"How may we question that Zero of Non-Being
we call the Present?
How may we understand it ----
this inexplicable Zero that is all we have of Being,
that we cannot savor until it becomes the Past
and out of our reach forever?
I am not my Present ----
I am my past: that muddle of memories, desires,
motives, impressions, acts: the unsolved equation
of a fragment of Time, its vectors, its tangential
pluses,
minuses balanced precariously in me for an instant:
the coruscating Instant, with its laser-like probing
antennae
conditioned by the quivering impact of stress on
stress,
the mind weaving its web of sensation, cognition.
Since I am a mystery I may not understand,
how then shall I fathom these people who breathed
and suffered
centuries ago in a Present so different from mine,
they may be said to have lived on a different planet!"
The poet in this early passage wonders if she can capture with meaningful understanding the breathings and sufferings
of the great explorer as he came into Phillips County and across the lands which she, centuries later, came to own.
From the jacket of the book is this language: Lily Peter was a cotton farmer and ginner in the Delta country of eastern Arkansas. She lived all her life in this region
first explored by Hernando De Soto. The photograph below gives some idea of the beauty of the
primeval wilderness through which De Soto passed.
It was made by the author on Big Creek, the "River of the Casqui," at a place known since pioneer days in Arkansas
as The Cow Pens.
The "small river" to which they came "over which, building a bridge, they crossed," is Yellow Bank
Bayou which crosses Ratio Plantation, the lands in the southern part of Phillips County owned by the author,
the willow fringed bayou only a stone's throw from the plantation house. On De Soto's southwest journey toward Indian Bay
he probably passed through some of the author's home plantation lands below Marvell. He would certainly have
crossed Big Cypress Bayou, on the bank of which her plantation home was located. It was because of the interest
she felt in this first exploration of her native countryside that she was moved to make this full-length portrait of De Soto
in The Great Riding, as a tribute to the famous explorer.
Below is a photo of cypress trees that was taken by the author. This photo was on the jacket of The Great Riding.
The poem below the photo is from "The Cypress Bayou", a collection of Poems by Lily Peter.
From "The Cypress Bayou"
The cypresses, darkly aristocratic,
rearing their stately armorials of green lacework
a hundred feet above the black marsh water,
lift up their heads to look over the edge of the world.
Their friends are the white crane, the hawk and the horned owl
they foregather with none beneath their dignity.
Last of their great dynasty, disdainful of men, clannish,
they dwell in bands and companies in the swamps and bayous,
and a cypress tree alone and far from its kindred
is as an exile in an unhappy country.
