Night of the Soul
to Longinus–that contretemps.
Who’s on first? A quagmire. But look!
a new bird in the yard, the white-eyed vireo,
singing from afar, somewhere I can’t see.
Surely some revelation is at hand.
Alas, revelations can go bad, sour, maybe sweeten . . .
seven heads, ten horns—leopard, bear & lion,
or Beatrice flitting among roses in New Jerusalem.
Which surprise-of-the-nonce shall we encounter
today or tomorrow or yesterday?
Krishnamurti: time is sorrow.
What about its fullness? Whither?
What if Time is a grizzled old tramp
with a peg leg chugging Ripple
hobbling down a ramp to nowhere?
Or worse—the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
The roses have all come and gone.
Nostalgie de la Boue
History is the myth that skeletons make
–Matt Prater
I.
I’m sinking fast through eonic strata
between a glistening, beeswaxed surface
veneer (which is now) and rock bottom
(then/origin), a kind of dangled
suspension in primal remembrance,
the infant’s tabula rasa or souls stranded
in drafty bardos awaiting rebirth.
I stagger into La Casa de los Marinos,
squeeze through a throng of drunks
cracking each other’s skulls open
with Dixie bottles—attar of patchouli
sweetening the stench of the dead
or a crown of bleeding thorns.
Thereupon, I abscond to slurp
raspberry meringue at Dolly’s
Pastry Shack on Monkey Hill
offside a defunct rhubarb plantation.
This yo-yoing of plenum and vacuum,
pleasure and pain, apex and nadir,
Eros and Thanatos. . .
turtles all the way up, all the way down.
II.
Could be we can never attain
the mythic thing-in-itself (ding an sich)
because we have hoisted nomenclature
between us and it (them?)
Peanut the Squirrel sniffs, secures the acorn—
without thinking “acorn”—stores it away
not thinking “nest” or “secures.”
Honeybee doesn’t think “nectar”
as it siphons it from blooming red tips.
We think “honeybee” & “nectar,” “red tips”—
translating essence into second-hand lexis.
And this, we think, is wise.
“Wise,” too, a word we deem we are.
I have forgotten what desultory means
along with entelechy and abnegation.
Words survive those who coined
or understood them: Madam I’m Adam)—
Aristotle is a skeleton, entelechy lives on
until it too goes extinct with the tribe.
Get thee to a refuse heap, thou sluggard–
Boutique de la boue, your steadfast buoy.
III.
The Gaelic word for grievous homesickness
and longing for the past is hireath,
with stress on grievous—
not the usual, everyday missing Mom & Pop
and your pooch Peaches, no hello & shalom,
no ave atque vale, no where y’at, no see ya . . .
this is sickness unto death, no mere sniffles
while leafing through the family album–
you now aren’t you, you’re a vestige,
a remnant, a shell, a hangnail of what once
you were, Mom & Pop departed, Peaches,
lost at sea. the entire past a global bone yard.
The ghosts are wailing in Wales, in Tibet,
Mesopotamia, Assyria, Barataria, they wail
throughout the universe, in dark matter
& black holes, dirge of the spheres,
yearning for the mercy of transfiguration.
And I only am escaped alone to tell thee . . .
Except I am not alone. We are legion.
IV.
And if the body is not the soul, what is the soul?
–Whitman
We sat on the floor one night,
our backs against the wall of an empty classroom
in Arts & Science where hours before
we had listened to a Shelleyan professor
with flashing eyes and floating hair, lecture
on the Sublime of Longinus. We cuddled and spooned
in that classroom, the sublime transubstantiated
into lips . . . splendor on the floor.
We grew stone stiff as a watchman jiggled
the doorknob and aimed his flashlight
through the glass. The shaft missed us.
We were low down, out of sight.
The next night, fearing guards or police,
we lay on a mound of hay in the university greenhouse,
risking everything when spirit incarnates
as flesh, as meaty spirit, delving into
organs and bones and blood
to siphon the sweetest sublime?
Qualm before the Swarm
yeah, so what to do about it? these incessant swarms
that blight the mind and ransack, if you can’t run fast enough,
the body, not to mention the soul, whatever’s buried
somewhere in the meaty tissue, nobody knows where, though
I heard you weigh less after you croak than before. . . so
what to make of the nearly full moon tonight and the pines
swaying with the frigid wind, the skunks still prowling
in mid-winter, and now a coyote hindrance plaguing
the commonwealth, and that growling in the street,
sound kind of human, painful, but I hear they’re on their way,
the interlopers and imposters who can even extract the minerals
from your body at a distance, they say to meet expenses,
but we know out of seismic greed, root of all evil,
so I walked down to New Orleans and devoured
an entire king cake, even the plastic baby inside,
only to find myself prone in a gutter as Comus passed,
the flambeaux hooting and cavorting with their massive
crosses on fire, dozens of foreign necklaces cinched
around my neck, another swarm, and I gleaned
that I too was a swarm of molecules, atoms, quarks
and whatever inheres inside the quarks, though I hear
it’s mathematical, something like singularities,
mathematical points and charges,
Up, Down, Left, Right, some sub-microscopic
infinity at the root of the lowest common denominator,
a joke maybe, bathetic, all that sound and fury reduced
to quanta, beyond time maybe even space, smashed
by gravity, what’s going on? does a quark think?
How can pieces constitute a whole that transcends
its pieces? Qualms over it, qualm over the whole shebang,
qualms over qualms, swarms of qualms, transient,
ephemeral, like mayflies, here today . . . tomorrow,
another story, let us dance before the plague breaks out,
swarms of insidious microbes below the swarms of stars,
quarks of the sky, of the universe, unfathomable
in number and scope, and whatever else you can name.
The Planck limit is closer than you think, sniff it,
lick, taste . . . leapfrog out of El Dorado.
WHITHER
Although it’s only a day since I was taken away
And left standing here in wonder . . .
But everything that I know lies under
— ELO, Is This the Way Life’s Meant to Be
I.
October half gone already, I try to remember
September, which vanished too abruptly to savor
its autumnal turmeric flavor as it shoveled
the leaves of that black walnut we cut
because it had metastasized overnight to threaten
the stovepipe.
I sort of like the green pods it bestowed
all over the yard even as I tripped on a few
and the squirrels cracked them open and left
blackish remnants on the deck and steps.
Finally, I raked the detritus into a lawn bag
and dumped it into a can, that death-progeny of September.
Some guys hauled away the branches in a truck.
Not that I like junking nature or pissing off the squirrels—
but you don’t want your stove to explode during
some ice storm, or ever, which soon enough becomes
forever.
II.
I’ve seen them come and go during my span,
those the young ones don’t know or remember—
John Cameron Swayze, Joe E. Brown, Sandra Dee,
Cajun Pete, Fabian, Morgus the Magnificent, goofy Pinky Lee . . .
They come and go with the relentless flow.
Thirty days hath . . .
Someone left that cake out in the rain . . .
Only to forget most of it as time goosesteps forward.
Yet funny the specks remembered, stranded in the mind
like those blackish remnants, no discrimination,
only random flares of the neurons—one of my first students
at Midwest U., Becky Foxworthy, I kid you not.
God, she must be so old now, hideous to think,
all in an almost phantasmal eyeblink.
Dumbfounding the passage, dumbfounding the changes,
massive the carnage, the privileges and derangements.
But who would prefer that time didn’t exist?
We’d be stranded statically on that Grecian Urn.
Eternal stasis—or, Goodnight Mrs. Calabash
wherever you are. And you too, Jimmy, and Sandra
and Pinky Lee and that slimy salamander on Desire Street.
III.
Jesus H. Christ, him gone too. Whither the weather
of yesterday? And therefore tomorrow. And the future.
Don’t tell me about original sin, that Crock of Ages.
Does it comfort you, my friend, that we’re all clumped on the same barge,
packed tight like a deck of cards. The Hanged Man cries FOUL.
Yet they just shot Captain Kirk out into real space, fancy that.
or throw in the towel because you ain’t there too.
Me, I’m Virgo, an earth sign—no outer space for me—
couldn’t get me in a rocket for a million bucks, maybe a billion.
Just one of those short trips and back like your swinger of birches, Frost.
As I wander around this wreck of a town . . .
I also wonder—about everything, the purpose of it all, the hadal zone,
though spotting that blue heron on the New River bank this morning
felt compensatory if only for a privileged moment,
and that crow squawking at Maddie and me and Cinnamon
as we trekked, a kind of Isaiah perched on that tree branch
way above us, denouncing iniquity, raging with the wind.
I wonder if the time is right
to belabor our common plight
like Isaiah on his branch
or hitch instead a ride with chance
and plunge misgiving down to hell
and chant anew that all is well.
CATBIRD
Sadness descends like a feather
with the density of pavement.
There is no way to explain or grasp
other than lying flat on your back,
waiting with the grass and sky.
And finally he comes, our catbird,
diving onto a cable wire, his favorite perch–
for weeks, the same bird, clucking
or screeching, part of the family now,
twigs and insects stuffed inside his beak
like grubby trophies.
She said we would have to look him up
in the book of symbols–and late one night,
secretly, I did. No catbird in particular
but bird in general. Swarms mean mayhem,
death, every conceivable misfortune,
whereas a single, like our catbird,
represents the soul. But whose soul?
Mine or Her’s? The delicate flames
of our children? Or every soul at once?
The Egyptians and Greeks
depicted them with human heads
to signify ascent, union with the divine–
large birds best, white a blessing.
And yet, the book goes on, a single scavenger,
the sole black bird, vulture, crow . . .
can herald ruin.
This creature though, is surely more clown
than ill omen, a goofy joker, even a cartoon
who chooses our yard and joins us
whenever we drift into the airy summer evenings . . .
a friend. Unless I misread everything.
Unless I am on some frantic threshold
of understanding.
About the author:
Five volumes of Louis Gallo’s poetry, Archaeology, Scherzo Furiant, Crash, Clearing the Attic and Ghostly Demarcation & The Pandemic Papers are now available. Why is there Something Rather than Nothing? and Leeway & Advent will be published soon. His work appears in Best Short Fiction 2020. A novella, “The Art Deco Lung,” appears in Storylandia. National Public Radio aired a reading and discussion of his poetry on its “With Good Reason” series (December 2020).
His work has appeared or will shortly appear in Wide Awake in the Pelican State (LSU anthology), Southern Literary Review, Fiction Fix, Glimmer Train, Hollins Critic, Rattle, Southern Quarterly, Litro, New Orleans Review, Xavier Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Texas Review, Baltimore Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Ledge, storySouth, Houston Literary Review, Tampa Review, Raving Dove, The Journal (Ohio), Greensboro Review, and many others. Chapbooks include The Truth Changes, The Abomination of Fascination, Status Updates and The Ten Most Important Questions of the Twentieth Century. He is the founding editor of the now defunct journals, The Barataria Review and Books: A New Orleans Review. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize several times. He is the recipient of an NEA grant for fiction. He teaches at Radford University in Radford, Virginia. He is a native of New Orleans.
In the artist’s words:
Bette Ridgeway is best known for her large-scale, luminous poured canvases that push the boundaries of light, color and design. Her youth spent in the beautiful Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York and her extensive global travel have informed her colorful palette. For the past two decades, the high desert light of Santa Fe, NM has fueled Ridgeway’s art practice. Her three decades of mentorship by the acclaimed Abstract Expressionist Paul Jenkins set her on her lifetime journey of non-objective painting on large canvas. She explores the interrelation and change of color in various conditions and on a variety of surfaces. Her artistic foundations in line drawing, watercolor, graphic design, and oils gave way to acrylics, which she found to be more versatile for her layering technique. Ridgeway has spent the last 30 years developing her signature technique, called “layering light,” in which she uses many layers of thin, transparent acrylics on linen and canvas to produce a fluidity and viscosity similar to traditional watercolor. Delving further, Ridgeway expanded her work into 3D, joining paint and resin to aluminum and steel with sculptures of minimal towers. Ridgeway depicts movement in her work, sometimes kinetic and full of emotion, sometimes bold and masterful, sometimes languid and tentative. She sees herself as the channel, the work comes through her but it is not hers. It goes out into the world – it has a life of its own.
Over four decades Bette Ridgeway has exhibited globally with 80+ prestigious venues, including: Palais Royale, Paris and Embassy of Madagascar. Awards include Top 60 Contemporary Masters and Leonardo DaVinci Prize. Mayo Clinic and Federal Reserve Bank top Ridgeway’s permanent collections. Books include: International Contemporary Masters and 100 Famous Contemporary Artists.