Spring and Autumn

By Larsen Bowker

Many of these poems are about natural allies, the young and the old, searching for the eternal inside the ephemeral. They support and redeem each other whether at the beach or building trails on my part of a Blue Ridge mountain. In balletic delight, theyre day moons, unicorns, and boneless snakes, transcendent joy to his pursuit of the spiritual. They are the songs that cannot be memorized, tiny threads of freedom that alter the motion of the universe. In this playhouse of words, they offer an endless array of actors appearing as if by train emerging from a tunnel far across the valley the interplay of young and old, compelling as the smell of pine needles in hot noon heat of summer, clinging to my skin and clothes, claiming me the way the day claims the sky.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546228806

Larsen Bowker

These are poems of a storyteller, his tone largely elegiac as he probes for balance in the thought/action and faith/doubt systems that give meaning to his life, searching as he says, “for the whole person I’ve always wanted to be.” In memories always threatening to become a vision, he searches for that sense of self etched on his soul by his Mother’s ‘love affair with words”, and his Father’s belief that “words are never as important as they seem to be. One critic suggests “reading his poems makes you feel as if you’re walking in radiant grace of afternoon light in autumn.” They are thought-inspired poems seeking to reclaim that slow drama and deeper texture of life lived before the 24 hour news cycles in their endless drone of words that work mightily to take the individual voice from our lives. This poet grew up in the part of Nebraska that has more limestone hills, rivers and trees than flat farmland, place his Mother made into Arcadian Myth and legend, initiating mystery into slow daily lives lived within their commitment to work, family and friends, lives lived celebrating the self as well as affirmation of others, helping to shape the character without rules. Another critic writing of poems in this author’s book “Flowers from a Deeper Soil”, called them “elegies from an unsung Master: honest, elemental and durable.” And another called them “’word journeys seeking to renew our Faith in a life greater than our immediate experience of it.”

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© 2018 Larsen Bowker. All rights reserved.

Cover Art…Pottery Sculpture by David Crane

Photo by Jeanette Elaine Bowker

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/27/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-2881-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-2880-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018901904

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ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

Prairie Winds

Something Higher

Summering Into Autumn

Flowers from a Deeper Soil

In the Shadow of Her Grace

Between Two Rivers

Elegiac Dialogues

DEDICATION

to Bill Aiken…poet…gentleman…friend

         "…equal parts smell of the open sea,

         and earth’s ripening apples…you lived

         a felt life to the brim, as if it were the norm,

         and living at the storm edge of the sky…

         you were iron wind in winter and madrigal

         songs of the ‘Seagull in summer…adding

         a thousand graceful subtleties to the great

         humaneness at the heart of things…"

         —Robinson Jeffers

Who sings the distant heart that dwells in all things

Ranier Rilke

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Prologue Seascape

I.   THEY HUNGER FOR THE LIGHT

First Betrayals

Debussy On A High Plains Piano

Lifeline

Pee Wee’s Gang

Sunporch In Mauritius

Sunday Shoes And Second Grade

Fire Roots

Heading Into Summer

The Sound Of Light In Spring

Altering The Motion Of A Landscape

II.   MY GYPSY LOVE SONGS

Thriving On A Riff

The Great Loneliness Of Memory

I Still Hear The Gypsies Sing

Sunday Market In Morocco

Song I Could Hear Before I Could Sing

Respect

Finding My Rhythm In Their Voices

Still Listening For The Tune

The Burden Of Light

Meditation On A Love Song

Her Gift

III.   WHISPER DREAMS

Whisper Dream Holding Back The Night

The Day The Bishop Sang

Algorithm Of Melody

Breakfast Poetry

Autumn’s Child

In The Clutch Of Song

Branching The Generations

Prophet

First Love

From Some Far Shore

Huzzahs

Flutes Of Memory

IV.   CALDER MOBILE

Looking For The Real Morning

Jubilant Midnight’s Song Of The Moon

The Girl And The Cello

Jeremiah’s Bones

Dancers At The Shore

High Mountain Melt In Spring

Where Sweet Birds Sang Last Summer

Reunions On The Blue Note

Clock That Tells No Time

And The Birds Fly In And Out

Day Moons, Unicorns And Boneless Snakes

V.   RIVERS OF MEMORY

Echoes In The Mountain Silence

While Witty Scholars

Starry Windows Above The River

Wolf Shadow

Crescent Moon In Late December

In The Sudden Stillness…

In The Lime Green Light Of Spring

The Long Curve Of Longing

Brief Touching

You Can Never Ever….

Thoughts Looking Out From A Train

Looking For The City Of Atlantis

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the editors of the following magazines, in which some of these poems first appeared:

POEM…

PASSAGER…

THE LISTENING EYE…

SULPHUR RIVER LITERARY REVIEW…

PARNASSUS…

SUNSTONE…

CONNECTICUT REVIEW…

PLAINSONGS…

WEBER STUDIES…

POTOMAC REVIEW…

TAPESTRIES…

BELLOWING ARK REVIEW…

CALIFORNIA QUARTERLY…

I am also grateful to my daughter Michelle Fortier without whose computer savvy, the manuscript may not have reached the printer; and to Lyle Evans whose technical computer support gave me peace of mind when I was losing my battles with algorithms.

PREFACE

Living in the shadow of these Blue Ridge Mountains a long time, I wait for warm winds off rocky promontories to blow summer into town with blue rains to soak the fields, Cicada seethe in the tall grasses and the smell of pine needles clinging to skin and clothes in weightless noon hot heat that claims me the way the day claims the sky.

In many of these poems young and old share the stage—

innocence and experience offering each other new tributaries to the River. They provide an endless supply of new actors arriving on trains emerging from a tunnel far across the valley, actors willing to ‘alter the motion’ of time’s wicked flight, making mystery the most powerful secret of art, the spiritual and sacred mystery pursued with no divine guidance. Like a Greek chorus of Faith instead of Fate, these poems search for the eternal inside the ephemeral.

PROLOGUE

Seascape

They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind. William Blake

You come in the early morning light of a blue

Moroccan sky, noses pressed against long glass

of my bedroom window, Berber-trebbling voices startling

me awake with chants of "come fish with us down on

the big rocks at the lighthouse"…and scoffing your delight

at my ‘pitiful’ excuses, you disappear like sylphs circling

down pebbled path…lacy soprano sounds of your imaginings

last thing I hear before wincing, city bare feet take you

to a place where you bend your heads over an immodest

spider spinning lovely filaments helping you ignore promise

        made

to tend lines tossed out to please your father who loves

        fishing,

and then you disappear from sight and into salt sweet spray

of wave-splashed rocks, singing your delight at cache