Linda Casebeer
Poems
Charm and Strange
broken down it turned out
charm paired with strange
named for the lifetime of the K
particle strangely long
and charm only on a whim
they came in twos and threes
like truth and beauty until
those names were deemed
too sentimental until that pair
was renamed top and bottom
along with up and down
the lightest of quarks each
fundamental particle unable
to be broken down any further
the way obituaries have the last
word on Richard Taylor
smashing electrons into protons
to reveal what lay within
the heart of all objects his
a story in an invented language
quarks themselves named
for a line in Finnegan’s Wake
three quarks for Muster Mark
begins the story anywhere
in 1990 when the Nobel Prize
was awarded for quarks
we had so little time to wonder
about the heart of anything
was it fractional charges
that had brought us together
to the blue house a world
built of children and work
dogs and cats lilies and irises
if anything we might have found
time instead for translations
of Octavio Paz another prize
winner that year literature
over physics since the story
begins anywhere
Curtains Blowing in the Wind
You and I love have written fiction
together it can be an intimate act
where we said writing in and out
of each other elicited the yin yang
of voices the he said she said
but in the year of the unreliable
narrator the question is who
is telling the truth if there is truth
haven’t we known all along writers
are unreliable narrators and not all
skeletons are the ones in the closet
like the trendy gone girl
gone missing the story first told
by the adulterous husband
from his point of view also
a suspect but absent a body
did she leave on her own
or is the girlwife framing him
with he said she said is either one
telling the truth if there is a truth
or what about the next story
also a girl witnessing a murder
from the window of a train begging
the question when breath ceases
does the story matter if it is not
murder is there a story to be untold
was the bedroom window
left open that night or locked
who tossed the single white rose
into the river was it a signature
or the return of magic realism
the return of alternate universes
On the Beach
Everyone who could was driving away
from the cities everyone who could
was driving towards the oceans
and away from what radiated
Phillip Glass played piano for the film score
etudes that repeated unlearned lessons
everyone who could was driving away
from the cities water was everything
a woman POTUS not Hillary
had precipitated the chaos a woman
who wanted to appear tough answered
a simple attack with nuclearity
that night everyone who could was driving
towards the oceans under the stars
that night everyone who could was driving
away from the cities the country had shrunk
somehow the girls were young again
I drove the old blue station wagon that night
everyone who could was driving away
from the cities I drove in a line of cars
until we reached a dead end in the middle
of a congregation sitting in pews
staring straight ahead gently waving fans
from a funeral home to cool the humid air
electricity was gone everyone who could
was driving anywhere to buy gas
knowing we would run out after we had fled
the city I turned the wagon around towards
home and wondered what to do about water
since water was everything we could set out
pans to catch rain the way I had learned
as a child to catch rainwater for rinsing
hair soft and silky but would the first rains
be radioactive we had never stored water
or canned food for emergencies the stores
had closed after their windows were smashed
neon electric no longer mattered batteries
and bottled water gone no medicine
the girls were young and healthy for the moment
but they would need water where were the bomb
shelters the concrete geodesic domes
the soothsayers of the millennium warned
us we would need water when the end came
how could we exist eating handfuls of berries
from nandina bushes bark and root
while we waited for the acorns to fall
from the hundred-year-old oak
we had only grown ornamentals not
homesteaders we had no guns no way to fish
when floods had forced koi from their ponds
in the Botanical Gardens the koi had floated
away downstream nets had to be set as traps
we could walk the few miles there
and find a way to net the koi but the girls
would argue they should not be killed
on this earth where radioactivity was set
to spread until all skin burned
where was the cyanide to alleviate suffering
the way the etudes repeated everyone
who could was running frantic for more
in the dream water was everything
and the girls were young again
The Keening
As if someone had been lost
the sound mournful and low
from a human it seemed at first
though the source was unclear
​
several yards touching ours
turned up empty no moans
from injured individuals
so where was it coming from
​
downtown a railyard whistle
familiar and daily but not
so what a creature’s paw
caught in a trap or a tomcat
​
caterwauling not in daylight
a cote a bevy a dole a dule
a flight so many names
for a group of mourning doves
​
but none feeding on the ground
only a drab female cardinal
pecking around the hulls
of spent sunflower seeds
​
as the silence lengthened
I returned inside to the table
to pour over a box of half pastels
sixty colors Rembrandt’s
​
general selection for that day’s
lesson in abstraction earlier
Ed had finished his piece
so I was alone as the low wail
​
began again and I found
myself opening the back door
once more to stand still
and focus on a large dead bough
Loki
Others write about dead men walking
instead I am a walking flower, bright
turquoise white and yellow, edged
in black geometric-patterned silk, a button
on strands of colored thread hooked
around my throat. I am a flower walking
among roses and drought-loving vinca
small white fairy flowers, clematis
thickly covering a cement block wall.
I am turquoise against Russian blue sage
yellow against Klondike cosmos
thick-stemmed and covered with bees
in the gardens planted to replace lawn.
I am walking into the seven thirty dash
for work that follows the shortcut
up Woodcrest, a narrow road over Red
Mountain and down into Homewood.
I am backing the car out of the driveway
as pain shoots through my thigh,
the car still moving into a sharper acuity
of what is caught at the hem of my dress,
the kind of bee others all day will tell me
never stings, boring anyway into my thigh
a red welt forming under patterned silk
​
Fog
The interpreter of my dreams professes
his love for me with the last words from his lips
before the lights go out, then sleeps curled
around my back, one hand cupping a bare breast.
​
A Shakespeare scholar and devoted fan of Jung
professor emeritus of literature popular culture
and horror a reader of a dozen books at once
a writer with dialogue going on in his head
​
most of the time, he listens with morning patience
to my ramblings about disjointed dreamscapes
and tells me all who roam there are my own personae:
the one chasing me and the one I am chasing
​
in the shadow of the moon the moon itself
and all of the others just below the water's surface.
I absorb what he says and nod and go on
as if it's enough to have said the dream aloud,
​
until near fatal clots travel to his lungs and fog
descends to obliterate the entire dreamscape.
The next morning my throat closes around
a hollowness that takes my breath away.
Name Your Poison
In her hand my neighbor held out a box
offering me nerium oleander a poison
as toxic as the fairy tale’s shiny apple
in a kit of age-defying seductions
but what she didn’t know is I know
oleander aka rosebay the bejeweled
pink or white clustered blossoms lining
my mother’s sea-sprayed Carolina yard
with subtropical fragrance the leaves
narrow and willow-like linear lanceolate
oleander the most poisonous of garden
plants in zones 8-10 along the coast
even deer know poison when they find it
planted in a ring around the roses
to be fair I don’t think my neighbor meant
to poison me since she used the product
herself and it’s not the first poison sold
as potion this one a cardiac glycoside
acting on the contractile force of the muscle
of the heart disrupting its function as if any
of us could know exactly how the heart
functions with so many emotions
streaming through its arteries/veins
​
The main artery in this midwestern town
a mythical Main Street with some storefronts
empty Radio Shack closed also The Times
an old movie theater and up the road
deserted factories never enough jobs
so selling nerium oleander becomes one
in a rat-a-tat tat announcement of a get rich
quick scheme for the price of a sales pitch
oleander with the sound of a round O
this is the way a pyramid is formed
by women you know a cousin a friend
a woman at work selling baskets or makeup
or storage containers that burp this time
the reward a Lexus instead of a pink Cadillac
the real money going to the usual suspects
which among them is not an old white man
while in the news on Sunday my neighbor
​
fainted several times also in the ambulance
as her heart rate slowed to 40 beats a minute
while we who want to understand googled
to find oleander can kill but also redemption
for oleander as the official flower of Hiroshima
having been the first to bloom following
the atomic bombing of the city
Strange Angels
American Horror Story haunted an old
house a gorgeous Tudor with Tiffany
fixtures transforming light
into ordinary horror not so terrifying
until the second season when the Story
took up residence in an asylum
also not so frightening for most
no more than a haunted house
but it was the asylum of my nightmare
where three strange angels knock
on the door while D.H. Lawrence
shakes his fist at me and shouts
admit them admit them and when I do
open the door I find Norma splintered
in a Picasso portrait with her blond son
Norman the father of my children
holding the hand of the third angel
an anonymous towheaded baby girl
wandering off into a clouded dream
without an answer to these questions
1) is it true that angels represent
what has been lost and
2) what am I to do with these three
barefoot angels that elicit body memories
of pregnancy the little souls moving
around in my belly four times
creating in me a certain vulnerability
all hormones and love we were young
then twenty somethings seeking romance
and orgasms playing house and haunted
by Norma who had never agreed
to give up either of her sons to marriage
meanwhile with each birth my focus
turned more inward first in utero
then towards the small warm beings
it was during those baby years
when the last two girls where born
a year apart that I lost track of myself
and world events as they unfolded
a peanut farmer president hostages
taken I think I forgot to vote
the year an actor was elected then later
the Iran contra affair and other whole
blocks of news I never followed
or music that changed with the body
politic all a blur until the marriage
finally shattered after Norma decided
to reclaim her sons and send me
to an asylum transference a doctor
would later explain she the strange angel
who would take care of everything
and even when I heard it as crazy talk
I could feel the sensation of walls
closing in of doors slammed shut
gauzy claustrophobia wrapped around
me in Central State Hospital the place
where my own depressed mother
had volunteered as a Gold Lady
and though that asylum was closed
years ago claustrophobia still
finds its way back to me in dream
Her Body is Small in the Box
On a ship anchored off Tortola the island
named for turtle doves I watched tenders
in the distance transport tourists back and forth
while I stayed with Mr. Fox: A Novel that twisted
and turned in on itself a metafictional plot
of murder and mayhem when the father
who murdered the mother was viewed
by his daughter as small in his coffin
this muse brought back to me my own mother
dead these few months not murdered
unless I did kill her by insisting on morphine
for the intensity of her pain
either way at the end her body was delivered
before dawn one Sunday in June to a deep South
funeral home tastefully set back in time
where cremations were complicated
by the need for signatures from every sibling
as a defense against drama our own family
unpredictable in that way since years before
one sister had hijacked the burial of our brother
the one closest to our mother and the only boy
so we didn’t seem to mind that he was her favorite
until he broke her heart the year she said
he drank himself to death
​
when we discovered we could bury her body
without all siblings signing since a body
could always be exhumed to settle a fight
discussions turned to a sea island cemetery
three states away Spanish moss palmettos
azaleas and a thousand brown live oak leaves
behind a three hundred year old church
the double headstone already engraved
with her name but not the year of her death
and after a couple of gin and tonics
the good sister thought we could kill two
birds with one stone like the aphorisms
so common among our mother’s people
we could bury her in the mink stroller
her name embroidered in the lining
of the coat she waited so long to own
but none of us now could imagine wearing
until that night I reread her will
with her request to be cremated
and I felt her claustrophobia punch right
through the lid of any satin-lined coffin
we could choose so it came down to the third
girl a notarized signature I finally asked
for and she did offer more out of the shock
of the death itself coming within a day
​
in what as children we thought was meant
by the quick and the dead in the creed
that told us what to believe in
but leaving only my identification
of her body to the mortician he said
he had prepared her in a cardboard
box for cremation and as if she had shrunk
that last day ever she was small in the box
The Story of Life
We could feel the evening falling around us
though it was noon when clouds covered the sun
above the chapel lit only by natural light
filtering through the windows
and upwards from the window wells
the guidebook said low light lent an ancient
and melancholy air to the fresco we had come
to Italy to see God the father creating Adam
their fingers almost touching except for a small
space left between the two in anticipation
of that moment when God would complete
his creation but in the dull light the fresco
distant and blurred by macular degeneration
and glaucoma for Ed who decided to ask
the guards what time they would turn on
the lights after all in the story of life God
had risen into the sky with arms outstretched
to separate light from darkness evening
and then morning of the first day but that day
Ed was one of those the official husher tried
every few minutes to quiet the crowd forever
changing but always always looking up and sighing
Charm and Strange Poems
July 1, 2020
The title poem of the collection, Charm and Strange, was inspired by the language used by physicists I encountered as I was reading an obituary in the New York Times for Richard Taylor, a physicist who had won the 1990 Nobel Prize for his work with quarks. In physics, a quark is a fundamental particle; there are three pairs of quarks named top and bottom, up and down, and charm and strange. The poems in this collection were written and some published in small press journals between 2010 and 2019. Poems often return to archetypal themes of love, death, and the roads to intimacy.
Reviews
Kirkus Review
(November, 2020)
​
These lyrical poems inhabit a world of dreamscapes, enigmas, and the
numinous. In her second collection, following The Last Eclipsed Moon (2008), Casebeer brings together 51 poems, many previously published in literary magazines. The title poem refers to two types of a quark, a fundamental subatomic particle. In 1990, the year Robert Taylor won the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on quarks, the speaker in this poem “had so little time to wonder / about the heart of anything,” consumed with “children and work dogs and cats lilies and irises,” that she didn’t pay much attention to his achievement. Noting that the very term quarks comes from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, whose opening line starts in the middle of a sentence, the speaker suggests that literature has the greater claim to what’s fundamental, since a story—unlike matter—can begin anywhere. “Charm and strange” also encapsulate the book’s sense of forces that are, like the quark, elusive. Dreams and death, for example, figure in the opening piece, “Imagine the weight.”
The speaker has anxiety dreams about time-pressured tasks she must perform, including some related to her (now dead) parents. They’re late in two senses, and in the slowness of living, she can’t catch up. The short, unpunctuated lines convey her breathlessness well. In all these poems, Casebeer’s craft is evident in the lines’ precision and economy. Similarly, in “Symbol,” the speaker’s fears for her husband and his “death rattle / crisis” aren’t stated explicitly but are expressed instead by the disturbing image of shrikes, predator birds “that impale their prey / on thorns since they have no talons / only a songbird’s delicate feet.” Other poems engage with politics and social issues, but whatever the subject, the author goes devastatingly to the heart of things. Powerful, well-wrought poems that consider mystery with discipline and nuance.
​
BlueInk Review
(September, 2020)
Linda Casebeer’s Charm and Strange: Poems is an impressive poetry collection that braids the poet-speaker’s rich, interior life with memorable details from the larger world.
These free-verse poems, in five sections, present a series of vivid tableaus depicting and reckoning with the current zeitgeist—e.g. “the year Trump fell in love with Kim Jung Un” or “the sheen of oil spilling into the Gulf”—alongside the speaker’s personal history, dream life, investments in art and literature, and exploration of the natural world.
​
Here, specific people, places, and things draw readers into narrative scenes and lyric meditations, and Casebeer skillfully activates the senses: “At midnight when I turned the car/ into the driveway facing the lake/ headlights caught a hundred geese/ huddled at the edge of ice.” We can see the car turning, the headlights framing the geese. We can feel the implicit cold conjured by the phrase “edge of ice.”
​
Casebeer textures her collection not only with landscapes readers can enter but also by creating meaningful allusions to the humanities. Readers encounter painters like Picasso and Kandinsky, writers like Vonnegut, and D.H. Lawrence, musicians like Charlie Parker and Iris Dement. Never merely name-dropping, Casebeer weaves these historical figures and their creations into the poetry’s fabric. For instance: “…we believe/ when synapses cease/ the corpse will be tinged/ blue but cutting into the brain/ neurons will be as white/ as the sunbleached bones/ painted by O’Keeffe…”
​
Eschewing stuffiness, the collection also references less erudite activities: dining at Huddle House, asking Siri for directions, watching the television series American Horror Story.
The volume’s title doesn’t do justice to its complexity or inventiveness, and some segments could be tightened (“as we climbed higher intensity spilling over/ the mountains into numbered improvisations/ emerging at the end as biomorphic images…”) Overall, however, this is a wonderful offering. As the experience of coming to intimately know the speaker unfolds, the collection’s fresh and startling images are sure to linger in readers’ minds.
Latest Poems
A Cottage Named
Rest and Be Thankful
Slant, Summer 2020
Sample Poems
Imagine the Weight
In my dream I am running
from the marauding elephant
of unwritten poems
and unfinished slides
for the client meeting
running with a certain
panic my fraught limbs
moving across the savannah
in the slowest motion
though when I wake
this is not Africa
usually in these dreams
I am running out of time
or into time to catch up
with the departure of a plane
or a train once a city bus
after I had found a room
full of church circle women
my deceased mother forgot
were coming and I was running
to pick up a dozen box lunches
from the center of the city
close to the office
of my father also dead
but not buried in his plot
his cadaver given away
for anatomy lessons
I expected to pick up
his automobile
stolen instead his insurance
company always chasing
rings of car thieves
never just one at a time
while above me an old
department store clock
showed an hour and a half
had passed for the women
waiting for their luncheon
women tearing bandages
from old sheets to send
overseas and I could not
even create a small feast
to scatter loaves and fishes
among them I am still running
down another block
for oysters or crabcakes
running like in the dream
last week late for a train
to New Orleans leaving
in heaven’s seven minutes
and I was nowhere
near the station running
as I will next week to catch
what is leaving without me
planes small and huge
headed to other continents
once my father returned
home after flying
on a doubledecker jet
the second level a lounge
with a piano a real piano
imagine the weight of that
he would say every time
he told the story we wondered
how the plane could lift off
with a piano on board
and speaking of weight
did I forget to mention
in these scenarios
I am left packing baggage
in cumbersome old cases
without wheels or spinners
valises gripped by hand
so I can never run fast
enough to catch up never
run fast enough
The Way of Happiness
The year Trump fell in love with Kim Jung Un
and the planet’s hyperbolic trajectory tilted
more than a little towards crazy I fell in love
with Asian tree peonies a gift from the gods
the attraction beginning with one plump bud
on a shrub abandoned by the previous owner
when love leaked out of the house into divorce
leaving the sale of the property to us to us
to us in the way of happiness displayed
by the leaf’s shape of a hand with a thumb
and three fingers I recognized as a peony
and imagined a pink Sarah Bernhardt double
ruffled fancy peony pronounced pe Oh ny
by my friend Harriet Parham from Virginia
I cut the bud and set it in a clear water glass
a slow opening single petaled bright blossom
my mother would have called shocking pink
the outer petals spread wide to yield
a fireworks display of a hundred shredded
white petals a Bowl of Beauty the first
in a season when I ordered enough plants
for an entire peony garden an embodiment
of romance and prosperity an omen of good
fortune a happy marriage though how
to assess any marriage by length or breadth
or depth or else by what magnetizes
pulls us together and apart repeating
like the reunion where a woman reflected
on her life as driven by med school
and breast cancer research a thirty year
marriage to a fellow student her husband
now forgetful but for the most part a good
marriage then she repeated a good marriage
though it had not been her first unqualified
thought from her south Texas zone 9
where peonies require a little extra effort
to flourish without the benefit of a winter chill
My Lyric Life
1.
What if by flower you mean peony
white petals crawling with ants
beat down by April thunderstorms
the old metal stands falling away
and I mean all that blooms in white
round blossoms in our front yard
simple petaled peonies but also
climbing roses opening all the way
to the edges of what could be promised
rose buds the tightly brighter images
of what is to come in full bloom
pollen dusting the blowsy centers
just before the last petals drop
in the mating season mockingbirds
drowning each other out you whistling
at the one perched on the chimney
when I say fragrance you hear breast
almost obscene the hundreds of light
blossoms and you imagine that many breasts
at once each one larger than your hand
2.
And when I say home and mean
our hundred year old brick foursquare
on the corner with these gardens in front
you hear house from your own history
a time when your father took in renters
after the divorce a shock to a ten-year-old
during the second World War the house
later given over to the other family
in the background like the man
across the street on the porch swing
of the foreclosed house made of stone
his roots as old as the Rift Valley
enormous wings shedding pale scales
as he listens to our conversations
and to mockingbird songs that belong
to every bird truck and lawnmower
a very old man who finds meaning
in all the plots that have been lost
since the 1909 blueprints for this
house with stone wall were made
Impressions
Even in a photograph on newsprint
the sheen of oil spilling into the Gulf
comes through in swirls of oranges
yellows and blues with the same crude
beauty evoked by my mother’s paintings
when she floated oil on water and color
bled at the edges of heavy white paper
where she would pen outlines in sepia ink
as if looking for shapes in clouds
to see what it all added up to
languid women in flowery hats
radishes with delicate roots
or were they protozoa and what
was the point after she lost her formula
for mixing oil with water and left
the city where she had worked for years
with her friend Jo who dealt in geometries
more attractive to the critics of the fifties
than the curves my mother loved
as much as she loved art as redemption
reflected in entries each summer
to the juried ecclesiastical arts show
at the Lutheran church of the red doors
the act of creation one of commiseration
over marriage largely as unhappy
as any of that time my mother an air sign
my father born under a water sign
these days the patterns of oil shifting
with the weather towards coastal white sands
the weight of the oil hanging heavy
across the wings of long legged waders
Jehovah's
witnesses come
come witnesses
where the screen door
lets in the April sun no
hiding behind a teacup
at the kitchen table
no allowing the doorbell
to go unanswered I am
as transparent here
as the pair is apparent
there only a screen
between to reveal
the world turning small
in the elder’s being
as she climbs four steps
to the porch ever so
red the beret atop
her grayed head bent
forward over footed cane
dressed in her Saturday
Sabbath best she refuses
a porch seat the chair
rocking empty instead
as she stands still to catch
her breath her breath
her breath itself flittering
into air beyond the white
butterfly’s fragile questions
have you wondered
will suffering ever end
what hope is there for
my dead loved ones
will humans eventually
destroy the earth
Awake! read it with
your Bible she says this
is the way of happiness
witness who among us
could refuse her offering
The Big Top
It was just a little circus on the old winter grounds
where zebras and camels had wandered off
once after the last of the corn had been cut
it was our son-in-law the brother of the highwire
artist who led us to the bleachers set under a faded
striped tent staked to solid Midwestern ground
surrounded by fields it was a sultry Saturday
in one hundred degree heat for the pack up
the babies and grab the old ladies 2 o’clock show
when the cadences of the ringmaster’s voice
crackled through the microphone as if to awaken
us from a dream where the dead had reappeared
it was just a little circus but the cues were all there
clowns before a sequined girl climbing silks
another ponytailed and swinging on a trapeze
Scandinavian goats leaping up on pails at the turn
of a whip pyramidal gymnasts and the old highwire
artist working without a net only the music in his head
"There is a crack in everything, it’s how the light gets in."
Leonard Cohen
