George Ellison. Artwork by Elizabeth Ellison.

 

I Knew In My Heart

“You ask in your letter of the bird that nested beside the cabin door before you went away,” she wrote.
“The cabin burned in 1945. After moving to town I listened to him sing on a vinyl 45 record I found in
the back pocket of a National Geographic bird book.
I still have the record but these days I don’t have anything to play it on.
Like you always used to say before you went away, ‘That bird sounds just like a bell ringing in the wind.’”
Those were pretty words but I knew in my heart I would never see that bird again.

 

Annual Inventory

With ledger book precision and wry persistence … while managing the family lumber supply business … he crafted rhetorical inquiries he called poems about “those things of which we have concepts but find non-existent or unapproachable and our experience of finding them so.” Having declared “Objects are nothing,” he retreated into the glittering light and dark shadows of imagination … but sometimes Bronk paused and smiled while taking the annual inventory to ask himself: “Would it be different in a real world?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. Syntax

“I may never know how or why I was unanimously self-appointed to extract angular lines of syntax from multi-colored dreams or peculiar provisos or sincere lies and transmogrify them into species of that garrulous madness Coleridge classified (with unsurpassed authority I might add) as being:
‘Too general an affinity with all things.’
“For a long while I couldn’t or wouldn’t finish a sentence without revising it hundreds of times. I perhaps exaggerate but serial disorder was replicated in syntax that serpent-like devoured its own tail … an endless array of lexical sequences were out of control so that at the end of the day when I looked over what I had written I often didn’t have a clue what it was about.
Not a clue.
“In Friedmann Pulvermuller’s The Neuroscience of Language, I read with sinking heart of ‘incongruent syntactic violations’ and ‘neurophysiological studies using electroencephalography’ that ‘show certain syntactically deviant word strings elicit an early negative event-related potential’ and that the misplacement of an ‘of’ or a ‘be’ or an ‘an’ can ‘trigger a brainstorm! ‘
Mired in syntactical deviance I invented (and have now patented) syllabic blank verse by which the practitioner simply breaks the line (prose or verse) every ten syllables and keeps on rolling regardless of such niceties as stress, rhythm, rhyme and other bothersome restrictions. It looks like this:

The path above the / creek followed ancient
syntax through a rho / dodendron tunnel
along the ridge on / which I sit and count
my fingers one to / ten aligning ends
with beginnings so / that everything else
will fall into place / and I can call this
syllabic blank verse / and get on with life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gaunt Phantom

Rifle cradled in arm the old soldier turned bounty hunter
moved through the laurel … gaunt phantom in a dream …
until he spotted the dull glint of dead eyes. Clutching the
creature by scruff of neck he deftly separated scalp from
bone with knife and tied it to his waistband from which
six wolf scalps worth $5 each now swung back and forth
in time with his stride as Quill Rose marched home again

 

When Sarvis Was In Bloom

She heard the clattering hooves fade away over frozen ground.
She also heard the dry whisper of moccasins on the cabin floor.
Sarvis was in bloom when the rider returned and reined to a stop.
Through the window he saw what he had feared propped upright
on a table. “Poised mutely attentive for me to see,” he thought to
himself as he rode away with his wife’s burnished skull lashed
securely through an eye-socket to his saddle horn.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________________

Artist and paper-maker Elizabeth Ellison has exhibited at NC Arboretum, NC Botanical Garden, Schiele Museum and numerous other facilities. She is the owner-operator of Elizabeth Ellison Watercolors on the town square in Bryson City NC and prepares the artwork for the weekly Nature Journal column she and her husband, George, contribute to for the Asheville Citizen-Times. Contact and see more of her work at www.elizabethellisonwatercolors.com.

Writer and naturalist George Ellison was the winner of the Wild South Ashe-Roosevelt Award for environmental journalism in 2012. That same year his Permanent Camp was one of three finalists for the Southern Independent Booksellers Association award for poetry, and his Blue Ridge Nature Journal had previously been a finalist for SIBA’s non-fiction award. He writes columns for Smoky Mountain News, Asheville Citizen-Times, and The Newsletter of the Southern Appalachian Botanical Society. Contact him at www.georgeellison.com.