The Apricot and the Moon
by Cathryn
Essinger
Dos Madres Press,
2020
ISBN: 978-1-948017-78-7
79 pages
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The following biography is from Dos Madres Press’ website:
“Cathryn Essinger lives in Troy, Ohio where she raises butterflies and tries to live up to her dog’s expectations of her.
She is the author of three previous books of poetry–A Desk in the Elephant House, from Texas Tech University Press, My Dog Does Not Read Plato, and What I Know About Innocence, both from Main Street Rag. Her third book contains a video poem based on the way a community remembers a local murder. The video was produced by Cathryn’s son, Dave Essinger.
Essinger’s poems have appeared in a wide variety of journals, including Poetry, The Southern Review, The New England Review, Rattle, and River Styx. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcarts and “Best of the Net,” featured on The Writer’s Almanac, and reprinted in American Life in Poetry.
Currently, Essinger is a retired English Professor and a long standing member of the Greenville Poets.”
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Review of Cathryn Essinger’s The Apricot and the Moon
Cathryn
Essinger’s new collection, The Apricot and the Moon, is an exploration
and meditation on abundance, fragility, and loss; creation, imagination, and
memory; time, seasons, and cycles; beauty, mystery, and magic. The poems are inhabited by connections to the
moon, sun, water, and wind; family, friends, and neighbors; animals and flora. They
resonate with a complex blend of longing, vulnerability, tenderness, reverence,
and possibility.
I was first drawn into the collection by its title, the fact that it’s
dedicated to “the Moon, our closest neighbor and most steadfast friend,” and
the tiny gem of the beginning poem titled “Envy,” that sets the stage for the first
section titled “She Said the Word Moon…”:
The moon climbs
with its hefty promise and I suspect it of knowing
the true art of resurrection—seeds packed
into a sinewy cave,
The sharpness of the spoon and the motion to “scrape out the seeds” effectively rubs up against the delicateness of “holding the soft entrails in one hand.” The image of throwing it to the birds extends the idea of resurrection, because the seeds will not only sustain the birds, but they will cycle through their bodies to disperse and hopefully sprout a new squash plant.
The poem “Another Stilled Thing…” begins with another image of fertility and regeneration—a goose egg found “Tangled in the roots of the sycamore tree.” But this egg is “cold” and “abandoned,” no longer viable. The “I” of the poem cleans and saves it for “the neighbor boy / who loves stilled things— / fossils, locust husks, and sea shells, / anything that might have been, / but now is not.” Such a haunting image, and one of reverence in the way she depicts carrying it so carefully: “We honor its fragility, as if it might be / reawakened.”
“Deconstructing the Moon” is full of whimsy and mystery that spoke to me of the potential power of creativity, imagination, and language. It begins with “She says ‘moon,’ and the word forms like a bubble, / hovering close to her lips…She says the word ‘light,’ and the moon / moves across the patio, touches the table top, / smears the grass like a slow snail…” The image of an egg recurs, when she portrays the moon climbing “to the top of the pines, / where it breaks like an egg yolk, spilling color / down upon the tree…”
The two poems that follow “All Hallows” are centered on black cats. In
“To Name the Moon,” she describes one gracefully, carefully walking the length
of a fallen branch in “life or death practice for the day / when she will climb
higher than ever before, // her last life held firmly between her teeth.” The
poem ends with the wistful image of
the cat in heaven “ready to argue for nine more chances to spit // at feral
dogs, tempt the thinnest of ledges, name / the August moon, and call all of her
children home.”
This idea of regeneration interlaces throughout the collection. In “For Boo,” another black cat, perhaps the same one, has died and her owner is asking the gods to “Make clear the midnight path for her…Let there be catnip…Let her voice be heard…” in the end, desiring that if she’s threatened or longs for remembered places, “let her return to me as a familiar, / a shade, a companion beside my door, / her voice too persistent to be ignored.”
The poet’s bond with the moon resurfaces, along with a connection to
neighbors in the poems “Super Moon” and “A Corner of the Moon.” In “Super
Moon,” she sits a chair outside to watch the moon, and is joined by a neighbor
who whittles. I absolutely love that she has a book in her lap and headphones
on, because she says, “I don’t want my neighbors to think / that I am doing
nothing except watch the moon.” When the neighbor asks what she’s listening to,
she admits nothing, and he suggests she learn to whittle. The poem ends so dreamily, when she asks if her neighbor will teach her, and he agrees, saying, “you begin by
looking / at the moon…”
“A Corner of the Moon” is a fascinating reverie that combines the
everyday world seamlessly with the fantastical. It begins:
Last night I saw my neighbor throw
[I] watched him lift
it to his weathered face,
The last two poems of the first section speak of connection, longing,
and loss.
“Missing Wakayama” contains an epigraph of “for my son, in Nachi,
Japan.” This suggests to me that the
narrator went to visit her son in Japan, and now misses both the city and her
son.
In “Serendipity” the narrator carves a pumpkin for a friend in memory of a cat who recently died, commenting:
…although
moving quick-silver in
the October
The section opens with “The Blue Heron, Fishing,” in which she names a blue heron Heraclitus “because every day / he steps // into my stream / and every day // I follow in the wake / of his stepping.” Such a beautiful association established, and, since it references Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher, this stream reminded me of a quote attributed to him: “You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.” And a similar quote: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man,” which reflects the ideas of life’s fragility and impermanence that runs throughout these poems. This poem also echoes the idea of naming and the power of words, referenced in earlier poems—the one where a black cat in heaven gets to name the August moon.
Together we make the
sign for green,
The poem goes on with she and the fern signing “white, joy, happiness,
lovely…and her favorite—the sun!” They converse about language, translation,
the “immediacy / of sunlight, the nightly plunge into darkness / the motion of
stars, the little grief / at the end of every day.” This poem explores the
magic that can happen when reading poetry, and the power of the imagination and
language, and the mysteries we encounter every day.
“Heliotrope” is a meditation on time and some of the instruments that
keep it—a microwave clock, stove clock, a mantel clock, a grandfather clock
“who always / lags a moment behind, the shadow / of the earth eclipsing the
moon // above his numeraled face.” She goes on with the grandfather clock:
…He understands
the turning of the
earth measured against
I’m mesmerized as this poet ponders time and its mysteries and
contradictions, such as: “Today my son is flying west, ahead of the sun, /
arriving before he has left…” She ends the poem with the sunflowers that
“followed the light so faithfully” and how they “long for earthly time, / the
darkness of the soil, the steady / tick-tock of the sleeping seed.” Such an evocative image of the seeds waiting
for their time to regenerate, an impression which replays in earlier poems. In
“Zinnias” the poet talks about chores at the end of summer, such as cutting
back the zinnias, and “gather[ing] a few seeds to tuck away.” The poem ends on
such a fine, wistful note:
hoping to plant them
in the spring, knowing
Again, we see this idea of regeneration positioned against the
fragility of life. The “stalled forever” phrase so perfectly echoes the goose
egg in an early poem that the narrator takes to a neighbor boy “who loves
stilled things…anything that might have been, / but now is not.” These visions
of possibility and hope braid throughout the book, creating a haunting sense of
longing and regret.
The poem titled “A Story: Twelve Moments Tangled by Time” is a series
of tiny moments of the natural world observed, what I think of as “stilled
time” preserved in twelve haiku-like stanzas. In one “The wind has a story to
tell, / I listen as if / it were meant for me.” In another, “The story tangles
in the branches / of the sycamores / still lost in the shadows.” One I
particularly like was the following, which mirrors for me the poem “Reading
Basho by Fern Light.”
I am more interested
in blackbirds,
The time theme proceeds with “The Hourglass,” which the poet says,
“doesn’t measure anything / without a little nudge to get it started.” It also
speaks of memory, another idea that threads through the collection: “Memory does not honor time, but flings / its
shade across any course you’ve charted.”
“On the Stairway” is an evocative retelling of a simple moment of
pleasure stilled in time that remains a secret nourishment in a man’s life:
He was coming up the stairs
the painted nails, the
pale arch.
the edge of the step,
and then
to move away from him.
How interesting that the man never saw more of her than the details revealed
above. He says he intentionally didn’t turn around to see more. We don’t know
if she was someone he knew or a stranger. We don’t know if it was an inside or
outside stairway. It appears to be a stairway he climbs somewhat frequently. He
reveals that he never told anyone, not even his lover. “He kept / the moment to
himself, a selfish pleasure / perhaps, but it was such a small thing.” But it’s
evident that this moment of beauty meant something larger to him. He says, “Odd
how you can take such moments / with you—they ride along like shadows, //
almost unseen.” The poem ends with the confirmation of how much he relished
that tiny, secret moment in time:
And yet, he never
climbed the stairway,
place, without
remembering, without
I appreciate the mystery of this stolen moment, and his memory of it,
and how much pleasure such tiny bits of stilled time and their re-creation or remembering,
can afford us all in life.
The poem “Away” revisits such remembered moments, and the stillness of
them, how you “drift away…to wherever away is—that small space // that we
promise ourselves, / that precious thing from childhood // within reach once
again.” She goes on to describe that still moment of being away:
…It is the
step
a door, the calm just
before sleep,
you truly are.
She speaks further of the mystery and sacredness of memory: “But, deep in memory, there is a charm, / a
talisman that knows you are never // really gone, that you are here and away /
all at the same time.” There is such nostalgia and tenderness in the poem’s
ending lines of a memory invoked by a childhood photo her mother took of her “on
an unremarkable summer / day when there didn’t seem to be // an end to
anything, much less to love.”
“Someday, the Sycamores…” is a magical imagining of sycamore trees
having the ability to “pick up their roots / and walk away…” It takes place
along a creek, and ends with the speaker of the poem witnessing just such a
moment of wonder:
And if you watch
carefully, if you sit down in the dark
on gnarled knuckles
and inch away, see them gather up
“Beside Spring Creek” recreates another moment alongside a creek near a
sycamore “suspended between the reflected world / and the one above, // we can
no longer tell the difference between / the shimmer of the water and the gleam
/ of a September sky.”
In “The Old Heron, Rising,” she again follows a heron who she says,
“refuses to migrate.” It’s spring now, but the heron “understands // that
beginnings always foreshadow their ends.” The poet reads to her dog in “After
Flushing His First Muskrat,” the legend about how “it was the muskrat who made
the Earth.” I so loved how she goes into the dog’s mind, his thoughts about the
story she’s reading him. He recalls the moment at the creek with the muskrat:
Mostly, he remembers
the smell of wet musk in
dove between his legs
and slid into the current.
water pushing forward,
the dizzying mix of sun
In “Gossip” yearlings whisper secrets to trees, who repeat it to
sparrows and “sometimes / early in the morning, when there is still water / in
the gutters and before traffic has begun, / they repeat it in a language that
even I / can understand—Everything will be /
different today, but nothing has changed.”
The themes of time, memory, and loss extend into the third section titled “Now, and Again,” which starts with
the tender poem “Summer Apples.” The poet is making an apple pie for her mother
“who is not gone / but whose memory has become / so transparent that she
remembers // slicing apples with her grandmother / (yellow apples;
blue bowl) better than / the fruit that
I hand her today.” It ends on a note that echoes earlier ones of regeneration,
which also gorgeously mirrors the generations of humans in this poem:
And so, I slice as
close as I dare to the core—
the seeds remember
everything they need
In the poem “Now, and Again” the poet is reminded of an old T-shirt her
mother washed until it was so thin she “could see right through // to another
time, to a landscape gauzy / through cotton mesh, where the Iowa / cornfields
lie smothered in summer heat. // And I know now that time can be / caught in
the thinnest of nets.” Such a breathtaking image of memory and time.
The title poem “The Apricot and the Moon” tells of the 2017 Solar
Eclipse, and shows the poet, and who I assume is her mother, arranging a
grapefruit, an orange, and an apricot on a table, and “set both to spinning to
show / how something small can eclipse the view // of something much larger
than itself.” The “you” of the poem brings the apricot in front of her eye, and
names what she can no longer see all night, until the daughter puts her to bed.
There is such reverence and tenderness in the following lines:
I am afraid for you,
until I remember that you
In “How Words Become Things” the poet tells how her two-year-old
granddaughter calls the moon “balloon,” and speaks of the power and failings of
language:
Already she knows
that every metaphor is
a lie, and that language
they want to become…
The idea of regeneration enters again in the poem “Of Course,” where
the poet views a sonogram of a grandchild-to-be and sees “a face so familiar
that I know / I have seen you in another life.” This poem is filled with such joy,
tenderness, and vulnerability, ending with the moving lines:
…And when you are my age,
remember me, please.
Remember that I knew
“Cooking Soba in Ohio” returns to the poet’s son living in Japan, in a
breathtaking way of imagining her way to visit him. While she cooks soba
noodles, “steam…misting the air,” she envisions herself traveling “past plains,
/ coastal waters, oceans, and then // to a small town half way around / the
world, and now I’m in the street, / looking for you...”
In “Anniversary,” she depicts a couple in a strip mall parking lot, the
husband loading groceries and lumber into their vehicle: “He taps his wife on
the shoulder and says, / Look at the moon…” The woman “wonders how they came / to this moment, a middle aged
couple, / children grown and on their own…and after all these years, / this
moon still advertising, still outshining / anything that the world has to
offer.”
This third and last section comes full circle, returning to autumn and
holidays in a poem about carving a pumpkin, “The Carving Ritual” and a poem
“Halloween.” In “Raking Leaves” she says she knows each kind of leaf and needle
by “the sound of the rake,” imagining how the leaves “mumble, gossip, whisper
among themselves, / refusing to be rushed into forgetfulness.”
The book concludes with the poem “In October, We Count Our Losses,” in
which the poet accidentally brings in a caterpillar with a bunch of parsley she
picked from the garden. She sets him “in the middle of a bouquet / of parsley,
dill and rue, where he continues / to eat while we set the table, stir the
soup.”
They talk about all the caterpillar survived to get there, and about
“people and places” they lost, and “how grief can become its own comfort…”
The caterpillar crawls away and is forgotten. She enters the future in
the following lines:
It will be a month
before I find him
plain and nondescript,
a little mummy,
on the porch while
snow and rain pelt
She imagines how in spring she will “find him reborn, clinging / to the
farthest screen, wings catching / the sunlight, warming to a new day.” The poem
and the book end on this haunting, hopeful note:
There are so many of winter’s little griefs
Cathryn Essinger’s The Apricot and the Moon delves into our connections to each other and the natural world, revolving around the mysteries, complexities, and dualities of being human. These poems pulse with layered, repeated imagery of beauty and opulence, light and darkness, moments of stillness and intimacy that braid into a rhythmic whole of life’s seasons and cycles. They will fill you with awe and comfort.
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