THE MIND OF TREES

Live Oak on Bayou in Arnaudville

This morning amidst the continuing news about mass shootings and tragedy of the last few days, and while I pray for peace in our troubled country, I received an email from my dear friend, Karen Bourque, a master of glass artistry who lives in Church Point, Louisiana. She had attached a photograph of her latest glass piece featuring a tree in Cajun Country. Like many of Karen’s glass pieces, the work brought with it a feeling of peace. The piece wasn’t requisitioned by me, but Karen shares images of a lot of her work with me, and I share my poetry with her — an exchange of inspiration, and sometimes synchronicity. She said she was reading a poem each night from my latest, The Consolation of Gardens, and meditating on it, and I was cheered by the thought that, although I’m not on any bestseller list, some of the poems have carried the “consolation of gardens” to cherished friends.

The email with an image of her lovely glass piece reminded me of an oak tree that Karen, Darrell, Vickie, and I viewed after lunch one afternoon in Arnaudville, Louisiana and that Karen used as a model for the cover of my book, A Slow Moving Stream, published in 2016. One of the poems, “The Mind of Trees,” captured my mood and “spoke to my condition” this morning. It is partially excerpted below:

The trees outlasted their language.

No matter who came

the language disappeared into English:

French, Spanish, German, Chitimacha.

English filled the horizon,

the patois of each clan banned,

buried under the oaks, the words waiting.

The trees absorbed all of it

and when hurricanes felled them

they were cut into logs,

the loggers, finding stories in their language

imbedded in the rings,

began to preserve what had been lost.

Word by word they created

an articulation of arriving,

the sound of memory offering itself

from a distant longing. They heard

what they had been told not to hear —

testimonies for their being there.

And they praised the trees

for finding a way without them.

The poem is open to interpretation, but I believe it’s pertinent to what is going on in our country and am glad to repeat it here. Thanks for the “pass along” this morning, Karen Bourque.

Photograph in “The Mind of Trees” by Victoria I. Sullivan and glass piece image on the cover of A Slow Moving Stream by Karen Bourque.

WHERE BAYOUS FUSELIER AND TECHE MEET

This week, a writer friend from Florida arrived after delivering boxes containing journals covering her lifetime to the archives of Sophie Newcomb in New Orleans, Louisiana and wanted to revisit a few sights in Teche country she'd missed after she left here eighteen years ago. We took her to one of our favorite places for lunch at the Little Big Cup and to NuNu Art & Culture Collective in Arnaudville, Louisiana. The latter center was conceived by native-born George Marks, an artist and sculptor, who returned to his roots in this small Cajun community twelve years ago. Marks, who helped revive a dying community and who has made a home for displaced artists after Hurricane Katrina, recently received the Jillian Johnson Award for Entrepreneurship in the Creative Economy and is credited with spearheading a cultural and economic rebirth in Arnaudville. He was recently highlighted in an article by Walter Pierce in ABiz, an alternative newspaper featuring news and analysis on commerce in South Louisiana.

When we arrived at NuNu's, we were greeted by a member of the quilting circle working in one of the rooms of the Art and Culture Collective, and she postponed returning to her sewing until she had pointed out a few of the artists' creations — paintings, jewelry, wood carvings, soaps, textiles, books
by Louisiana writers and other pieces of artistic work. My writer friend, Jo Ann Lordahl, was attracted to a huge painting by Marks, and we had our picture taken beside his work shown in this blog.

We spent an hour in the Collective, and I enjoyed talking with Debbie Richard, a retired speech teacher who hangs out in NuNu's and is a "closet writer." I'd seen a sign that read Prairie des Femmes, or Prairie of the Women, as I entered the art center and was intrigued by Debbie's description of a triangular prairie between Bayou Fuselier and the headwaters of Bayou Vermilion. She said that it was a place to which women had fled from storms, hurricanes, war, and other disasters and that there were stories about this unincorporated community with which she wasn't familiar.

When I returned home, I did a bit of research and found that a woman named Ashlee Michot lives near Prairie des Femmes and has written two books about the area, Journals and Portraits of A Place. She has also published several books about Louisiana yard shrines and Marian grottos. Many days she spends time in the countryside around Point Blue where she says she first heard French spoken. A retired school teacher, she photographs rural scenes, writes music, works with medicinal herbs and does amateur archaeology in fields around her home. I was told that my friend, the poet Darrell Bourque, knows Ashlee, and I intend to learn more about her and any stories she has heard about Prairie des Femmes when we meet with the Bourques in February.

As usual, I enjoyed touring a South Louisiana habitat as much as the tourist, and after eating some Cajun fare on the deck of The Little Big Cup, we walked through Tom's Fiddle & Bow Shop where owner Tom Pierce often has bluegrass jam sessions. We denied having any musical ability, although I have a yen to learn how to play the banjo, and we escaped before Pierce could sign us up for fiddle lessons.

A growing number of Cajun and Creole artists, poets, musicians, and chefs have set up shop in Arnaudville, some of whom have built homes in this haven that almost died out in the 1980's, but which is now recognized by Gaye Hamilton, manager of Louisiana Cultural Districts of the Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, as a town where "placemaking has been done right."
 

THE BAYOU TECHE

This beautiful image will appear on the cover of my latest book of poetry about Bayou Teche entitled A Slow Moving Stream, which will be published this month. The glasswork for the cover photograph was rendered by Karen Bourque of Church Point, Louisiana and is an interpretation of the Bayou Teche as it flows past the town of Arnaudville, Louisiana. The glass piece is entitled “Beneath the Surface,” and an afterword by Karen describes the elements included in the piece. She writes an eloquent explanation, an excerpt of which follows: “Spring, the dominant seasonal reference to the piece, is symbolic of the time of renewal. Spring, either as time measure or as metaphor, marks that time when the soul awakens inside the crossing of a water barrier, that time when unconscious mind and conscious mind surface and co-exist in the balance of renewed beginnings.”

Darrell Bourque, who is a former Louisiana poet laureate and author of Megan’s Guitar and Other Poems from Acadie, “if you abandon me, comment je vas faire: An Amédé Ardoin Songbook” and forthcoming “Where I waited” and Love Bridge, describes my book: “Diane Moore reminds us that poems begin in memory and in interrogation. The grand march of history holds one version of who we are. Mostly hidden grace notes and terrors hold other versions, and language tied to memory perhaps the truest version. Moore’s pathway to the sacred is through the word and she knows with the right inquiry we can also know in the ways that trees know, and clouds, and crows, and streams, and the whole earth. The universe she creates in the poems in A Slow Moving Stream is a universe where the obvious and the imperceptible, the mundane and the magnificent, the political and the personal are talking, where everything large and small is talking to the other all the time.”

Border Press announces that A Slow Moving Stream contains poetry that “follows the languid Bayou Teche from its source at Port Barre to Morgan City, Louisiana where it empties into the mighty Atchafalaya River, making a journey that traces some Acadian origins in a lovely and sometimes lonely landscape. During the journey, the poet unveils some of the characters and events of early Acadian settlements, as she imagines the history taking place, from the time the Acadians fled their native Pisiguit, Nova Scotia to a present-day oil wealthy Acadiana. This volume contains poems about the Great Flood of 1927, a Civil War battle near Franklin, Louisiana with an attendant drawing by the late Morris Raphael, author of The Gunboat Named Diana. Moore includes descriptions of swamp life and explores spiritual ties that have bound the people who built homes and enterprises along ‘a slow moving stream’ in one of the United States’ most colorful cultures.”

While A Slow Moving Stream alludes to historical events and people, it is, as Karen Bourque writes, “a poetic recreation of people and experiences” as I imagined them to be. Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan, a botanist who formerly taught at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and author of Why Water Plants Don’t Drown, Adoption, and Rogue Genes, enhance the poems in this volume and add to the reader’s experience of that slow-moving body of water called “The Teche.”

I conceived the idea for the poetic work last year while lunching on the deck of The Little Big Cup Restaurant in Arnaudville, Louisiana, watching the bayou flow by, with Vickie, Darrell, and Karen. Actually, the poetry has been hovering in my mind for a long time, and an account of one journey I made along the route of the Teche appeared in Tour Guide: Louisiana’s Beautiful Scenic Byways, Part I that Trent Angers commissioned me to write for Acadiana Profile magazine in 1996.