Longitudes, Old Habits, & Shu

by Lawrence Cottrell (August 2022)

Winter, Andrew Wyeth, 1946

Longitudes

We discuss such things now … what I’d do should she die …
____my days without her by-and-by …
Almost like speaking of the weather, or when I’ll mow
____next,

____or what ought be on a grocery list.

But still (and mostly), I sigh and move on, unable to bear
____the unbearable,
Having found late in life that familiarity, even thirty
____years of it,
Doesn’t breed scorn perforce but can be a homecoming, a
____getting used to another’s tale as one’s own story …
Gives-and-takes switched for the worn away wills of early
____years together,

____like spacklings of holes in plaster.

When magics have undone, each veil’s lifted, abatises

____wrecked

____(strewn onto time’s tender mercies),

Love of a whatsoever quiet kind may drift longitudes of
____fissuring selves,
Souls that weave discarnate threads ´to pied batistes of
____dawn

____on fortune’s dusking fells…

Old ordinary tells transmuted by our need for heartening
____dearlings of the holy—

Old Habits

Swallows gyre beneath the bridge, rote sense ranged north
____to rendezvous with June,
Chase fugitive life above a river as new flock of old habits,
____pennies for prodigal mind…
To spend when bitter winds pry hasps of autumn, rime’s
____stormed the last blue bonny inch of asters;
Buy fractions of a once upon a waking, nest airy gambols
____of mind with yester’s making …
Corrupt the culprit, death, with undertows to take the
____taking,
Visions flitting through green gush of summer in
____December…
Memory’s hymns forsaking angles, the grim inclemencies
____of winter,
Tongues of fire that speak to shadowlands accrued within
____the faded vigor of a sun,

____cause to blow ´mid snow pink mists of eglantine—

Shu

Shu (imaginary God of the real wind)
Pries
Shingles,
Whips
Signs
Along
The
Avenue,
Is
Treble
Shackled
To
Bass,
Stitched
To
Wail;
Hollo through cracks wild songs
To
The
Bric-a-brac.

I would furl canvas on spars,
Run
No
More
To
Heaven’s blow,
Abjure
Earth’s toss of mane against the manses and the jakes …
Denounce
That
Cannonade
Of
Sky
Like
Saint
A
Heresy …

____burrow into hush on some concavity of time …

Minuet
With
Eddies
Of
The
Easy, ambling gestures
Of
A
Serpentine—

Table of Contents

Lawrence Cottrell has lived in West Virginia, mostly, preferring to dwell among good people, in a place where change is an unloved orphan. He has a BA from West Virginia State University and attended several graduate schools, leaving each finally to walk mist-hewn hollers and prowl wind-blasted ridges, to be where valleys can be spanned by two arms and a broom handle, and noons aren’t quite sure of themselves. His poems have appeared in The Lyric, Appalachian Heritage, Good Foot and Grab-a-Nickel, among others. His work is in the celebrated anthology Wild Sweet Notes: Fifty Years of West Virginia Poetry 1950-1999. He blooms presently at a bend of Elk River’s meander.

Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast