already

A jumbled, shining
music comes
to find me
in the corners
of your quiet
weather. Already
I can feel its
footsteps crossing
my heart, like
oars in the rain
of a river,
rising.

©Laura Sorrells 2013
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light's attention

Mountain laurel
glows in light's attention.
Every minute
seems to wait
on the wind
to trade in winter
for the humming
urgency of
bees.
----©Laura Sorrells 2013
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This was a found poem, culled from Dave Bonta's blog The Morning Porch and the responses to it.

all hours

Every climate chooses
its paradox. Your
ordinary, vivid love
tells me something about
beauty every tme
I feel you speak.
Nowhere else
is where you are.
All Hours are our
oracles, our teachers,
our speechless, wrestling
angels in the
silent dark.
----©Laura Sorrells 2013
all rights reserved

the possibility of dogwood

The possibility of dogwood

sings in the simple

prayer you whisper.

Our family of sassafras

and wind, of bloodroot
and mourning cloak,
announces the violent
and blessed 

claims of birth

and breathing. The scrutiny

of lilies and thunderheads

always finds me, always

remembers how I burn

like a desert without

you, and how

your healing fire

declares itself

again and again

in the living thirst of

your breath.

----©Laura Sorrells 2013

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This found poem came from Pattiann Rogers' book The Dream of the Marsh Wren: Writing as Reciprocal Creation.

a poem by Mark Jarman

from Questions for Ecclesiastes

Unholy Sonnet #17

God like a kiss, God like a welcoming,
God like a hand guiding another hand
And raising it or making it descend,
God like the pulse point and its silent drumming,
And the tongue going to it, God like the humming
Of pleasure if the skin felt it as sound,
God like the hidden wanting to be found
And like the joy of being and becoming.
And God the understood, the understanding,
And God the pressure trying to relieve
What is not pain but names itself with weeping,
And God the rush of time and God time standing,
And God the touch body and soul believe,
And God the secret neither one is keeping.
----Mark Jarman

something older

from 2008......

The other day I went to the little lake off of Cove Road to take pictures. I didn’t have anything specific in mind. I thought maybe I would see the wild turkey again, the one I saw in late May up in a tree. I didn’t, but I got several nice photographs of dragonflies. And so I sat down to write something about them, something about stillness, waiting, nearness, trust, consciousness, detail. After starting and stopping several times, I pretty much decided that there doesn’t seem to be anything richer than the simple fact of the dragonflies’ presence. The bulbous eyes, the shining tiles of spread wings, the returning surprise of a narrow powder blue body to a reed, like an airborne stylus or a comb held up to the light with the teeth pointing away from you. The leaf, the stem that holds something particular for those tiny feet. A template of curiosity when the creature settles closer, a way of thinking I let it have when I consider it but that surely isn’t there at all. How green and blue share the afternoon light in such a way that the same insect shines like the edge of a leaf one minute and then five later hums with the Maxfield Parrish brightness of twilight sky, a needle of blue flame sliding through shadow to water. I’ve heard dragonflies called snake doctors and so I looked up the term. Seems like the Native Americans started referring to them as such because of how dragonflies rode low over or maybe on the backs of snakes. Someone imagined them stitching up the wounds of injured king snakes and moccasins, I guess, and there you have it. it’s an image I like, one of wordless collusion between worlds, of healing transmitted through the thinnest of places to roughness, no questions asked.

©Laura Sorrells 2008

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The Mountain

The mountain’s face is just the face it shows me. The side I see. It plays at getting bigger and then smaller again, depending on where I am. Sometimes I drive from Cove Road down Grandview Road to Burnt Mountain Road just so I can see the mountain rise up over me. A gentle ancestor, a season. It’s never the same twice and yet there’s a stubborn consistency about the textures of its winds and shadows. The light loves to turn colors I’ve never seen before as it passes across the forested spire. I make up names for these colors sometimes. Thornblue, roselaurel, greyling. Earlyglow. Threshold. Silverhaunt. Pantherdark. Woodsmoke. Skywild. The mountain often seems to mandate silence, or at least suggest it, sternly but with what I think of as love. Mircea Eliade wrote, “In several traditions the Cosmos is shaped like a mountain whose peak touches heaven; above, where the heavens and the earth are reunited, is the center of the world. This cosmic mountain may be identified with a real mountain, or it can be mythic, but it is always placed at the center of the world.” For me this cord is genetic, I think sometimes, and I wonder if my mother and grandparents, and others, felt this visceral sense of kinship with the mountain. I listen to the music of the mountain as I drive past it and it calms me. The music shifts but it always shares a soul with itself. The songlines, I thought once, driving along into the rise of the road one day in late December, watching the mountain get bigger as I got closer. It often does that in winter. I have thought that it should be the other way round, that the mountain’s bareness should make it seem smaller, but the bones of its slopes rise up into a shared space with the revelation of treetrunks in the small light of a January afternoon in a way that enlarges the mountain’s presence. Years ago, reading Joyce, I ran across the word “omphalos” and, looking it up, realized that the mountain carries that cord of energy for me. It is a portal, a thin place, a threshold, a liminal space where sky and earth come together and promise me that everything here---sky, earth, hawk, tree, coyote, rock, bear, creekwater, pinecone, bobcat---is my relative. That the tapestry of ancestors is not linear but curved and always present, always speaking to me in the silent shapes and shadows of wind and cloud across the cove as night comes on. 

©Laura Sorrells 2013
all rights reserved