Before the Light Changes, by Irene Honeycutt

Before the Light Changes
poems by
Irene Blair Honeycutt

ISBN 13: 978-1-59948-120-3
~80 pages, $14
Go to mainstreetrag.com

Irene Honeycutt has been, like Shelby Stephenson, one of the movers and shakers on the NC poetry scene. She's helped launch an inportant literary festival in Charlotte, not to mention helping to launch numerous young writers on their careers, and she's done what all busy poets struggle to do---launch her own small boats of langague, her poems. I've been enriched by her poetry and her friendship. KSB

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“Irene Honeycutt defies the easy stereotype of Poet, disengaged from everyday life. Even better, she defies it with a vengeance—an energy that enlivens her work throughout. Whether lying in bed wondering if she should answer the doorbell, staring at an empty computer file, or watching an old man sweep water from his flooded home’s floor after hurricane Katrina, she refuses to let go of the everyday moment, whether interior or exterior, probing the depths of it for its past and ever-present reality. Because she enters her poems so completely, her readers recognize these moments as their own. When Honeycutt declares, ‘Dreams live in buried codes. /Last night they told me: /You carry a corpse around /and you are part of the sun,’ we know what she means. Before the Light Changes renders that interplay of light and shadow in all its shades of mystery.”

—Kathryn Stripling Byer,
North Carolina Poet Laureate,
author of Coming to Rest



(Irene signing books!)


“Honeycutt ‘slices an apple and its heart opens,’ particularly in those poems in memory of her dead brother. And for all the other absences we tend—and bear, the way ‘darkness holds the moon in place/even when it’s hidden.’ This collection finds her ‘swimming in a dream of a sunken pool we never had.’ But there are moments, also, of poignant humor. When a jazzman asks a friend with dementia how she’s doing, the reply is: ‘Who could ask for anything more?’ Indeed.”

—Julie Suk, The Dark Takes Aim



“In ‘Clearing a Path for Retirement,’ just one of many of the memorable poems in this collection, Irene Honeycutt tells us of her refusal to send ‘parts of my life to the shredder.’ How fortunate we are that she hasn’t but instead used her past to create poems that touch the reader’s heart as she probes the machinations of her own. Before the Light Changes is further proof that Irene Honeycutt is one of North Carolina’s finest poets.”

Ron Rash, author of SERENA



(Irene Honeycutt)




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The Radio With the Green Eye



The radio with the green eye is playing
"I'm so lonesome I could cry."
Dad turns the knob, and Gabriel Heater's voice
blasts into the living room. Dad folds
the Labor Union News and hunches
towards the radio's mouth.
It is covered with brown cloth.
I poke it when no one's around,
wondering what goes on inside.
Tonight the mouth thunders with bombs.
I get up from the sofa.
My fear is like the egg I drop
on the kitchen floor.
Mama just keeps washing dishes,
pretends not to notice.
Ronnie's in bed, wants me to play checkers.
Yesterday, he stepped on the iron rake,
sat crying in the garage while Dad poured
kerosene over the hole in his foot.
His blood soaked the towel.
I've learned that if I turn a dial in my head,
it all goes away. Even the static
of machine guns becomes a blanket
of snow, covering the war.


----------------------------------------------

The Transfer

The nurse said she would change his diaper.
I spotted her in the hallway much later,

leaving another patient’s room, reminded
her to please change my brother’s diaper.

She said she would be there soon.
Said she’d be there before the ambulance

arrived to transfer him to the hospice
ward. I sat by his side. He never complained.

Minutes ticked and time
for the scheduled transfer passed.

An hour later, she rolled
a cart into the room.

“They’re on their way,”
she said. “Gotta clean him up.”

Another nurse, passing his room,
glanced in and grinned at her.

“Lucky you! You always get the ones
who need changing.”

I pretended not to hear.
Hoped he hadn’t heard.

How patient, how full of grace he was,
lying there in swaddling clothes

waiting for the transfer
that would surely come.


-----------------------------------
When You Think of All the Things
Ten Dollars Cannot Buy



says the public radio commentator,
pitching for a donation. I am bent
over the dishwasher, unloading
pots and pans, my heart full,
eyes brimming.
Send ten dollars a month, and we’ll send
a gift: YoYo-Ma’s CD, “The Appassionato.”

Maybe T would like that CD.
She sends me energy and love,
wants me in her life again.
This can’t be bought for ten dollars.
She doesn’t invite everyone into
her life or her homes. In Mound,
Minnesota, you can step out her back door
and ski into the woods. A vacation
can’t be bought for ten dollars.

This past weekend she flew to Charlotte
for a friend’s surprise birthday party.
I invited her to lunch. Long-lost friends,
we were reunited over garlic nan, navrattan
curry. She shared photos of the trips
she and her husband recently made
to Prague and Budapest, then told me
how their estate lawyer looked surprised
when he walked into his office
and saw them sitting there with an 8x10
photo of their cat between them.
Who do you leave an estate to?
We’re both only children.


More pictures:
The Marco Island homes—
one of which she calls, Sandcastle.
An iguana on the deck.
Day of the Iguana, she laughs.
We call him Tennie..
I stare intently at Tennie.
It looks strangely like the snake
that swallowed the frog in my backyard.
I’m still wondering what that meant.
It was not about asking for anything.
Or devouring. The look on the frog’s
face. Something about relinquishment?
Shedding?


I e-mail T in Mound.
“Here I am again, not knowing what
to say, not wanting to embarrass you
or sound maudlin. But I want you to
know how much I admire your courage.
Your tenacity. You know how to live,
how to die.
I loved your stories. How you told
the surgeon who wasn’t sure
you should make the trip to Greece:
Hey. I can be happy anywhere in a first-class-
all-expense-paid hotel room, anywhere!
I have no compulsion to climb to the top
of the Acropolis. I’ve done that!”
And when Nurse Ratchett droned on
interminably about what tests
they were about to administer,
you mentally went to the Aegean Sea
and chanted, In one week I will swim
in the Aegean Sea, drowning out
the siren’s threatening monologue.
In one week you were swimming
in icy blue waters, thinking of
Helen of Troy.”

I love the way we laughed hard
yesterday at the Indian restaurant
even though she’d shared:
I don’t need a workshop on
how to be in the Now.
I’m here, in my senses,
tasting the curry—
one of the few
that actually knows what I’ll die of.

Melanoma.
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(Twilight on the Danube)


Bulgaria’s last dancing bears finally footloose

--The Charlotte Observer, 6/16/07



Bought by activists, the three bears will live
out their lives roaming a mountain sanctuary
with former dancing bears, marking the end
of a Balkan tradition outlawed in 1993.
Captured in youth, each bear’s nose or lip
was pierced, a metal ring inserted, chain attached.
They were doomed
to travel in cages,
dance on embers.

I glance at the photo of Misho, the 19-year-old,
whose eyes, even whiskers, are downcast.

Imagine a campfire surrounded by mobs filling the night
with jeers and laughter as an old bear makes its appearance,
bowing to flickering faces. Before beginning its dance,
the good bear gazes deep into the dark forest, then edges
closer to the fire. Again and again it circles.
A man rises, yanks its chain. The bear stares at the stars
while the man forces whiskey from his flask
down the bear’s throat, until drunken it stumbles
into the embers, makes music with its feet.

The night is young,
younger than the bear
ever was.