The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard
Lyric is a Sound We Hear Beyond the Noise: On the Lyric Essay
It’s always this way -- we learn to think with an ear toward tuning. If I had listened to you, I’d never have invented that song. I hear your objections even when your mouth is sewn shut.
Given its genre mingling, the lyric essay often accretes by fragments, taking shape mosaically … (Deborah Tall)
How accessible is this? Because that becomes the question, never mind the eye to form, or what the fissures whisper. A small yellow kernel shoots to eight feet tall with enough sunlight and water (natural elements of a ready nature). Let it be known that no one came along yesterday to test for pH and still we eat, still we sing the songs inside our bones while the green stalks rise.
continue reading
Holy Night
She thrusts her fist toward a hollow sky, gathers dirt around saplings newly planted, flails a ribbon through an Earth Day moon. She won’t pray on nights like this—too raw, and carnal somewhere—too uncertain. But she’ll bask in dog pack howls and coyote cries, and dream of younger days. She’ll squat on an old concrete block and wait for the void to seize her like a holy fire.
__
[First published in the Kentucky Review, January 2016]
Quietude
“I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.” - Albert Einstein
If a foghorn blows in Iowa, be assured that you’ve not teleported to the Port of Redwood City, but instead encountered the yearning of a cow for her calf or a bull for his feed. Or perhaps it’s mating season when the entirety of nature seems intent on howling and groaning.
Now, here, in the quiet, the sough of a car in the distance, the soft whistling of an unseen bird, the hum of a computer at rest, these I hear. My own warm breathing. And on windy days, the settling bones of an old farm house on a hill.
continue reading
Yuma Sunrise
When the night heavies down, and memories
shadow dance against a window etched
with moonlight, a desert stiff with thorns--
I ask the deathly swelter,
can I write your sand?
When a bat weaves across the birthing
daybreak, pre-dawn blue, pink-streaked clouds
and scrubby brush surrounds it all--
I tell the silent tan and brown,
you should not keep quiet at a bird’s fall.
And when white has crested, eye of sun
between the pass (it surges quickly),
shadows trail behind me, this great power--
I bow before it and
a seagull cries.
__
[First appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of the San Pedro River Review]
A Place Called Context
Time in Situ
In the Midwest, time is much like it is anywhere else but for the minutiae: a limping orange barn cat, a cold chill wind in the space of a blaring down sun, and a sunset that marks the end of too few hours in which to cram all the work we’d intended. It is a neighbor’s death, for neighbors can be neighborly in Iowa, and we miss them when they’re gone. It’s heavy winter snows and late spring rains, the admixture of moistures deluging our rivers and streams and rotting the fields, flooding the plains. It is family and friendships, corn mazes and pumpkin patches. Time comprises our rural concoction of pleasant places in open spaces in Iowa, alongside far too many friendly faces, and what some would consider to be a staid provincialism. But it’s not. It’s merely here, and here is home.
continue reading
The Woman Ages
as her chickens lay: as a matter
of course, without much trying.
She ages in defiance, asks
do you want to buy my soul--
this polar expedition, a net for
wolves, this desert in my teeth?
She’s halfway to a wreck
or roadkill, the scat of God.
All she has to do now is fall
off the rung and land right-side up.
__
[First published in the Kentucky Review, January 2016]
A Place Called Place: Migrations
Enter the beginning of the world and a shattered silence. It’s been lively ever since. The human species clamors most, shouting and shifting and trying to prove a point; even in the act of love we whoop it up. Is there flux in the oceans, flight in the sky? Birds bluster and every dolphin sings, every whale spouts, clicks, whistles, and pulses. Life implies commotion, so we invent earplugs and develop a knack for parietal art, find a cave, and paint.
continue reading
Sunset Strayed
I missed the sunset, the stars, the jaws of the moon. I missed the broken wings of a firefly and the night toad’s soft blue nails. Sunsets are beautiful in Arizona, I’m told, but I missed it but for the pink and orange smother spread across the Gila Mountains horizon and the celibate blue sky profaned by a few rare random clouds to the south, clouds thick and monument-like (requiescat in pace) but twisted right in a curlicue at the very top—three of these in a row, and various other light and unformed or dense and fluffy clouds here and there, portending rain somewhere, not here, never here. I missed the rain. There were no lain-down leaves—September’s dibs—only cactus thorns and meager. I missed the brightness of the sun itself—the deepest gold, jutting flame, blinding, sharp, acute, rumpled low lower lowest to scratch and wonder.
I missed the seven seas spread throughout this dying day, the buzz of a cicada, the horse that ran too fast on stilted legs, on gaited legs. When God lay down, when day lay shut, when noise broke wide in the wide night sky, I missed it.
There are reasons here, Arizona swelter, things you want to miss but can’t. You never miss the sand, the melt, the char and pebble. Find the dry creek bed, the cold raw flame, the bite. Find Apollos sans tunic, johnson slumping in shadows. Nothing sings in the desert but bones, dem dry bones. Find eyes too blind, skin too scaly. Find a scorpion’s mate. Let slip and slither. Rattle.
I missed the sunset, strayed. No matter. I’m here to trace a nightfall only secondarily, so it’s moot. The moon is moot, splayed gaping in this night sky, full and figuring, a distraction to my day-weary eyes.
I’m here to love and be loved by aging parents, to hold onto the absurd notion of a life devoid of permanent separation, impossible farewells. I missed the sunset but found much more.
__
[First published in the Spring/Summer 2015 issue of Prick of the Spindle]
