TURTLE TRAILS

And what of the turtle
who finds her trail blocked
by the new asphalt road,
hot as just poured pitch,
and she with places to go...

and what's left of the turtle
who dares the hot tar
but can't beat tires, that singing
skid year-rings off her plastron,
crack her carapace into splinters
to bleach in the sun, and egg shells
like bits of plastic, shard-sharp
in dry air...

and what of tomorrow, of next year,
when turtles no longer come this way,
their span reduced to the width of a road;
generations of turtles
smacked to the side of a road that replaced
dirt trails, that dried up wetlands,
pulled taut the hills into flatland,
ripped reed and sedge from the runnels
of waterways, that took the land
from the turtle as surely as from the Indian,
taking her eggs, and her poems.

poem by CB Follett from Visible Bones,
originally appeared in Green Fuse.

Book Details

Visible Bones, poems by CB Follett, award winning and internationally published.

There are seventy-two poems in Visible Bones divided into six sections – The Gravity of Hammers (general poems), The Latitudes of their Going (poems of the animal kingdom), Stripped Gears (earth poems), Falling into the Shadow (poems of leaving, including poems of social concerns), Close to the Bone (the lost daughter poems) and Gathering the Mountains (ending with a section of general poems.

The cover of the book, front and back, title page and section title pages all use the art of the poet.

Visible Bones is published by Plain View Press 1998. ISBN 97-076035 Price $14.95 130 pages
perfect bound, layflat laminate color cover 6" x 9"

ANNA

When she died,
I picked up all her parts
and rearranged them
in me.
Mother
and Father
did not see;
eyes blurred
with loss of promise,
they tipped her
below the frost line,
and thought all of her
had gone.

But knowing
of their needs,
I soaked up Anna
into my own peat,
let her move
with my bones, speak
with my tongue,
until by cell and thought
she took me over.

And though they knew
they'd lost a daughter,
they were forever wrong
about which one.

poem from Visible Bones by CB Follett
first appeared in Verve, 1991

REVIEWS

Visible Bones…may well prove to be one of the finest poetry collections to emerge this year… The poems are extraordinary…The book is liberal with poems about creatures of woods and water, paddock and stream and they are revelations. In loving, elegiac but unsentimental ways, Follett shows us animals as we may not have seen or thought about them before…This poet whose passion is always quietly present…takes us with her…and prompts in us recollections of our own lives…From her we learn how to see what is heart-stopping and unexpected…Why is it that we keep looking to poetry for solace, for stimulation, for nourishment, for reminders of our humanity? Why in the face of contemporary realities, do we continue to search though poems for lyricism, good sense and honest feeling, only to be more and more disappointed? Isn’t it in hopes of finding words and meanings such as these…

-Review by June Owens, Florida

Every poem is full of clear, expressive imagery that flows effortlessly from one mood to another, from one vision to another. CB Follett’s wit and invention is delicious, and the emotional depth each poem possesses is often breathtaking. In Visible Bones, Follett looks at life with a clear unflinching eye. Her deep insight and unsentimental compassion will capture and delight the reader.

-Ruth Daigon, Editor: Poets On; Between One Future and the Next,
Papier-Mache Press

…a poet of astonishing breadth who addresses both the life of the body and the life of the spirit…a seer and a truthteller who writes in a vivid, passionate voice we feel we can trust.

-Susan Terris author of Curved Space and Eye of the Holocaust