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    Exploring This Terrain: Poems
    Exploring This Terrain: Poems
    Exploring This Terrain: Poems
    Ebook131 pages53 minutes

    Exploring This Terrain: Poems

    By Margaret B. Ingraham

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    About this ebook

    Margaret B. Ingraham’s collection Exploring this Terrain bids the reader to join her in a journey of discovery. In a world in which speed is increasingly regarded as a virtue and distraction is its inevitable consequence, each of these poems offers escape and consolation. One by one they invite the reader to be still, to observe, to listen, to “taste and see” – and ultimately to experience the wonder that only attention can discover hiding in the thin places within the various terrains of our everyday lives.

    “What is the terrain that Margaret Ingraham explores in Exploring this Terrain? It ranges from the Blue Ridge Mountains to Pluto. The path crosses the trails of memory and illness, the natural world and disintegration, and various parts unseen. Yet it stays, as Margaret says near the end of the book, in the ‘secret places of my brokenness.’ It is the beautiful landscape of wonder, the uneven country of love, the difficult ground of faith.” —Loren Graham, author of Places I Was Dreaming.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherParaclete Press
    Release dateApr 1, 2020
    ISBN9781640603783
    Exploring This Terrain: Poems
    Author

    Margaret B. Ingraham

    Margaret B. Ingraham, a poet and photographer, was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and “grew up” exploring the woods behind her childhood home. She is the author of a poetry chapbook Proper Words for Birds (Finishing Line Press), nominated for the 2010 Library of Virginia Award in poetry, and of This Holy Alphabet (Paraclete Press), lyric poems adapted from her own translation from the Hebrew of Psalm 119. Ingraham is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Award, a Sam Ragan Prize and numerous residential Fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has twice collaborated with composer Gary Davison, most notably to create “Shadow Tides,“ a choral symphony commissioned to commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and performed on that date in Washington, DC. Ingraham lives in Alexandria, VA.

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      Book preview

      Exploring This Terrain - Margaret B. Ingraham

      I

      IN MOUNTAINS’ SHADE

      "In his hands are the depths of the earth;

      the heights of the mountains are his also."

      Psalm 95:4

      Proverbs

      [Silence] is the fence around wisdom.

      —Ancient Hebrew Proverb

      "Doth not wisdom cry,

      and understanding put forth her voice?

      She standeth in the top of high places,

      By the way in the places of the paths."

      —Proverbs 8:1–2

      Yesterday was clear

      and warmer than we would expect this

      time of year

      on the lip of Blue Ridge.

      Bull bellowed through the afternoon

      and the Little Dipper

      tipped a glimmer from beneath

      the gauze of stratus curtain

      blowing in.

      By morning clouds had settled

      and an odd mockingbird came quietly

      to sip remnants of rain

      from the cement planter

      out beside the corncrib,

      and all four of them—

      cloud, bird, stained water, concrete box—

      carried the same inference

      of gray.

      Although I waited all day

      for the familiarity of winter

      shadows dropping long, falling dark,

      before they would finally recede,

      nothing moved across the field

      except the breeze,

      nothing met me on the path

      except westerly wind turning in

      at dusk.

      I know that night will show itself

      this way along the high ridge

      of Mt. San Angelo:

      pillar of cloud will dissolve

      into the gray solitude of cattle

      sighing and that mysterious wisdom

      we came here to know

      will slip invisibly inside

      silence’s fence.

      Transfiguration

      Spring moves up the ridge at the rate

      of 100 feet per day in the Shenandoah.

      Thus it is that, without asking,

      spring moves up the ridge

      another day’s full measure,

      so cowslip carpets a high meadow

      that yesterday lay a plain new green.

      Redbuds that hailed the end of frosts

      now pale beside the flowering quince

      and blaze of samara seeds like blood

      red wings adorn the supplicant limbs

      of winter-weary sugar maple

      and, without asking, pull my gaze

      far from valley seam to move me

      with this season’s rite procession

      up distant hills where purple hurt

      like Shenandoah’s haze recedes

      into this broken night and through

      ragged strips of gauzy clouds

      the paschal wafer moon

      washes the whole prospect

      in ambient glow of its topaz light.

      Evensong

      This far north

      it is still South Holston waters

      clucking softly on the rocks

      like a small coop of contented hens

      at roosting time.

      Deep in the circles of evening

      all the leg-singing crickets

      gather on the shore

      to play new melodies

      with their knees.

      In these mountains

      they say

      you must always come alone

      to dance a summer polka

      to the Blue Ridge crickets’ song.

      The Thrush of Morning

      In this fourth month’s first day’s

      new light, I walk the familiar path

      that is still damp with early mists,

      which seem forever reticent

      to dissipate and let the morning in.

      Just as they, I hesitate along the slope

      at the place the gravel footpath forks

      and listen a moment for the hidden thrush,

      although I know it’s well ahead

      of time for its migratory visit here;

      in that pause I think of lonesome Keats—

      who named another season for these fogs—

      and of his nightingale, whose songs

      he heard, though bird he could not see.

      Disappointed that this dawn brings

      no melody or hint of morning song to me,

      I turn beneath my longing to discover

      in the lifting haze the season’s recompense

      left last night under a starless cover—

      delicate green stoles of finely knotted buds

      draped over grand Chinese elms’ low boughs

      and young curly willows’ sloping shoulders,

      new leaves waving hosannas in a secret breeze,

      ushering in the promise of days more lush

      than these, fuller hedges to hide the timid vireo

      and pledge of dulcet notes more tuneful

      than ever the ancient dancing flutists piped.

      I keep this silence to myself, a quiet

      like the one Keats understood could make

      sheer mornings such as this seem bittersweet.

      Postcard from the Blue Ridge

      Do you recall which of these was O’Keeffe’s mountain? I have

      been looking

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