J.S. Absher
POET - Editor/Publisher - IndepenDEnt Scholar
A Life of TraumaFor several months in 2021, I helped my friend L. R. capture the story of his abusive childhood, his years as a bully, and his slow maturation into a loving and loved father and husband. It's a happy ending, but not an easy one; L R. has many physical and psychological scars that limit his mobility and his options in life.
Our process: L. R. dictated short passages into a digital recorder; I transcribed, with the help of Descript, and then we added new materials, corrected, and re-arranged, until we came up with a finished manuscript. Why purchase: It's a quick read and an honest account. Your purchase will help L. R. and his family through a difficult time. |
A Song |
A poem for the sycamore,
a sycamore for the snake that swims in the shallows sheltered by its roots, roots for the land, to hold it in place, land for the sycamore, on whose long thick limb we’ve lain cantilevered over the river in shade, shade as blue as a jay’s feathers and free to all comers. * * * A poem for board feet standing in a mane of leaves fluttered by air of their own making, air for poet and spouse, poet and spouse for each other and land and snake and river and sycamore, sycamore for the leaves, leaves for the air, air for the song of marriage we are singing. * * * Those who venture off trail-- booted against snakes, whistling Colonel Bogey’s March, surveyor’s maps rolled underarm-- see dimity patterns the roots make on ground checkered with shadow and light, and with every step are wary: clutters of leaves may strike, the stepped-on stick bite back. * * * Those tongues flicker to find us out, warm-blooded calculators who fell and bark, slab and mill through knot and burl till the tree of knowledge is pollarded and bare, a lacquered coat rack where perch the birds of abstraction. * * * This sycamore rising dog-legged-- or is it a god’s leg, or that of a god’s horse straining the wooden musculature to rear against the bit?-- is hard to fix in words that do not hobble the power, but when saw and dozer cut their buck and wing, easy to reckon the board feet. * * * By this border of blooming surveyor’s flags in weeks we’ll step arm in arm then do-si-do over hardwood; on a bed as wide as a pond glimpse in our dreams afternoons that stretched a heron’s wing over the river in woods whose high crowns for us have been lopped and pulped * * * and made into this paper on whose void the words elusive as a swarm of gnats reeling and spinning bless our reading chair, our table where a boy not long from Africa types the home row letters: lads fall; all sad lads; half sad half glad: all fall; * * * bless the safe place we have made, the wooden bowl on the table, the fruit that fills it, the gnats eating the ripe fruit, the fruit of prayer and meditation; and bless the headboard in whose shadow we dream the tree whose fruit we are—logger, surveyor, poet and spouse, lads: same tree, same fruit. Published in Mouth Work (St. Andrews University Press, 2016) |
Hope, by Cynthia Reeves (1979)
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ANYCE SHEPHERDThe murder of her deputy sheriff husband in 1938 begins my grandmother's fifty-year widowhood.
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NIGHT WEATHERThe quietness of haiku in a book designed and profusely illustrated in color by Katie LaRosa.
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MOUTH WORKPrize-winning poems on the power of language and love.
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MISSISSIPPI LAWYERLove letters from a crafty lawyer, William Maybin.
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Trying to Break Through, Cynthia Reeves, 1984.
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Trying to Break ThroughEvery writer dreams of breaking through - to a deeper, richer language; to a greater understanding of the world; to an appreciative, buying audience. This painting by Cynthia Reeves expresses that longing, as well as the commitment to continue even if the breakthrough remains elusive.
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