Poetry by Linda Parsons

Linda Parsons is the Poet Laureate of Knoxville, Tennessee. She is also the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. She is published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Terrain, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, and many others. Her sixth collection is Valediction: Poems and Prose. Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville. She is an eighth-generation Tennessean.

Time Says

Ash flakes off the sage, twine bound.

Room to room, smoke haloes arches, windows,

thresholds. I say to January, the vast new year:

Be gone what no longer serves me, cleanse, renew—

but you can smudge anytime the ground shifts,

cracks open, swallows what you thought would

live without end. Smoke scrolls the sills, my nose,

my imploded dreams. I dab the scatterings

and, if it were my custom, would cross my forehead

like a priest, robes heavy with incense: Remember

you are dust and to dust, etc., etc. What protection

but this assurance is wrapped in these burnt offerings?

Time, I say, let the dust settle where it may,

let days go loose and unbound come spring,

wallow mudlucious, legs kicking air. I say

what I always say to the lined face staring back:

Remember to remember how love may yet be

returned, how kale overwinters for the soup pot.

Remember the ash of your parents, how it feeds

your roses and bass in the Powell River, how time

knocks as if it knows you, but sometimes looks

askance through the glass, tamping the road

dust from its feet.

Anywhere You Want to Go

        after Shuly Cawood

 Though I was thinking of

the hairpin turns up to Mt. Pisgah

past Looking Glass Falls, years since

I took that road in the Blue Ridge,

stopping for Turk’s Cap lily and jewelweed,

years since I traveled with someone not

my husband who read the mountain’s

fogged braille and drove straight into it,

thick around one curve, lifted at the next,

someone who even cared about anemone

or bloodroot, who walked off-trail to inhale

the ephemerals.

But I’m talking of today

and where we want to go, neither here

nor there, and he is not included, not since

he left my house, the rooms I thought ours,

and now he’s left the very earth we stand

and wander and wonder on—he’s not included

anywhere, not his apparition on my porch

or driving as he always wanted to, me

nodding off, lullabied to engine’s hum.

Silly me, thinking night would meet dawn

in the same way the wheels went on

and the moon went on, dusting my shoulder

with evermore.

Remembrance of Things Past

 I need to stop a moment today

and remember yesterday, the words

risen from memory’s mist into time’s being.

Three times they appeared in the day’s span—

hustle, hustle, hustler—in an article, on a man’s

cap, talk in the grocery store. The word

my father used hurrying me out the door:

Hustle, lazybones! He may have even been

a hustler himself, his salesman’s line to grease

the deal. And I stop to think that he was here,

in this warm early fall, oaks browning too soon,

almost a touchable presence in the echoing

well of absence: his crisp Van Heusen shirts,

a cigar rolled between thumb and forefinger,

the smoke heady as Proust’s madeleine,

sweet key to remembrance. My father wanted

to leave a grand footprint in the world—

but dementia had other ideas, the old hustle

stolen practically overnight. I’ve tried

to move slower through life, losing time

in the garden, the salt of labor on my mouth

for hours. I’ve tried to bring the world to flower,

shedding light from my heels and wings.

My father must approve, since he told me so

three times yesterday, something I need

to stop and think about today.