The photo of J.C. Todd is by Robin Hiteshew. All rights reserved. ________ "Remembering" first appeared in Nightshade which can be ordered from: Spring Church Books P.O. Box 127 Spring Church PA 15686 1-800-496-1262 ________ For a review by J.C. Todd in this issue. ________ J.C. Todd’s work can be found online at: www.cortlandreview.com www.grdodge.org "Why I Teach Poetry," an on-line supplement to the PBS special Fooling with Words with Bill Moyers, Fall, 1999 is located at www.pwnet.org ________ J.C. Todd is a Contributing Editor of The Drunken Boat ________ Email J.C. Todd

J. C. Todd Journal Entry, Carolina Sea Isle 8888888 on reading Gerard Manley Hopkins Where the Atlantic cuts the shoreline to ribbons of islands, dolphins swim onto a spit of beach chasing fish the full-moon tide pulls in, then slide or flipper backward into sea. Afterglow, dusk, ocean coming on, coming on humped and gray as dolphins. Early stars jittering on surf like glints of fish, you, out of earshot, or are you? Not even the pebble weave of the flyleaf can restrain these words, yours, set loose in my mind by the pouring down dark, 8888888 . . .chance left free to act 8888888 falls into an order. Starry night. Swans in crosses, dippers in bears, a wingtip of the great horse flicking the lost horizon. I take the flights to my room by foot-- the paradox of it!--go to bed thinking, alone. Yet in the last instant of light after the light is out, I see the heft of your journal indenting the extra pillow. 88888888888888 I’m drifting off, edging over, closer to where you molder and gleam. Yellowing High in the pines, yellow throat twitters, confusing fall warbler, losing color flying south. What hurries it--light shift? hunger? some genetic ineffable? Next week it will be gone, and next after pelting Mexico, Belize with its bright note and skitter, lifting the eyes of those whose autumn appears not in the dense camoflauge of dying underfoot but overhead in wings and the wheel of stars that hauls Orion up from the dust of horizon. The Pleiades glint steely. No frost where this migrant winters, no sealing ice. There the human, gathering evidence of cycle, chills under the hunter, heartbeat slowed by the song of a bird whose throat yellows and pales like a leaf. Remembering Remember, Mother, when you were so ill it hurt to move, hurt to lie still? Or perhaps you don’t, having passed through flesh into ether. I am the one who remembers, remembers washing you and thinking, Why don’t I remember you washing me? As though to clear the soapy film that clouds the water of the bath, a hand appears, supporting my shoulders, flimsy neck, the back of my still-soft head. Your hand, released from cells that have transferred you when you washed me onto me when I washed you, our hands one hand now as I sponge blood from my daughter’s skinned knuckles.