The Ordinary and the Wild

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2012-01-29T15:39:00.000-08:00

The vagaries of everywhere
meet in a blue wander,
a teaching of pause
and twinkle.
The soul's green word
shakes the sky
with its elemental body.
See: this tangle
of frolic
is the reply
your world receives.
Not rare,
but eager,
a ship of crystal nothing
come to swim you far
astray.

©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

the grace of small wantings

2012-01-25T14:30:00.000-08:00

I want to learn how to have a cup of loose green tea in the morning rather than three tall steaming cups of strong Italian roast coffee.

I want to learn to remember to wake up early like I used to so I can sit on my deck and watch the sun come up over Sharptop.

I want to learn to know more birds by songs and how to tell the difference between a redtail and a cooper’s hawk from far away.

I want to learn how to forgive myself for forgetting something every morning when I leave for work, usually something that seems essential.

I want to learn how to breathe deeply, all the time not just when I’m stressed and fumble for it like a line tossed to a drowning swimmer.

I want to learn how to play an instrument, preferably an old one with someone’s initials carved in it shallowly before it was handed down to the person I will get it from, a musician maybe who will see me on the street and just hand over this spare guitar or fiddle with a bow, stop busking, and wish me good fortune as I try to overcome the clumsiness of my tiny fingers and teach them how to become friends with string and wood.

I want to learn how to bake an amazing pie, not just a good one. One layered with berries and sugar and latticed with stripes of dough. A house and a rooftop, sustenance, comfort.

I want to learn how to build something out of wood. A shed, some rafters I can lean on when I’m tired, a glider I can prop my feet up in and hear the silence of the winter woods.

I want to find the space for the prayer I’ve always wanted to feel. Not just to say but to offer without speech. Words will be there, and emptiness, and long loose strands of squirrelnest, and acorns. Pens, because I hoard them and would love to begin to give them away. A swimmer’s goggles, faintly redolent of chlorine, a bar of lemongrass soap, a dog’s collar still husky with the holy wolfish domesticity of dogsmell. A bandaid or two adorned with cartoon characters, maybe Spongebob Squarepants or Spiderman. A sheaf of index cards I stuffed in my raincoat pocket with notes on them from my observations in the Atlanta airport. An old pair of eyeglasses so thick you could start a brushfire with them. A bright blue paper clip. An Indian head penny. A recipe ripped from my stepmother’s Southern Living on the sly, promising me a perfect bowl of gazpacho. When I assemble these things I will stroll around them with my camera out, searching for the perfect angle from which to send up this prayer, and then I will sit down in the short winter grass in front of this prayer and I will watch it start to rise, carried up and off and then back down to me on a current of salutation and numinous grace, the breath of God speechless in the clouds I breathe as I listen.

--©Laura Sorrells 2007

I wrote this in response to a website writing prompt about what I wanted, back in 2007. I have moved closer to some of these things since then but most of the wanting still applies.

the game

2012-01-22T18:50:00.000-08:00

I haven’t done this in a long time. Maybe I’ve forgotten the rules. No written words to go by. I pull the slips of paper out of their tiny painted box and feel my fingertips prickle with the familiar nip of resurrected nostalgia this little plaything brings me.

Not many people have played this game, because I made it up, and its only rules are the ones that feel their way into being as we play it. The playing board is fashioned from tattered handkerchiefsilk and cardstock, and it lives most of the time with a palmful of tiny blue musselshells, some hemlock twigs, three bits of scarlet ribbon, and the backbones of leaves.

This game is a theater of exploration and restoration, a tiny stage of reverent discovery.

It works best if you forget most of what you know about how to find things. No passwords, no strictures against revealing sacred clues.

You can say anything now.

When I built this game I used some marbles and some acorns and some clear glass beads as playing pieces, and then a little green toy mouse with a German name, and then an old Christmas tree decoration, a tiny globe of opalescent glass attached shakily to a strand of wire. A sphere of eggshell thinness like the blessing of a moth’s breath.

You can’t lose this game and you certainly can’t win.

It’s best if you play with someone who likes to laugh and who appreciates nonsense but who also loves the holiness of thimbles and thick smudgy stubs of carpenters’ pencil.

This game is like coming home to me, like being led through a cool oldgrowth forest by the hand, a blindfold of desert sage and rosemary nudging me (and you) into a place of total trust and abandonment of anything but the now.

Come play with me if you will.

Surrender to the foolish joy I offer you

and know you’re home.

©Laura Sorrells 2012

I rewrote this just now; when I originally wrote it in 2007 it was a response to a website writing prompt about creating a game. I have no idea where it came from either time.

Claybell

2012-01-21T12:55:00.000-08:00

This rendered clay

of bell and clapper

hangs faintly blued

by canvas in the heat:

a dome and a tongue,

silent.

The lake of its body

ripples like a river

in the light

and all the unearthly wideness

of the cloth above it

settles in its stillness.

Its voice pools up

and laps the water from

the small of my back,

a dog thirsty for touch,

a sky.

--lks 2007

©Laura Sorrells 2007

bliss and blessing

2012-01-21T12:46:00.000-08:00

Audacity of Bliss, said Jacob to the Angel--- “I will not let thee go except I bless thee” -- Pugilist and Poet, Jacob was correct.

--Emily Dickinson, from her letters

Unspoken

2012-01-11T16:09:00.000-08:00

There are no secrets between us. I tell you all the lame stories I can’t manage to heave into the waiting human ears around me. I complain about my cold extremities, my shivering toes and my fingers that need more cloth than these thin gloves give me. I make a joke out of the way I collide with desks and trip over electrical cords while teaching. I assume you know what I’m talking about when I say see how this piece of fruit feels (not how it tastes.) How it goes down kind of rough, with tattered saline edges, not like the bittersweet citrus tendrils of grapefruit or the gentle slump of a soft banana sliced into cubes. How it has a skin on it, one that smells like the kindness of fresh air after long confinement. How it lingers on my palate like the swell of field berries almost gone with summer. How it carries me back to the chipped porcelain saucer of that night in the borrowed cabin and to the story we told each other about moths and their secret language: not two stories, but one, a handshake and a private disaster owned and befriended, a nod to the impossibility of living in that place. A private vow, a set of initials inked into a margin, a claim and a release, a triptych of seeds to remind us where our mouths were and of what they held, as if there were any chance we might forget.

I wrote this for Donny in 2008.

©Laura Sorrells 2008

blooms and sings

2011-12-21T11:23:00.000-08:00

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
--Wendell Berry

anywhere between

2011-12-20T19:21:00.000-08:00

Glimpse the maskless teacher
anywhere between
the riddle of your endless question
and the awkward, lovely
heat
of mystery's obedient
immanence.

--lks 2011

I put this found poem together from Frederick Franck's book The Zen of Seeing.

even a sky

2011-12-18T17:34:00.000-08:00

Somewhere between
this tag of words
and the place
it's never been

a window frames
what shines like water,
but could be
anything,
even a sky.

--lks 2009

This was the first of the found poems I've written using the magnetic poetry kits.

lullaby redux

2011-12-17T21:35:00.000-08:00

Despite the lullaby intention set by my mix of chamomile and valerian I can’t go to sleep. Little mice feet sound larger than I hope they are behind my refrigerator and I remember how my brother’s big black dog chewed through the refrigerator coil while he and his family were away. A friend tells me how when he was hiking the Appalachian Trail mice chewed off a big hunk of his long hair and made themselves a nest, there in the shelter while he slept next to a skunk. The skunk may have slept through it too. My cats don’t seem inclined to do anything about these noises. The other morning the tiny corpse of a mouse lay next to Penelope’s fat gray paws in the kitchen and though it hurt my heart to see the creature’s little pink feet still and lifeless I was glad at its smallness. I’ve moved for now into the bedroom where I don’t usually sleep, the one where most of my books are and where an oil painting of sailboats hangs over the bed. My grandmother painted it when I was a little girl, and one of the boats has my name; another has my mother’s and another my aunt’s. I take a big bottle of lemon Pellegrino water to bed with me as well as the cup of herb tea and a book I stopped reading four months ago. The house settles into the almost-winter night and my lonely heart aches a little for my lost love as I fall at last into slumber.

This Cloud

2011-12-13T19:03:00.000-08:00

This cloud is the head of a bull, ready to move but not moving yet.
This cloud is the comb you found on the bus last week and were afraid to touch. Little points of light fly down from in between its scary little teeth.
This cloud is a pointy jester's shoe with bells on its upturned toes.
This cloud is the anomalous, achy blues song you heard on the radio last Saturday night in the middle of the classic jazz show. It wants to be sleek and pretty but turns inside out like a growl of cumulus trying to make it through another afternoon of atmosphere.
This cloud wants to share the sky with a bird of prey.
This cloud owes the bank a lot of money and is about to burst and fade away, spent from spending.
This cloud is a tiny key that fits a mysterious lock you haven't laid eyes on yet.
This cloud is the wake of an outboard motor boat bouncing across the choppy brown waters of a summer lake after a storm.
This cloud is a flag at half mast.
This cloud is waiting for other clouds so it can say what it needs to say to someone other than an empty sky.
This cloud tastes like the dry sand of uncooked grits hidden in the middle of butter and salt.
This cloud hums an off-key tune about traffic jams and text messages lost in the ether of its soul. It wants to catch up with the randomness of all those mis-sent dots and squiggles but doesn't know where to start looking.
This cloud is a glob of grape jelly spilled on a formica tabletop at Waffle House late at night.
This cloud is an origami crane, carefully crafted from crispest cardstock for good luck.
This cloud is a crimson ribbon unraveling at the edges.
This cloud is a knot of paneled pine shaped like a wizard's lazy eye.
This cloud tastes like a swig of cough syrup, a gulp of bitter licorice that goes down slow and unwilling and hangs around your throat and palate long after its flavor should have faded.
This cloud is a silver thimble with a minuscule dent on one side.
This cloud is a silk scarf caught in sharp winter branches. It changes color along with the light that holds it.
This cloud is a dormant hornet's nest sagging away from the delicate paper cells of its center.
This cloud is trying to tell you a secret, but if you don't learn its language, you'll never figure out what it has to say.
This cloud has a gray jersey hood pulled over its head because of a really bad haircut.
This cloud is an inkwell waiting for a pen nib.
This cloud needs a name but resists being captured by syllabaries and alphabets. It's waiting for someone to come up with another way to remember who it is.
This cloud is tired of compound words and sentences.
I know this cloud's cousin from last winter, when the setting sun played at hiding behind it during January's reluctant snowmelt.
This cloud has your name and speaks like a tree or a mountain. Its voice is deep and strange with an edge of purple in it, like a fire burning painted paper on a cold stone hearth. When it makes an appearance I catch my breath and wonder at the elegant, inimitable grace of its presence. Being around it is almost, but not quite, more than I can bear before I have to look away and do something else with my heart, my soul, my breath, and the mind I have always used for knowing things.

----© Laura Sorrells 2011
all rights reserved

I've been experiencing a sort of stasis when it comes to writing poetry the past few months, maybe longer. My energy hasn't been particularly available, I guess. This past Monday I was at a meeting of the Writing Club at the school where I teach, and the students, including three of mine, wrote poems with great enthusiasm and dispatch. I became determined to write some sort of poem too. The assignment the club sponsor had given the students felt too abstract for me so I used an old idea I once borrowed from somewhere (I can't recall exactly where) to write this.

a poem by Jane Hirshfield

2011-12-08T17:09:00.000-08:00

Unnameable Heart

The cricket who
kept me company three days
has fallen silent,
I don't know where.

There are so many
lives of which I know nothing.
Even my own. It moves now
through my fingers toward yours
and I know nothing
I can say that will name its heart.

A boat drifts far out
on the river below the mountains,
and below it
the fish, the great fish
that the one in the boat has come for,
swims in the shadows.

Perhaps the cricket is there, inside the fish.
Stranger things have happened.
I have looked everywhere else
for my lost companion.

From here, the shadow looks small,
but to the fish it is huge.
Range after range of mountains,
and still the old painters
found a place
where two could walk together, side by side.

--Jane Hirshfield

a gesture of never

2011-12-04T16:31:00.000-08:00

Some blue, irresistible lantern
insists we descend
into a gesture of Never.
A prodigal tug of small
but sensuous grace
stretches intently:
a new and beneficent rumor,
a companionship, a fete,
an orange flower
growing on the ancient roof.

--lks 2011

This found poem came from The Gardener's Bed-Book by Richardson Wright.

something hidden

2011-11-16T16:49:00.000-08:00

A strange circle of
momentum swells in
this fruitful
gray breath.
Overnight, a cathedral
gathers.
Something hidden
reaches me:
an arrow,
praising string.

--lks 2011
some rights reserved

This found poem was pulled forth from Rilke's Duino Elegies, the A. Poulin translation.

this slow stream

2011-11-08T19:09:00.000-08:00

Surrounded by change,
listen for a flower
of fire
remember to trust
the secret color
this slow stream
thinks

--lks 2011

This is from the haiku magnets.

Ronde

2011-10-19T18:27:00.000-07:00

A fervent, tender wind lifts
the wheel of itself
above the daily body
of everything.
The luminous phrase
the fox hums in her willingness
travels straight into the
ghost of my woodpile heart.
Emptiness, tiger, honeycomb, puddle:
nothing is not you,
unstoppable and attentive,
the lord of gorgeous
little weeds
and ant language.
Everywhere, I hear
the porcelain music
your light unfolds.

lks October 2011

This is another found poem, this one taken from Mary Oliver's New and Selected Poems: Volume Two.

Salt

2011-10-15T18:52:00.000-07:00

A radical acoustics of truth
rises in innocent clarity.
The delicious gate of desire
reveals an apophatic weather
of unexpected peace.
At last, I learn
the visceral work
of exquisite silence.

The moon is made of salt,
not sugar.

©Laura Sorrells 2011
some rights reserved

This latest found poem, such as it is, came together from the pages of Sara Maitland's A Book of Silence.

Foxfire

2011-10-12T16:07:00.000-07:00

God is my secret; he knows I'm his girl. You don't
know what he's like. Sometimes he licks my face
like a cat lapping cream. I almost caught him once,
but he disappeared down the bole of an oak.
I know he loves me because he gives me presents.
I found a bottle cap once, Red Fox Root Beer,
on the path I take through the aspens. You've never
seen it in a store, have you? A sign clear as candy.
And a bar of soap by a bend in the river, scented
with Rome apples and never used. I bathed with it
for a month, my evening prayer, till it was gone:
God wants his gifts used. The suds down my leg
like apple blossoms on a branch in the dark.
You say he's not real? As soon tell a mother
the child's not real that suckles at her breast.
I stayed with him all night when he had a fever,
fed him shards of ice to keep him alive, and when
I had no water, I cooled him with my own spit
till I couldn't swallow. Who are you to judge?
Come out and you might see something--foxfire
from the root of a fallen cedar--he's mine.

--Robert Thomas

smoke's brother

2011-10-11T18:12:00.000-07:00

Bring home

the animal grace

your spirit needs,

the brilliant thread

of smoke’s warm red brother.

lks 10/11/11

Something quick from the haiku magnets. I keep coming back to that koan about the red thread.

A Turning

2011-10-04T17:25:00.000-07:00

This rich and hungry silence is what I have instead of what I had. The peak of the mountain wants to be more to me than it has been. It doesn’t seem so much a peak as part of something’s body, the body of God perhaps. I keep thinking I want to investigate this thinness that feels thrust upon me, this pruning, this narrowing down and paring away. Of course in some ways it is a richness too. It has spaces where things happen that don’t have a name yet. I will doubtless give them names, probably compound words like webtime or portalhunger or twilightsight. Poplarsoul. Bearsong. As October begins I feel a turning. It always seems the most liminal of months to me, though I know months are a construct, like time. Its crepuscular denouement moves me and whispers to me. But now it’s just gotten started and the edge of fall is still warm. Its shoulder is just covered with a limning of leafshawl. It smells like loamy earth just turning cold at night. A little bit like rosemary drying into winter, crisp and full of itself but ready to be quiet and still soon. Mixing it up with thyme and fading sage next to the fallen bluebird house by the road.

Saturday’s winds were high and frisky. My mother disliked wind and sometimes I don’t like walking in it but mostly it comforts me when it gets together with the trees. My old gray cat used to play with the wind when it blew across the deck. It took me a couple of times seeing it to get that that’s what he was doing. He’d twirl and dance, trying to catch it in his paws like yarn or thread. I feel a little more alive in strong fall winds. A little more aware of the edge of things, of the delicacy of them and of how they sing when they break, like glass or the creaking throat of a bent branch.

Crickets have long since replaced the cicadas of summer. They’re shyer with their song. Last month a cicada got stuck in the glass door and clacked and buzzed much of the night. I tried to find it to set it free but I never could. The color of cicada song is a brassy goldenrod and that of crickets is auburn. I hear my own thoughts in how the crickets move their legs and wings. I hope to do that still when they stop, or maybe what I hear will lead me into some other way of knowing. Some other lingua franca, not sound but something else, like signing or the raised tininess of Braille. Just as tricky to learn perhaps. It will take me awhile to get it. Maybe I never really will; maybe my gestures and how I see the tug of shapes will always need refining. That threshold place is not new to me and I am comfortable with it. Its iterations shift shape like the colors of the horse in the Wizard of Oz but its soul is somehow familiar ground, a gentle pocosin of soft wet earth and hidden birds that fly up suddenly into sky, miraculous, wild, and free.

©Laura Sorrells 2011

The Hidden Field

2011-09-18T17:38:00.000-07:00

Some nameless sweetness
thumps into the palette
of my reverent heart.
Everything abides
in an extravagant,
strange apotheosis
of wonder, courting
the solitary, affirming the
heady purity
of starwort and whippoorwhill,
of sphagnum moss
and spider body.
Listen again:
a chorus of nothing
saturates the hidden field
where clouds invent breezes
and thundercolor births
its mysterious stories.

© Laura Sorrells 2011
all rights reserved

This is another found poem culled from words in the text of Hannah Hinchman's book on nature journaling, A Trail Through Leaves: Journal as a Path to Place.

a poem by Margaret Gibson

2011-09-09T16:44:00.000-07:00

Fox Fire at the Changing Tree

The burning that must
have been coming from me--

these are lines I'm stealing
from someone else's poem, just after

I've resolved not to lie, not to steal
to live in my evergreen

integrity as long as I can manage it
I'm much like these foxes

gathered on a night whose stars
might be flakes of snow

They have their burning torches
to lift and bear

down the road, fully camouflaged
once they've put on the stolen forms

of pious pilgrims
The bare, spreading tree above them

is fit for owls to inhabit
when a savory hunger makes them take

deadly aim
on any small rustle in the dry leaves

That's their true nature
however haunting their melancholy cries

But the foxes--for the love of me
(and it's exactly that)

I can't see why
I shouldn't want to to touch them, stroke them

I might just rub the ruddy silk
of their coats against my cheek

And often have, you tell me bluntly
That friction, however

slight, sufficient to make me
spit fire, gnash my teeth

and lunge for the soft parts of your body

lifting my chin moments after

to say hotly I didn't mean to
I didn't sense it coming

As if I were the innocent one
blindsided, bloodied

--Margaret Gibson

blue wingbeats

2011-09-05T18:02:00.000-07:00

The alphabet of the unfathomable
spells out its blue
wingbeats of grace,
a tapestry of yes
inside the healing
persistence
of foxglove, the unassailable
remembrance
of rosemary.
A ladder of yes
spreads across
the ponderous deep
Aldebaran sky.

--©L.K. Sorrells 2011

This is another found poem, this one culled from the pages of Hannah Hinchman's amazing book A Trail Through Leaves: Journaling as a Path to Place.

the color you see

2011-08-27T18:56:00.000-07:00

Imagine this empty glass
full
Approach the color
you see
Open every piece
of dream
the raw world sings

--lks august 2011

(I am becoming an apologist for the haiku poetry magnets. It seems to be about the best I can do right now.)

feast

2011-08-22T18:59:00.000-07:00

Across the seeded green
of somewhere new and lucky
the language of feathers and drums
feasts and gathers,
a laugh of wind and nest,
blue and easy
in a celebration
of winged
unwrapping.

--for dd, August 2011

one from R.S. Thomas

2011-08-21T13:39:00.000-07:00

But the silence in the mind

is when we live best, within

listening distance of the silence

we call God. This is the deep

calling to deep of the psalm-

writer, the bottomless ocean.

We launch the armada

of our thoughts on, never arriving.

It is a presence, then,

whose margins are our margins;

that calls us out over our

own fathoms. What to do

but draw a little nearer to

such ubiquity by remaining still?

--R.S. Thomas

Capture and Witness

2011-08-04T13:49:00.000-07:00

from May 2008

I want to write something today about how animals call us back into the moment, how they summon me away from my drifting thoughts, my errant mind. How birds retrieve me from my sorrow, my worry, my preoccupation with time and things. They do this when they fly over a marshy north Georgia meadow, a tag of crimson brightness on dark wingspan in the gray late afternoon, and when they haul their spindly heronlegs and arching necks up over that same still brackish water and out to the edge of the woods. It’s always been this way. A friend reminded me recently of how this works, of how fast the mindfulness of being with creatures can come upon us if we let it, if we’re open to it. I thought about how immediate this could be for me as a child, how eager I always was for the experience of smelling my horse’s warm sweaty hide when I rode her or went to feed her. For the joy of seeing the raised flare of whitetail over deerhaunch, springing through high pasture grass. For the starlike spread of a possum’s pink paws on the wood of our porch, stealing cat food, and for the dry wheathusk of a kingsnake’s recently shed skin at the base of my favorite tree. The other day I went to a gathering of strangers to hear them play their flutes, and I began my time with them by hunkering in the grass with a fat bumpy toad and its big eyes, shuttered beads of black and bronze shimmering in the heat. The toad hopped about in the weeds for a bit while I tried to photograph it. Then I stood a ways off from it and let it abide under the tassel of something green. I got down on my belly and noticed the pulse of its creamy amphibial throat, the ridges and curves of its back and neck, the shapes of its nostrils. I thanked it for letting me see it so close and I took my pictures. That moment, a small one of felicity and sweetness, laid out a template of calm attention and inner peace that spent the rest of the afternoon with me.

Lately, on a website I belong to that features independent artists and photographers, I notice that when people compliment each other on their photographs they often say “nice capture.” While I appreciate their sincerity and encouragement, something about this language bumps up against me in a way that seems kind of goofy but which I understand. For me taking pictures is less about “taking” per se and more about watching, honoring, noticing, and being. The picture will come if it’s meant to. And sometimes, even when it seems meant to come and it does come, perhaps it isn’t meant to stay, I learned recently. Not that long ago, one late April afternoon during spring break, I was walking around up on Fort Mountain, about an hour north of where I live. The mountain was just starting to green up. It’s a sacred Native site and I won’t say much more than that about it other than to make mention of the long gray tumble of stone that spreads across the mountainface and the place’s aura of hauntedness, of the slightly melancholy sweet spiritpresence that is always there for me. I was standing around outside the old WPA tower on top of the mountain when my attention was directed towards the butterflies tumbling and rushing through the woods. Tiger swallowtails, mourning cloaks. i couldn’t get any good photos of the swallowtails but the mourning cloaks offered themselves right up to me. They were big and slow and tired from mating. Two in particular came right up to me, even brushing my forehead over and over as I lay on the ground near a big old log that seemed to hold some pull for them. They kept coming back and back to the log. I was able to get very close and the tattered wings and furry bodies of the mourning cloaks showed up gloriously on my camera. One mourning cloak paused on a branch near a big brown leaf that mirrored its body’s hues softly, earthily, eloquently. I was moved and thrilled by my photographs, and I thanked the butterflies when I left.

The next day I was in the little mountain town of Dahlonega, standing outside a café, taking photographs of pansies and their expressive curling faces when I did it. Somehow, in my eagerness to take better macro shots, I reformatted my entire memory card, deleting all the splendid mourning cloak shots as well as photos from my father’s house at Eastertime and other pictures that I loved. I was sick at heart but tried to lean into the incident as a lesson in nonattachment. I’d never done anything like this before, and I pretty much knew my way around my relatively simple little Canon. Though what I’d done seemed stupid and careless, cavalier even, I decided to feel into the emptiness a bit and try to learn what I could from it.

And here it is: photographs for me are gifts of spirit. They’re a collaboration between my eye and the world with its tenderness and its sternness. They’re not about capturing but about witnessing and being there to let something come through. This process isn’t about passivity or even just receptivity, though: I think one has to seek, or at least open up, in order to receive. But it can and for me should be a sort of prayer, even in the goofiest and most playful of moments. If I carry this sensibility with me then my photographs will do the same thing for me that animals can: ground me in the thisness of now in a way that will nurture and befriend the spirits who see them.

Celebrations

2011-08-04T13:43:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite books is Byrd Baylor’s I’m in Charge of Celebrations. A breathtakingly beautiful book, accompanied by Peter Parnall’s illustrations, it’s narrated by a young woman who lives “alone” in a Southwestern desert. She’s not lonely, though, since she’s “the one in charge of celebrations.” She has a hundred and eight of them too—Dust Devil Day, when the dust devils “came dancing in time to their own windy music;” Rainbow Celebration Day, when she saw a jackrabbit poised on a hill staring into a triple rainbow; Green Cloud Day, when she saw a cloud “green as a jungle parrot” high up in the winter sky; Coyote Day, when a certain special coyote followed her through the desert holding her gaze as any friend would; The Time of Falling Stars, when during a meteor shower she also saw a fireball blaze across the nightsky; and her own New Year’s Celebration, which happens in springtime, around the end of April, when the white-winged doves come back from Mexico and the desert is abloom with cactus blossoms.

That young girl’s spirit resonates so deeply for me. I’ve always felt my own sense of the wheel of the year and when I was a child I would create my own holidays according to when good things happened or when I saw something wonderful, just as she did. Now, I don’t do that anymore, but I could, and maybe I will again.

So, if I did, what would the holidays be?

Blue Ice Day will come in January, to mark the time when an icestorm came and blanketed the forest around Jasper with a particularly deep blue sheen of crisp, fiercely shining ice. This ice kept the light that shone through it and reflected it out into the air so that the world seemed hollowed out with a magical aching blueness. On Blue Ice Day, you lean into experiencing the world by candlelight and firelight.

In April will come Dogwood Day, when the dogwood blossoms reach their peak and the creamy branch stretching across the top of my backyard shows itself bright as a floral nightlight in the Georgia dusk.

In mid-June will be Lake Conasauga Day, a special midsummer day and night set aside for a pilgrimage to Lake Conasauga, the highest lake in Georgia, up above Ellijay in the Cohutta Wilderness. It will have to be a perfect bluegold summer day, which is to say there might well be a thunderstorm in the late afternoon, which will then give way to a sunshot early evening with mist hanging over the face of the lake in deep wet pockets. On Lake Conasauga Day, I and whoever wants to go with me will drive up to the lake, enjoy a picnic lunch of crusty bread, Manchego cheese, lime fizzy water, grapes, hummus, and halfmoonshaped fried peach pies from Annie’s Restaurant in Talking Rock. We will then take a nap on the banks of the lake while the food settles. Then we will go for a swim in the cool teabrown waters of the lake, and then we’ll hike deep into the gray shadows of the woods to the Firetower, which requires a ceremonial climb every summer so that a perfect view of the Cohuttas is available. There are stairs, so it isn’t particularly dangerous, but it’s a ways up, and the wind blows hard up there. It’s another world, for just a little while, a windy pocket of perfect vision and separateness, a suspension of body and spirit in time and place. Then we will either have a campfire and settle into a quiet evening of fishing and marshmallow roasting, or we will head down the mountain back home.

In fall, preferably late October, will come a day for frolicking in the leaves: Leaffall Day. It’s all about leaves on this particular day---rolling in them, smelling like them, playing in them, raking them, burning them if possible, taking pictures of them, naming them. Oakfire, poplarchild, sweetgumracer, maplewhirl.

In December, around the time of the solstice and in its spirit, will come Shadow Day. On this day the liminal spirit of wintertime, of threshold and slumbering possibility, will be held forth in a quiet reflective time of meditation and simple stillness. Shadow Day will be a bowl of time, a curve of hours meant for reflection and labyrinth walking, for stillness and the hush of hopeful holy darkness. On Shadow Day, you might choose to suspend yourself from all the bustle and expectation of the world, or you might decide to write things down, examining them and pondering the passage of months and weeks ahead. It’s up to you, your space, your deep emptiness. Shadow Day smells like juniper and smooth stone, like wet earth and damp wood.

I think Byrd Baylor would approve.

Rediscovered

2011-08-01T15:06:00.000-07:00

I ran across these thoughts just now while looking for an old lesson plan template. I think I'll revisit this project. I felt so strongly about it a couple of years ago. It still feels viable....and somehow suddenly important.

I’ve been thinking lately about how to begin writing down any sort of coherent narrative, or set of narratives, about my family---who they were and are and how their respective senses of self were formed, altered, damaged, rebuilt or not. It’s been intimidating to begin this project and I’ve had a hard time getting started, so I thought I would just start typing. First of all, I want to set some sort of intention, but I don’t exactly know what I want to end up with. So I suppose I should start with what I think I want. I want to collect and preserve and write family stories, but not primarily for their narrative qualities. I want the stories to come together or at least relate to each other in terms of having some sort of overarching coherence and meaning regarding specific themes, paradigms, issues, struggles, and recurrent personality traits, for lack of a better term. I don’t think I’m capable of writing a true family history and that isn’t really what I’m after anyway. Maybe these stories will morph into fiction; maybe not. I think what I need to do is record my experience of them—how I learn about the people, places, and experiences involved—in a journalistic sort of way, incorporating my own thoughts, impressions, feelings, disappointments and hopes into the mix as I go. I am not sure what will happen, but that really does seem all right at this point. I hope I gain a stronger sense of that as I write and learn and record more.

Starting off, I want to look at my grandparents and start to write down stories and impressions and information about them. I want to think about them, as well as my parents, in terms of several different aspects of who they seem to have been, but I know I won’t be able to get any sort of total or complete sense of that. That’s all right; a full and accurate depiction of character isn’t what I’m really looking for, and I don’t think it’s possible. There are always different perspectives, layers, stories within stories. So, I am also willing to be surprised. I hope I will be. One of these components of identity has to do with spirituality, one has to do with vocation and creativity, and one has to do with exploring what seem to me to be real polarities of personality---a need for solitude and a desire/need to be of service to others. (I suppose this last paradoxical set of stuff is pretty much typical of the human condition, but I think it expresses itself pretty intensely in my family, and I’m interested in how it has played out in our lives. How it’s folded into our beings, jerked us around, brought us loneliness and joy. Kept us whole, torn us up. I guess this is a universal sort of matrix but I am hoping there will be some sort of resonance and singularity about what I come up with that makes it worth reading. ) People in my family seem to be dealing with very strong desires to help others, to be part of community in a tangible, profound, and service-based way, and yet they also seem to be bumping up against very powerful tugs towards solitude. Sometimes silence. Sometimes a kind of self- or other-inflicted exile. I know I feel the paradox of this dynamic in myself, and maybe I am just splicing it onto my sense of who my people have been. But I don’t think so.

On my mother’s side, there’s my grandpa Floyd. I’m not going to enumerate everything I know about him here. There are a lot of gaps regarding him and it should be interesting to fill them in. he was a public servant, working for the Federal government as a revenue agent, and he had a sort of mythic status in this town, a larger than life character who was apparently well loved by even many of those he chased down and arrested. But according to my mother and cousin he was quite a curmudgeon—not a family man at all, and prone to needing time alone in the woods. There’s a story about how he informed my grandmother when he first went out with her that he wasn’t looking to get married. This doesn’t seem terribly unique to me but I am interested in how the specifics of his character might show me some of this apparent paradox. Maybe it isn’t there after all. But I think I will learn interesting things about him. I don’t have a strong sense of his spirituality at all. It’s a blank page for me aside from the bald facts of what church he apparently attended. That isn’t true of my other family members; he’s the only one.

My grandma Floyd is someone I knew, though not as well as I might have. I think my cousin Jeff is the primary one to talk to about her. I don’t have a sense, actually, of a need for solitude in her. She seems the least introverted, the least inward of my four grandparents, for sure. Maybe that’s why I felt less of an affinity for her when she was alive, less of an immediacy of kinship, than I wanted to. She had so much energy and was so connected to so many different people. I do relate to the sometimes chaotic and discombobulated expressions of that energy that I remember in her as I get older and acknowledge my own patterns of thinking and living and how very similar they are to hers in that way. I do know she had a strong sense of personal religion. I get the feeling it was an authentic thing for her, not lip service, at least when I knew her. I remember my mother speaking of her mother’s service to her church and to other communities she was a part of and how it brought tears to my mother’s voice. I also want to think about my grandmother’s creativity, especially in terms of her painting, and how it informed who she was. How she came to her various expressions of it, what it meant to her, how it allowed her to become more fully and completely herself. I know she began painting in middle age, and I’m curious about how things changed for her inwardly when that happened.

Next, my granddaddy Sorrells. He was a legendary figure for me in childhood and someone I grew up sad about not knowing. He was, according to everyone who spoke about him, deeply committed to serving his community. He was a city policeman, deputy sheriff, and then county sheriff for many years, until he was killed in the line of duty in ‘62. I’m prepared, at least a little I think, to have some of these perceptions shaken up a bit. I’m not sure who might do that, though. My father’scousin Danny? Maybe. I am specifically interested in how my grandfather Sorrells’ relationship(s) with the African-American community of Walton County worked, or didn’t. as far as religion and spirituality go, I know that my grandfather Sorrells was born a Primitive Baptist but left that church when they told him he couldn’t be a Mason. So he chose to be a Mason rather than a Baptist. That interests me. It doesn’t bespeak a spiritual lack at all for me, though I am sure it did for some who knew him then…I am interested in why he might have made that choice, what it was about the community of the Masons that appealed to him and called to him more strongly than that of the church.

My father’s mother is the person, of these four, whom I knew the best. She was a very private, quiet, shy person, and certainly someone who chose a great deal of solitude. I don’t think she disliked people or even society, though; she was partly just shy and partly traumatized by personal experience. I never got a sense of her as misanthropic. I am interested in how she created and found relationship in her solitude. I think my dad is the best person to talk to about all this, though maybe his cousin Jeannette will also help, as well as his cousin Danny. I’m interested, finally, in my grandma Sorrells’ generativity, her creativity. It expressed itself in her sewing, quilting, baking, and cooking---domestic activities that she seemed almost constantly engaged in, at least peripherally. I am interested in how they helped sustain her and how they, again paradoxically, maybe contributed, if they did, to her solitude. As to grandma’s religion—I don’t think she ever did any de-mythologizing of any kind. Her stories were simple and unquestioned. But the faith she had, the belief system she carried, seemed to work for her. She relied on it emotionally a lot. Maybe, though, it failed her in some ways. It must have. I am curious about that. And I’m curious about the specifics of her friendship with Claudia Hillman, the African-American woman who saved my brother Brian’s life when he was a toddler. What were the rules and understandings surrounding grandma’s and Claudia’s friendship? How did it help her be less isolated, less lonely?

These are some of the questions and considerations I am starting out with. I am excited about where they might take me.

Incoming

2011-07-30T07:40:00.000-07:00

The twitch begins behind my left eye,

the dusty one,

lazy in long hours.

Prepared to wait it out,

I gather myself

into shadow and sheet,

drinking in the firings of

each throb

and wanting

a deeper dark.

Finally I surrender to

those bending furls of purple

and lie with the music

of this clutter,

stilling the hurried rush of blur and trailer

into a settled space of gritty warmth.

Sleep dispels the brightness,

subduing it under a collapsing wooden dock

so that it settles down on its knees

in fishy mud,

browning away

from that shuddering muscle

of weakened sight.

I dream of thick glass,

old-world pirates

with eye patches,

and the gray tabby hand puppet I played with

when I was five,

the one with the rip in her left ear,

the one who heard

(and saw)

my stories.

Hooks

2011-07-30T07:32:00.000-07:00

These hooks hang onto hunks

of a color I can’t name,

Not auburn

or burnt sienna.

More like the

ubiquity of rust

And the flakes of its oxidizing

scrim.

The tumble of bead

over stone

like the kaleidoscope

my mother gave me

when I was twenty

and its assurance of flow.

The horsehair smells like a

currycomb,

hay on a wooden floor,

and the funk of farriers’ tools

warming in the sun

after their congress with horseshoe,

hoof,

and nail.

It sticks and streams

out

from hooked hunks

of barbed wire,

a testimony to presence,

the imagined body of absence,

and how they play together,

like the glow of new metal

before rust reaches it

and gives it blood.

How Long?

2011-07-22T19:05:00.000-07:00

How long will it take me to get from there to here? From the place where I was to the place where I am?

I start off with freeze-dried lentil curry and lots of water. I have a good map and strong legs. I miss my music. I hum fragments of Kind of Blue, bits and pieces of Two Little Feet, a bar of Concrete Sky. I stop to wash my hands in the spring and notice a callus where I used to grip my pen. It seems lonely.

The birds sound the same in the morning here as they did on my mountainside. The dawn chorus. Pink and mauve light filling feathered throats, an old view weathered by many visions. Lonesome, haunted. Crepuscular despite the early hour.

I make up songs as I go along now. My mother said she used to do this all the time, not just as a child, but all her life. The little old man on the tractor was so ugly he got a song all to himself, an homage to his puckered face. I make up triptychs of verse about Queen Anne’s lace, bear scat, and why crows always seem to travel in threes.

I pull at a loose thread on my flannel shirt. It wraps itself around my finger and the snap of string from sleeve is gratifying and crisp. My socks are wet and I want to go home.

The blackberries I find taste good and they get stuck in my teeth the way they did when my grandma made cobblers for us. All that crystallized sugar and flaky dough swimming around in a big white Pyrex casserole dish. These berries go into a baggie and I count them out on the bone of my knee as I watch the sun go down.

I had a dream last night about a bracelet I used to wear, a yellow rubber thing with a famous athlete’s name on it. It disappeared at the Y one afternoon when I went swimming. I didn’t miss it at all until I had this dream but now I wish I had it back.

How can people live without writing things down?

Pretty soon the loop will be complete. I’m still not sure where the time went. The crows are still coming around in threes, but there are also more hawks than ever flying above me.

I like the way I think music will sound when I’m driving in my car.

There are no blackberries left.

Conspiracy

2011-07-22T11:09:00.000-07:00

Emptiness conspires with grace to present itself sometimes as fullness, as a replete warmth, a sweet creature well-fed and mild grazing in a field behind a farmhouse.

This is not one of those times.

Today the laundry became a carnival of twisted threads and shredded silk, a mandala of rips and stains from clay.

Today a favorite song suggests to me that anywhere else would be as good as, if not better than, this place. (Boots and faded jeans an imagined charm for completeness and right being. But not really.)

Today I neglected to take a seat when I ate my Irish oatmeal and instead gulped it down through a mouthful of gritty raisins while I shuffled through student papers and looked for my keys.

Today while I was in the shower the coffee made friends with the linoleum, a hot brown lake eddying across the countertop and lapping at the rug in front of the stove.

Tonight, I swear, will be different.

Tonight I’ll let myself be dazzled and stilled by the spools of stars and planets visible in the sky above the ballground.

Tonight I’ll write the first few words of a great and daring poem.
The rest of it will find me soon.

these

2011-07-05T12:41:00.000-07:00

these wild dandelion wanderings
let me need what
the blue morning
tells me

This is sort of from the haiku magnets.

driving past a collapsing farmhouse on Highway 78

2011-06-29T17:08:00.000-07:00

no radishes left
in the old kudzu basket
just earth

(with apologies to Issa, or the memory of Issa, or Issa's devotees, or all of the above)

one from the haiku magnets

2011-06-23T11:01:00.000-07:00

say the green here
stand up
and walk
big

--lks 6/22/11

I like playing with the haiku magnets. They help me take myself less seriously, sometimes.

A Hawk's Nickname

2011-05-05T17:49:00.000-07:00

Your grassy raindrop song
spreads like the bloom
of a season,
laughs like the color
a hawk’s nickname
would share
with its favorite
sky.

4/7/11

A Lace of Everything

2011-05-04T17:23:00.000-07:00

To approach
the landscape of spirit,
choose the bone
of attention’s
treacherous blossom.
Serve the tricky ceremony
of exhalation.
Emerge from the fertile nothing
of winter’s bed
and disperse the season’s
messages—
a lace of everything,
a margin of crows and roses,
sinuous,
sharp,
and inseparable.

--lks 2011

another for dd

2011-05-01T13:08:00.000-07:00

The irreverent river

your brightness breathes

is carrying

a branch

of rain

to its strange

and lovely

home.

2/14/11

one for dd

2011-04-30T12:36:00.000-07:00

The blooming world
appears in you,
a raw and breathing
field of grace,
the color of smoke and sky,
of sacred fire
and birthing earth.
The ferns speak
a fresh language today,
a whispered call
for you to feel your own
gentle holiness,
abiding in the skin
of your feet,
the bones
of your hands,
and in the holy map
of your spirit’s
patient walk.

--4/7/10

Docking

2011-04-12T19:46:00.000-07:00

When I was nineteen, a spider bit me on the shin, and I still have the scar, a faint crescent slightly brighter than the skin around it. I was sick with the bite for almost a week but I never worried. I was bitten again this past October and only realized it when someone saw the bruise along the underside of my left arm, spreading out around a tiny central point of darker color. I went to bed that Friday night with the idea of seeing a doctor the next day, but when I woke up the bruise had faded and my arm was much less tender. Spiders seem to want me to notice their still bodies amidst the mandalas of their woven webs and against the patterns of cotton in the plastic bin where I keep old quilting pieces. The roving skitter of a daddy long legs feels like a ticklish thing to me, a dance of fingertips across concrete. The death of the five black widows who made their summer homes last year beneath my deck has even seemed a harsh subtraction, the gray beams of wood where they spun and waited diminished by an absence of coral.

Several summers ago, my brother and his wife and children came to visit. Downstairs, in the finished basement, a scorpion lived (maybe even more than one) and emerged with his tail arced over his back, guarding the treadmill and the trundle bed. I felt such a pang of love for his spiky form, for his grasping and his defiance. I swept him into the dustpan and carried him down into the woods, where I set him free.

Just after my mother died, maybe even the next day, a dragonfly came along. We call them snake doctors where I come from, though not here. At first I wasn’t sure what that noise was, that batting of wing against wall, that buzzing rustle, which sounded like a whispered secret but wasn’t. When the creature died, I found it in front of the fireplace, and I put it in a tiny pewter box, along with a palmful of dry bay leaves from my friend’s father’s central California garden. The dragonfly is still there against the box’s inner velvet, a gossamer stretch of paper falling slowly away from the axis of a twig.

When my mother first married my father, they lived in a jailhouse. He worked all the time and she was lonely. When bats began to invade their bedroom at night, coming down from the attic, my mother and father fought back. The bats had the last laugh, though, even in death, a grisly tumble of fecundity living even now in story here, a final wickedness, a Gothic tag of the inevitability of collapse. A claim made.

I remember a night in early summer, June probably, before the sun had truly set. I was out walking, and out from the chimney of the old Roper hospital on Refuge Road spun a rising fan of batwing and batvoice, hurrying up. There were so many of them, rushing into gnats and sky, claiming their sustenance, noisy, dense, needy. The city tore the hospital down later that year, and I still wonder where the bats went to live.

Last May mosquito hawks flew in through an open window and clung to the walls of my classroom. Although they went after them with textbooks and canvas binders, my students discovered later that the creatures they had slain were not mosquitoes, but mosquito hawks. There would have been no itchy red welts, no thirteen-year-old catastrophic malarial fantasies, no West Nile.

Year before last, a little green anole came to stay with me for a couple of seasons. Her name was Bailey. I don’t know if she was really a female, but one of my students wanted the creature to have her name. A slice of amphibious beige, she drowsed behind a photograph of my grandmother, and she liked to match up with the greenness of the ficus tree’s leaves. When her blood slowed, she nestled into the moss around a different houseplant and returned to the soil around it, a leavetaking slow and holy; a docking.

Doughfaces

2011-02-04T18:53:00.000-08:00

On display in a poorly arranged glass case
alongside musket muzzles
and the collapsing tannin cursive
of soldiers’ letters home
hang two old masks of fragile cotton,
unexpected and strange,
surprising me like a story I never really thought was true:
doughfaces,
ghostheads meant to hide all but eyes,
a wedge of mouth
and the blunt stub buttons
of drunk men’s piggy noses.
Pale and holding the light fiercely,
they glare through glass:
screens, thinning.
My grandma used to tell us stories
of men her daddy called the serenaders,
of how they’d come to shout and act the fool
outside her outsized Southern family’s shanty windows
on Christmas Eve,
of how they plugged up
the ragged rocky chimney
after what they sang was gone,
filling up the cold with smoke
and the poverty of winter mischief.
Still, some kind of distributive miracle
came into how she talked:
an ascetic glory rising up out of that
single shared sack of oranges,
the crescents split and nibbled down
to every last string and crumb
of acidic white rind,
a sacrament of juice on chins
and tongues on knuckles,
savoring the way a single traveling seed
held taste,
despite a trick,
despite invasion.

A Writing Survey

2011-01-26T14:28:00.000-08:00

Do you consider yourself a writer?

How did you learn to read? Did you reverse your L’s and P’s, and do you remember the first time you realized the existence of the hinge of meter , creaking in your brain until you bowed down to it, offering it syllables choked with angry consonants and the broad vowels of bad internal rhyme?

When was the first time someone snickered at the ridiculous breadth of your vocabulary, at the way your sentences were hung with pictures folded into words, at the choices your larynx made to surround your meanings with tribes of thorny adjectives?

Have you ever lost yourself in index cards, in preserving the voices of others in little plastic boxes crowded with squares of paper bound by rubber bands? And have you ever moved into the gap of unknowing supplied by a research question, impatient to know about the alchemical language of the I ching and its connection to the tao, or how Stieglitz met Georgia O’Keeffe?

How often do you write? Do you ever feel the chafe of unwritten clauses, hanging around in the sky of your mind's eye like clouds graying up with undropped rain?

Do you write poetry? Do you hear it before you sleep, hustling along in another language than the one you’re accustomed to, claiming its birthright, forming a body of need until you beg it to come alive in the language you know?

Answer each question as fully as possible, and use examples. Remember the time you sang to the carnival barker at the county fair, the one with the smoker’s cough and the purple bandanna, and how the words came out of you in an unexpected tributary of play and comfort. Call forth the journal you wrote in sixth grade and how you described the deer paths in the woods behind your house for no one but yourself to read. Tell me what you want from language, how you need it to sing, what questions you have of it. remind it to take care of you, and whip it into shape from time to time, until it neither flees nor marches, but moves instead with the steady rolling pace of a dog you’ve trained to guard you, its pink tongue a flag of loyalty as the two of you pass through that throng of wordless Philistines, intact and strengthened.

a register

2011-01-14T17:22:00.000-08:00

A secret register
of whisper
freezes through
the wander
of exile's evening

--lks

January 14, 2011

This is another from the haiku magnets. I'm going through a dry spell when it comes to any sort of substantive writing.

Winter Breath

2010-12-27T16:03:00.000-08:00

An iron wind
of winter breath
blooms white between
my field of spring
and sleep's old whisper

©Laura Sorrells 2010
all rights reserved

cloud and wood

2010-12-27T15:57:00.000-08:00

Stand beneath
the still cloud
that you watch freeze
like cold wood
Laugh at the sound
of always

©Laura Sorrells 2010
all rights reserved

A Midden of Scarcity

2010-12-05T14:05:00.000-08:00

The authority of the screech owl
sweeps winter's lonesome feast
into a midden
of scarcity. The fox
is the thicket's fire-tender,
the crow's command
the hidden constellations'
laughing paradox
of edge.

© lks 2010

This is just something I put together today while playing with found poem words from Hal Borland's old book Sundial of the Seasons.

This Book

2010-11-01T16:05:00.000-07:00

This book woke me up.
This book has a stain of sesame oil on the fourth page, near the end of the recipe.
This book helped me name my cat.
This book has the address of an old friend scrawled in purple ink on the final page.
This book has a crazy woman living in it, trying to bust out of the attic and prone to setting beds on fire.
This book rambles on forever but ends up with an affirmation unlike any other.
This book opened itself right up to a poem about a hawk last night when I went to read it.
This book made my student ask me to call him "Nobody." I said I would, and he started writing poetry.
This book wanders through my dreams at night.
This book contains a bolt of white silk and a quote from Townes van Zandt.
This book spent its nights under my pillow until I finished reading it.
This book wants to grow wings and fly off the deck down into the dry leaves.
This book is illuminated and came back to me after a foolish absence.
This book reminds me of invented colors.
This book was made into a movie starring Robert Downey, Jr. and when I saw the movie I stopped reading the book.
This book is missing the flyleaf and endpage because I used them to start a campfire when all I had in the forest was damp wood.
This book helped me pass a big test.
This book has mobsters and baseball stars in it, and I still wonder what happened.
I was reading this book to my mother the night before she died, and there is a fighting tom in it, and a tree with lights, and the parenthetical holographic remembrancewords "That's nice."
This book is a cathedral.
This book makes me want to go listen to Johnny Cash singing "Ring of Fire" real loud.
This book is part of the ninth grade public school curriculum but shouldn't be. The Cold War is over.
This book is dotted with winsome purple asterisks next to words that aren't verbs.
This book has a picture of my grandparents in it, sitting in a metal glider on their front porch.
This book is really a stage spotlit with mauve footlights and strewn with crumpled roses.
This book makes itself obnoxious when I see it but demands to be read.
This book has a dogwood blossom in it, pressed between the words of Pascal and Buber.
This book delivers a mighty punch and honors all its promises.
This book has a wheel of runaway cheese in it.
My late grandmother spilled something on this book, on the cover and then again in the part with the crazy goatman.
This book won't leave me alone.
This book has a streak of lightning in it that split a woman's life open.
This book hopes it will be written soon.

©Laura Sorrells 2010 all rights reserved

Dictionary

2010-10-30T10:24:00.000-07:00

Revisiting the dictionary I grew up with, I inventory the artifacts between its pages. It’s a child’s book, illustrated with whimsy and deliberation. A little forest of coral hangs out in the Cs: a tiny inky heart of stalky reaching. Even then I collected paper. Tags. Inhabitants of a house of words: a bookmark I made in the fifth grade for a boy I had a crush on. A progress report from that same year. A birthday note in spidery script from an elderly maiden aunt. (I’d liked the way she made her capital L’s, how they swung out so much wider than every other letter.) A blue ribbon for a picture I took of my old gray cat, reclining on flagstones next to boxed petunias. A nine-year-old’s Christmas wish list (a telescope, some Smarties in my stocking, a set of watercolors, a blank book I’d seen with an owl on the front). An incoherent note from a girl I barely knew. A thimbleful of purple confetti stuck with glitter and glue to the definition of “trellis.” Someone’s name, in orange crayon on black construction paper, smudged.

Laura Sorrells
© 2007 all rights reserved

almost

2010-10-19T19:34:00.000-07:00

Fade

2010-10-03T12:04:00.000-07:00

An austere resilience
anchors this patchwork
of ark and territory,
cajoles a leaking eddy
of vertigo away from
the directives of dreamtime.
Landmarks mimic palaces,
then unmark themselves
completely. Some blank
untelling vanishes the birthrights
of air and forest.
When does the pirate
become the melancholy saint,
tethered by the silent slide
of an inexorable forgetting?

--Laura Sorrells
© 2010 All rights reserved.

Small Enough

2010-09-20T11:13:00.000-07:00

Is your moment small enough? Can it shrink down to a place where pine needles carry the sacristy of their thinness along the brown earth, an unseen chamber for the sleek of evergreen arrows? Can it cradle the running legs of skinks from cats, their blueness striped on shiny black? Can it forge a hidey hole for crickets, plump and lucky? (and for whom is that luck intended? the one whose linoleum cools those tiny cricket feet, who totes it out to safety?or does it live, like silent falling trees in lonely forests, along its own small plane of fate and fortune?) Or is it like a tiny burbling engine, setting loose a change in heat and daylight?

Can this small moment make you happy? And is it small enough to change your heart, to take up home in places where you bleed and breathe and fade? to show you how to lie against the scrappy breathing dirt where these shifts happen, and take inside its little seeds and wings? If you shrink your sight down small enough you'll see the changing scales of green anoles as brown earth turns them sandy. If you let it steal your size, your moment's heart can carry you in this same place forever, an empty warmskinned spirit in the rune of present vision. Absolved of any yearning, any reach.

A Flood Story

2010-09-19T12:53:00.000-07:00

Shattered by wild weather,
we measure floodwater
with ink and narrative.
You listen to these rogue spirits,
becoming the rising geometry
of wet churning magma.
I wonder at your simple repair,
the moveless, lucid energy of
a shabby fabric
absorbing tsunami mud,
welcoming the jigsaw of tragedy
into your mad arroyo heart.

2010-09-12T10:49:00.000-07:00

What Kinds of Words?

2010-08-22T09:11:00.000-07:00

--after Neruda's Book of Questions

What kinds of words might the kudzu whisper to the magnolia branches as it overtakes them?

I imagine them to be syllables of consolation and care, spoken with tenderness despite the encroachment of vine over pod. Inexorability curls around each phrase in a drawl, slowed so that the emerging noises sound like a record played at the wrong speed, lulling branches and blossoms into acquiescence.

How long does it take for rust to darken into bloody burnt sienna?

No one can tell. The flakes defy analysis. Their carbon craquelure hearts don’t like being studied. They change with the slowness of snowdrops settling into soil when flurries fall and the earth is too warm for them to stick.

When will this well run dry? And when it does, what will you do for drinking?

Its water, like the backside of that old barrel I found down in the ravine last fall, has been rusty for some time now, and there's no telling what will happen next. I had a dream the other night about a tall machine, like a crane or an android giraffe, lanky with angles of metal that reach up to the sky when they should somehow be digging. When I woke I felt taller for a moment, and also deeper, as if the soles of my feet had met up with some spilled honey or errant tar while I walked in my sleep.

Whose face do you see in the moon?

Last time I looked, it was a bitter old man, in love with rocks, who collected them in heaps and hid them behind big sheets of wavy glass for no one to hold and touch. That glass is cracked and clamped together with big metal pincers now, and I see stick figures of men running in the stacks of marble alongside the buildings where the rocks still wait for someone to see them, know them, collect them, love them.

How do you know what those rocks need?

I do not know for sure but I had a feeling last time I was with them that they were lonely, that their coldness belied an ache for touch, a stony pulse that no scope can find. Of course, I could be wrong.

What kind of birds are those in the big white oak down by the train tracks?

They don't resemble any other birds I've ever seen. Their feathers catch the rain and turn it blue. They sound like killdeers do at dusk, but they don't play games in the grass to keep things safe at home. There are four of them and they share branches with six or seven crows in peace, the bigger darker birds still as silhouettes in a shadow box.

How do you know what to gamble on?

Anything can merit the tenderness of risk. It might be numbers, taken from some pool of pattern we all dip into when we need to quantify or guess. It could be weather: the blessing of rain in lakes, the welcome screen of snow on grass in early morning, the return of warmth. Or it could be something else entirely: a roll of the dice into the grace of shadow and the diminishment of wealth. Smallness, a challenge and a psalm, dealt out like manna or a sacrament as things fall apart and the center splinters into pieces of itself in places we can't reach or see. Loss, a subtraction resisted at first but then embraced and even loved.

When will we know when to quit?

When the smoke turns colors we don't see now. When cities percolate with the sounds of moving feet, not rushing but ambling, sharing the roads with the fed travelers who once sat hungry and alone on crowded hillsides. A multitude, at peace and heading towards some common space of work and gentle effort, a tribe finally able to claim its sustaining voice in the spaces where the words once slept.

© Laura Sorrells 2010
All rights reserved

For once, this is not a found poem.

the body of everything

2010-08-07T06:36:00.000-07:00

A transformation
is traveling within
the thirst of this weather.
Anywhere
can be a portal.
Each cell is a shaman,
burning and simple.
The body of everything
connects and absolves:
a vision,
a name,
a story.
The landscape's cosmology
is a family.
Such bright increasing.
Such readiness.
Such space.

--lks July 2010
© copyright Laura Sorrells
All rights reserved

This is a found poem from Sacred Fire magazine, with a couple of words added by me.

seeking and rising

2010-07-28T18:35:00.000-07:00

Into the sterile complacency
of neglected danger,
a primeval testimony
intrudes.
Risk seeks recognition.
It renounces the mind of safety.
Imagine yourself
an unknown fool,
serving a restless yearning,
a jester who expects a stage
but dances a liminal dream,
along the edge
of rupture and shadow.
Be that acrobat.
Rise into origin,
impervious, pure,
and empty.

©Laura Sorrells 2010
All rights reserved

This is another found poem; I wrote it using Sallie Nichols' book Jung and Tarot: an Archetypal Journey (which I found used in the Canton, Georgia Goodwill store, between a tattered Paula Deen cookbook and an old copy of The House with a Clock in Its Walls.)

Some notes on a planned piece of writing

2010-07-23T11:55:00.000-07:00

Thin place---red winged blackbirds, dry kudzu, spirals of thick branch hanging from trees. Fox decal on truck. Recurrent fox theme, sighting of swiftly trotting bold dark gray fox on perpendicular road that connects back up to refuge road. I thought it was a little dog at first and called out. The fox came on and I felt a little afraid, as there had been a rabid raccoon attacking car tires that week out in Talking Rock. Tonight I found a ticket stub in ditch grass. Downed tree in yard of little gray hermit house. No sign of life. Little statue in front of house. Enigmatic stillness to that place, like a witch’s cottage in the woods. A pagan feel to it. Tumbles of firewood in yard. A man must live there but there is a feminine sensibility to the place too. Groundhog in grass up on the hill near the abandoned shacks, hard to see. Still brown marshy water. Talking of ceremony and my mom’s death and hermetic revelation of goddesses. Sun setting like water, liquid silver in clouds. A parting so that vision is freed up? Remembering phantom blues music of previous night. Restlessness. Branches in road. Thoughts of Good Friday tornado and of wild violent Monday morning dreams, of Easter and sacrifice and presence. Thinness. Portals. Exchanges. Ship’s captain exchanging self for crew in pirate escapade. What does this space mean to me? I want to write something about it. How it holds liminality. The space of running foxes. Quick flush of tail and narrow body into underbrush. What is not quite seen but felt. The need to flush it out and know it. a reconciliation between that need and letting it hide. Letting it be known in some other way. Brownness of barbed wire fence and blackberry bushes not budded yet. Thorn tree dark and fractalled against pale sky. The creak of its dangling storm damaged branch. Beautiful, haunted, lonely. Not quite fallen but not connected. Reminder of the creak of that big pine that day at the ballground pond. Termite damage, red blond wood moaning like the rafters of a house in wind. Tree not house yet but still tree, still with itself all of a piece despite the rift. Pocks and holes of missing wood where woodpeckers (?) have been.

What to take away from walk along meadow road? Robert Duncan poem Always I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow. I always want to pull everything I feel there into my arms. Even the trash, the detritus, the ugliness of shed paper and plastic by the side of the road. The cars rush down through there so fast. Once on a summer afternoon when it was very hot a couple of slow walking Latino teens. Two boys with low hanging jeans and slouches. Nonchalant nods and small waves. Sometimes a big yellow shaggy dog capering in the meadow. In summer, thistles everywhere. Dense jungle of white pinwheels of thistlefuzz and the thick blossoms, some bright pink, others more muteds, some striated pink and green and white. The air is full. In winter a mammoth made of kudzu rearing to greet what could be another mammoth but might also not be. A heron sometimes hanging out in the funky smelling marshy part of the creek…I haven’t seen it in awhile. Red winged blackbirds fly in the field and gather in that bare tree up on the hill. Ron and I kissed here that night in late November 07, right before Thanksgiving. Someone called down the hill from that big ugly new brick house to ask if we needed anything. Guarded brusque almost fearful tone in that man’s homeowner’s voice, a warning. Ron played at emerging from the spectral kudzu on the walk back. I took a picture of him in bad crepuscular light and his orange cap flowed. He had his head bowed and one knee slightly raised, braced against the wall of the little house on Manor Street that is gone now. A small herd of deer playing in field one day in May when I walked there with Ron. Deep restlessness and sadness and unease, almost always, walking along this road with him. On Halloween too. Bright and sunny. Unseasonably warm. Felt peaceful and present but shadowed too. The light was turning tall dead pine a sort of flaming auburn on road just above. Gloaming. Hang gliders. Not orange or brown enough for it to feel like autumn but the cicadas were noticeably absent. Or their voices were. In solitude it is best. Bob Holroyd trance didgeridoo song walking past the honeysuckle and smelling the sweetness, almost cloying. Vivid sunsets with the air like lemon and the smell of fertility everywhere. And those singular trees. There are some stumps in that field going back towards town that always seem like small ground mammals to me, about to move towards or away from me. First time I drove this road was in 03 and I was listening to a Joe Henry song, go with god. I told Mitch about it in an email later. There was a bull there with long tapered horns, standing still and solemn. Power. I have walked out into the meadow along that little pasture road a few times. I always feel like I am trespassing. Last time I came away with itchy legs from plodding through hillocks of weeds. Still it felt like I was walking out into the spread of something holy. I can hear voices coming down from the houses over to the left. They seem too close.

©Laura Sorrells 2010
Some rights reserved

Found Poem #14

2010-06-25T14:01:00.000-07:00

The physics of turning
is oblivious to inquiry.
It promises an event
but delivers
only spirit.
Around you,
hands and branches
signal escape.
Nothing makes you full.
An inexorable grace
is keeping you alone,
a penny in rain,
red with the absence
of spending.

--lks June 2010

This is a found poem, constructed from a selection of words gathered from The Illustrated I Ching, translated by R. L. Wing. I enjoy writing these. It's best to find a text that brings together words with what might be called a similar spirit, a common way of evoking and describing. I built one of these poems from Sheperd's Seed Catalogue this past weekend. Other recent sources have been David Abram's amazing book The Spell of the Sensuous and Barry Lopez's book Home Ground. More to come.

Disappearance

2010-05-25T16:50:00.000-07:00

A hundred possible skies
vanish from
my country's silences.
Every other cloud
brings a roaring,
a ground of storm
that emerges after
its one bright minute
has faded into
hours of fog
and mystery.

Nothing is more
dangerous
than atmosphere.

--lks May 2010

I wrote this as a sort of found poem, using words culled from Dave Bonta's Morning Porch blog and an article from the April 2003 issue of the middle school-oriented magazine Odyssey: Adventures in Science. That issue focused on the aurora borealis, but I didn't use many of the words I borrowed from it.

Write to the Prompt

2010-05-22T19:51:00.000-07:00

Write a story about the time you left your sister’s jacket on the bus, and about the girl who found it, and how she wore it to the fair, even though it was much too big for her. Include details: how the seams enclosed her in a cave of sagging navy cotton, and how she filled the pockets with barrettes and Jolly Ranchers. Tell us about how the heat melted the Jolly Ranchers onto the barrettes, and how the girl, let’s call her Sylvia, dug a cocoon of blue raspberry stickiness away from the clip that held her bangs away from her face. Show us her expression when the candy came away clean and she could see again.
Write a research paper, if you can, about the difference between Ramen noodles and Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. Explain the exegesis of both forms of nourishment, and allude to the special ways you can address the inherent salty sameness of their bases. Tell us about the first time you made egg drop soup from that dry crackling package of Ramen and how good it tasted with a dusting of paprika across its skin as it cooled. Explain how, when you need to make more than one meal out of something, such a soup can become a casserole of sorts overnight, and how black pepper, when dusted across the surface of this second dish, works its way down into the soggy filaments of noodle, giving the whole thing a deceptive saline freshness for just a moment.

Write a poem about the imaginary creature you built from other animals you knew, back in the fourth grade. Tell us about the fine silver veins that flowed across the wings of the animal and how it had a voice, but one seldom heard, like yours. Tell us about your brainchild's feet, how nimble and creaturely they were, and about the animal’s tail. Tell us how it looped through your dreams as you first imagined this beast, and how it danced and darted like the tail of the Cowardly Lion, off balance and in rhythm with its own inner ley lines, a barometer of all the fears and energies its owner carried through the world. Give it a name, and have it roar.
Write a descriptive paper about a flamingo. Explain the flamingo’s perspective on life and show us all its needs and problems. Let us feel what it’s like to have knees that bend backwards. Have us see the river water it lives in through your new flamingo eyes. Take us with you when you fly away, and have us reach the horizon along with you, a part of one big wing, a rising of color from mud into sky, a departure, a choice, a leavetaking, and a joining, a cacophony of birdvoice dangling down along the joints of flying legs so that all the other animals still hear it, long after the migrating flock has left them behind.

lks 2007

Dream Broth

2010-05-22T10:44:00.000-07:00

The seeds of all my seasons come together in a soup of something I could once taste but hold in my mouth now like water. Everything is here: sweetness cupped in kernels that distill its flavors down like some old mill. White corn gone to tassel late in summer, hot from fire and swimming in some kind of honeyed brine that tastes like weathered wood and nothing I can name, a leftover solstice mix fierce and slow with underpinnings of rot and adventure, a taste of singe and lakewater, of a wet moon and its spell. It carries too the haunted pucker of October, the sour whimsy of collapsing things in ruined little gardens. A mystery, sliced in half when I wasn’t looking and offered with one hand out and one hand hidden. Pepper plays with it well and coaxes it into almost giving itself up. When I try to figure it out it almost leaves. It tickles like I imagine the folds of snowflakes’ edges would, a tumble of melting angles in my throat. Most times too it trails a residue of spice---shyer than nutmeg and wilder than something like paprika. I can’t name it but it has its own way of warming me, a heat gentled by the ways I get to know it and by the slick and chilly film of spring, of cool things breathing water as they birth. It wants to be raw but simmers. I don’t season it but wait for it to tell me what it needs. Sometimes it’s cream to cradle it and make it younger, to soften up its brazen twiggy heart. It might be a sprig of rosemary, nipped from the bush by the train tracks, or the green of wild young onion, raised up from feral earth and brought inside. Other days I’ve sensed a flush of rosehip, much too sweet for its own good, a blast of death inside it like the blasphemous hymn I found myself humming at dusk in April as a child. I’ve needed it for days now but it won’t come. There’s nothing written down for me to go by. I play and add and mix and stir but nothing lets me name it, and there I am again with that drink of simple water, limned by none of the grit and gruel I’m used to getting. I cradle it against my tongue and then it’s mine: an emptying fix for all my angry fullness, a hex of chaliced shadow warm as earth, my only season now its gulp of dwindling sun and ragged twilight wind.

--lks March 2009

xiii ways of looking at some prayer flags

2010-05-14T16:09:00.001-07:00

i.
Despite the cool spring wind
The prayer flags hang motionless.

ii.
I see their soft gray cloth
With the skin of
My feeling mind.

iii.
The prayer flags make friends
With the weathered gray wood
They rest against.

iv.
The travel of hornets
Is all one thing.
The way they buzz
The tattered flags
Is part of that thing.

v.
The old dragon’s mauve jaws
Carry age and the droop of solitude
In the prayer flags’ upper
Left hand corners.

vi.
The prayer flags turn pink
In the softening light
Of April dusk.

vii.
Once a merry string of
Primary color,
The prayer flags take it easy now.

viii.
See how the flags resist
Disappearance.
They hang like pale strips of soft iron
From ten-penny nails.

ix.
Beneath the prayer flags
And boards of smoke-gray wood
A strip of metal
Collapsed in last summer’s
hot June rain.

x.
I tell the prayer flags
A couple of my best secrets.
The gunmetal dog with the fat jowls
Keeps quiet
While I talk.

xi.
I don’t see the prayer flags
In the inky air of this
Thick summer evening.
If I listen and hear
What’s behind them
I can see how their edges
Catch light.

xii.
A thick goldenrod cord
Takes care of all the prayer flags,
Marigold bright
Like a sign
On a highway,
Pinning them to
A buckled gray rail.

xiii.
The storm has taken a long time
To gather.
When it does
It takes the prayer flags with it,
Squares of ash and rose
Cut free
By a big green wind.

--Laura Sorrells
January 2010

mapmaking

2010-05-14T16:02:00.001-07:00

"That's another thing we've learned from your nation," said Mein Herr, "mapmaking. But we've carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that be really useful?"
"About six inches to the mile."
"Only six inches!" exclaimed Mein Herr. "We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest scale of a mile to the mile!"
"Have you used it much?" I inquired.
"It has never been spread out, yet!" said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So now we use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does quite as well."

--Lewis Carroll, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Those Shoes

2010-05-14T11:15:00.001-07:00

I’ve been thinking about getting rid of those shoes. Last week I had to have a pipe fixed in my basement and I went down there to clear some space for the plumber to get through. As I walked through the door, just over to my left was the sagging, cracked plastic barrel of laundry basket where the last ones live. There was a pair of dark blue Keds on top, a tiny fraying eye of hole appearing just below the big toe on the left one. I tear up my canvas sneakers the same way. Or used to. I don’t really wear them anymore. My feet are too tough on things. I sometimes wish they could be more delicate, less determined. My mother’s shoes show those things too. There aren’t any high heeled stilettos in this beige plastic latticed broken barrel. Heelless Clarks loafers, yes, and Birkenstocks with the soles going soft. And a pair of burgundy New Balance walking shoes with the laces knotted short and tight. I wonder if she pulled those off over her ankles, the way I do? One of those heedless rushing habits we might have shared.
When I saw the basket of shoes I began to pull them up out of each other. I kept coming back to the blue Keds. They seemed to strain mutely to go back into the heap. A spider turned out to be living in the arch of one of them. It scuttled out when I dropped it, a comma of legs and fat round center angling for safety under an old chest of drawers. For some reason I waited for a skittering confetti of spider babies to come after it. I’d read about that happening and about how infant arachnids will fill up all the space around them like a pulsing carpet of potential web. When nothing showed up I shook the sneaker vigorously, but only a furl of graying lint, shaped like some obscure piece of punctuation I didn’t recognize, fell out. I plucked at the hole in the side of the left shoe and threw it back into the barrel.

a poem by Chase Twichell

2010-05-06T09:59:00.000-07:00

Inland

Above the blond prairies,
the sky is all color and water.
The future moves
from one part to another.

This is a note
in a tender sequence
that I call love,
trying to include you,
but it is not love.
It is music, or time.

To explain the pleasure I take
in loneliness, I speak of privacy,
but privacy is the house around it.
You could look inside,
as through a neighbor's window
at night, not as a spy
but curious and friendly.
You might think
it was a still life you saw.

Somewhere, the ocean
crashes back and forth
like so much broken glass,
but nothing breaks.
Against itself,
it is quite powerless.

Irises have rooted
all along the fence,
and the barbed berry-vines
gone haywire.

Unpruned and broken,
the abandoned orchard
reverts to the smaller,
harder fruits, wormy and tart.
In the stippled shade,
the fallen pears move
with the soft bodies of wasps,
and cows breathe in
the licorice silage.

It is silent
where the future is.
No longer needed there,
love is folded away in a drawer
like something newly washed.
In the window,
the color of the pears intensifies,
and the fern's sporadic dust
darkens the keys of the piano.

Clouds containing light
spill out my sadness.
They have no sadness of their own.

The timeless trash of the sea
means nothing to me—
its roaring descant,
its multiple concussions.
I love painting more than poetry.

--Chase Twichell

The Currency of Solitude

2010-04-29T13:57:00.000-07:00

What’s the currency of solitude? A way of trading explanations for silence, verbosity for stillness, observation for freedom? Are there coins that will show me its face, or maybe an image of the forest where it lives, their metallic edges smooth from being turned colors by weather? Can I buy it with paper, with the recycled foreheads and wrists of gentle trees that used to understand me and offered me only the gentle spoon of self at four o’clock, when plans are being made and I should be lonely? Or with ribbons of something like litter, pale and a little gritty from being with the earth? Or is it lost to me forever? Can I send someone after it? a bird perhaps, like a carrier pigeon in whose fat breast the password can be tucked, in between one wing and another? A quiet child, humming an innocuous song to himself, his small hands shoved in pockets deep for bearing me endless prairies of grassy absence? A wind, one that has a compass inside it with directions to all the places I used to go to be alone? I can see it now. That face will have a needle, one that calls me into the boggy spot where joe pye weed makes friends with lost fishing lures in summer and the air smells like acorns. When I get there, I won’t hear anything but the things I choose to: a sound like moths at twilight, making friends in a game of tag under light, or one that makes me think of curtains opening into sky, with only the slightest shrug of intruding whisper there to make me lonesome for voice and touch. And when that haunting happens, when time is up and I have to come back to the rooms of the world, I’ll need a ticket back to that soft earth where I could be alone: a voucher for reclaiming my own translation of the way an afternoon can simmer into evening. Without it, I won’t be lost, but the geography I’ll know will be one where I can’t smell the stems of leaves or know how long they’ve been waiting for me to come back to them. In that place, I’ll trade shared words for business done, and almost all the words you’re reading here will tip their hats and say goodbye, lighting out for that uncrowded territory where they can sit by themselves and notice, just one more time before night falls, the shape of a moth in the fading light.

lks 2008

The Devil You Know

2010-04-29T11:07:00.001-07:00

The Devil isn’t someone you don’t know.
He’s the killing floor for all your best desires
The place your dreams go to wither,
To drink Southern Comfort straight from the bottle,
And spend their last days hungover and scared.
He’s the excuse you make for the things you run from.
He’s the lost heirloom you were careless with
When you were young and foolish,
The one you swore as a child
You’d always take care of.
He’s in you,
And he’s in the way you see the Others
Who run your life,
Or try to.
He’s every mean teacher you ever had
Who didn’t see how sad you were
And yelled at you
Because you forgot your homework.
He’s the bully who was your friend in
The summertime,
And who went fishing with you,
Or taught you about Ollies and
The glory of skinned knees,
But who beat you up come September,
When everyone else was around to see
How tough he was.
He’s the overdue bill, the one you
Keep meaning to pay
And resent even having to deal with.
He’s the fear you have even now
Of your best
Being less
Than it should be.
The Devil is sometimes
A face in your dreams,
A blues imago with a way of smirking at you
That doesn’t quite wake you up
But gives you shadows
Under your eyes
All day.
He is also
Your leaders,
The ones who transact blood for
Oil
And pillage the wilderness for more
Of what they make us need.
Naming him
Might help you
To walk free,
To dream about the Ferris wheel in the city park
Or nothing you remember
Instead of him.
If you open up your mind
And let him come on in
And roam around,
Just bitching, insulting you,
And eating pork rinds out of the sace,
He might just ask you for directions
On down theroad.
By that time he’ll be just a goofy
Caricature of himself,
A cracked shard of what he could have been,
His shoulders slumped
In the face of all your kindness.

---lks
July 2, 2007

Only the Sky

2010-04-28T13:55:00.000-07:00

Only the sky
Is pretending to be still.
That soft fever
I get in these woods
Wells up blue
And slow
In my body. Its thump
Is only a piece
Of the life
It is going to be. A dead tree
Goes into its afterlife, a branch
Casting into the land's
Humming body. A bird stills
In the green hum,
And my body goes soft,
Still fevered
And slow,
Greening up into
That reach of deceiving
Space.

lks 2010

Snickers Bars

2010-04-28T13:41:00.000-07:00

Snickers bars don’t last long when they’re in the same room with Pixie Sticks.
Snickers bars make friends with those who need them.
Snickers bars get lost in the produce aisle very easily and then get in trouble for harassing heads of cauliflower.
Snickers bars go wild on the last day of school and instigate water balloon fights in hallways.
Snickers bars get queasy on Ferris wheels but not on carousels. They like to go sit between the wooden heads of swans and move around in gentle circles.
Snickers bars mispronounce the names of cartoon characters, particularly the ones they’ve known about forever.
Snickers bars are afraid of the red pens teachers use to grade papers. They love the smell of Sharpies but not the sound of fingernails on chalkboards.
Snickers bars carry grudges for a long time and melt down into rivers of chocolate when angered or opened too quickly, spreading across slopes of classroom desks into laps and onto sheets of notebook paper. You shouldn’t mess with Snickers bars.
Snickers bars take bets on how long it will take hot glue guns to perish, useless and sealed away from craftsy tasks forever.
Snickers bars get nervous at the tardy bell and sometimes start to melt.
Snickers bars enjoy the brightness of primary colors on classroom walls and often wish their drab earth colored wrappers were red or purple.
Snickers bars love Hallowe’en because they get to travel.
Snickers bars are foolish, made up of nutty whimsy and the salt of buried acorns under oak trees. They like to be party favors but only when the crowd is young and goofy. I once carried one around in my coat pocket for a week, until my hand reached in and it was gone. Inside the lining, though, I found an orange marble. I set it down on my bedside table and there it sits, beside a chewed up pencil and a tiny pink eraser in the schoolchild shape of a butterfly.

This Shell

2010-04-07T15:37:00.000-07:00

This shell is a silver blanket, wrinkled from travel.
This shell is like the head of a fox, a narrow triangle of clever insouciance.
This shell is a crown with broken edges. Its owner found it in a parking lot, a furl of paper with grease stains beside the fleur de lis.
This shell is a rubber stamp, an icon of ownership and approval.
This shell is a daisy, one of those big ones you see in the median of the highway, with a grainy, tousled center the shade of French’s mustard on a hotdog at a ballgame.
This shell remembers the time you went skinny dipping at Pismo Beach when you were eighteen and the moon was just past being full.
This shell has a way of catching fluorescent light and making it softer.
This shell knows what you had for breakfast, because it was sitting there on your table as you added raisins to the sweet cinnamon soup of your oatmeal.
This shell laughs a lot and was found by a child in a good mood. It needs to be around people who tell jokes.
This shell is like a statue I saw last week, a cherub standing on a pedestal in a garden, his belly round and dark in the afternoon sun.
This shell got chewed on by your Boston terrier and has a set of tooth marks embedded in it now.
This shell came to me in the middle of the night once and murmured something unintelligible to me under its breath.
This shell distracts me from doing my work with its pink luminescence.
This shell is a lava lamp waiting to brighten a very dark room with its tumbling pods of pink and blue liquid.
This shell got dropped on the kitchen floor but didn’t break. It picked up a piece of eggshell with its fine shellteeth though and they are shells of sorts together now.
This shell helps me teach because it looks like anything and everything.
This shell wants to be returned to the dunes. It’s lonely for lots of sand.
This shell puts out fires with the siren song of its contours and the momentum of its whispered wishes.
This shell resembles a Viking. It has that kind of ferocity about it, that invading soul.
This shell resists being mine although I carry it with me in my suitcase when I travel. I’ve nearly left it behind three times now, but I always remember it at the last minute.
This shell won’t pay my bills, but it would if it could.
This shell’s voice resists the kind of language we know.
This shell holds things together with its textures and edges in a way that surprises me every time I see it.
This shell is like an extension cord, a path from electricity’s source to an ear or a tool.
This shell is either a ghost or a wicked witch. I’m not sure which yet.
This shell has a shine like a Coleman lantern inside a tent.
This shell is like rust, a slow devouring of surface, a pouring of bloodtint into what used to be a mild field of plain gray metal.
This shell came from a thrift store and hasn’t been near the ocean in a long time.
This shell is Neil Young’s rusty harmonica, lost among model trains, waiting to buzz its owner’s lips again at the start of a song.
This shell is a place where something small and salty once lived.
This shell holds many stories, each of them a curve of voice and water, a trajectory of imagined seaweed and the remembered currents of fish traveling past.
This shell needs your eyes to do its job.
This shell sounds like the passing beam of a lighthouse moving muffled through banks of Atlantic fog.
This shell is the birthplace of a small mollusk.
This shell won’t tell any tales out of school.
This shell belonged to my cousin Ruth but then she gave it to me when I said I admired its shape.
This shell has an accent all its own, a pidgin burr that makes up its own words.
This shell is a paperweight, and students like to pick it up and check it out. I keep waiting for someone to drop it.
This shell is a way of seeing, a spiral of narrative continuity in the soulspace of my classroom, a harbor for writing prompts, and a way for me to lose myself in daydreams of Monterey and Cumberland Island.
This shell is a gift, a coin, a piece of currency from me to you saying: be still. Hold out your hand. This is my heart, and if you listen, you can hear it beating through the whorls of chitin, a lonesome percussion that needs no turn of phrase or metaphor to give it life.

I wrote this poem during preplanning in August of 2007 after reading a lesson plan in a book by George Hillocks, Narrative Writing, which was about using a bunch of seashells to teach figurative language. A couple of hours later, during lunch, I found in the teacher workroom a brown plastic bucket of seashells that another teacher had evidently collected over summer vacation. I may use them as part of a creative writing exercise after standardized testing is over and I am freer to do such things.
© Laura Sorrells 2007
all rights reserved

Throw Me a Bone

2010-03-29T13:45:00.000-07:00

Throw me a bone. Hand me a prompt, a set of words, a place to start, a seedbed or maybe just a seed. Tag me It and push me out from this place of big margins. I don’t need much. Just a few syllables, a sentence fragment even, like this one. Remind me that the weather has a skin, a voice, and some days wings and talons for gripping. Hand me a pencil you found in the hallway. I won’t mind the toothmarks or the empty pocket of air where the eraser used to be. I don’t plan on making those kinds of judgments anyway. Put on some music, something that sounds like something it isn’t: a string that hums like a friendly old machine or a reed that burbles like boiling water. I won’t need anything else. No slices of apple to lick clean of peanut butter, no salty chips to hear crunch while I think. no black tea to befriend until it’s strong and cold, like the big sky we saw that night at the orchard, a fierce and reachless bowl of stars with a flavor like that of sugar on metal. Just this: a shove, a nudge, a chord, a frame, a word. A smallness, waiting to grow layers, to disturb, sing, fracture, collide, transform, and humble. You won’t get back what you gave me but something else instead: a joke where solemnity once lived, a pile of fragrant sawdust where you used to have a two-by-four, a puzzle thrown askew until the spoons and hollows of its picture make no sense at all to the eye you’re used to seeing them with. You’ll have to learn to solve its riddle with another sense, one you might not know you have yet. Not a third eye, but a shudder that alchemizes and translates from just beneath your ribcage and doesn’t mind the scattershot way it has to work to collate and harvest what the world gives it. When you’re ready, you’ll find an ark, a big ship ready for sailing on the roughest mythical seas your storytelling soul can plant and nurture. I’m ready when you are.

Thin Places

2010-03-27T14:25:00.000-07:00

I wrote this in late April of 2009.

This evening I went for a walk in my thin place. It's a badly paved country road swooping along a slight incline with stretches of meadow on either side. I approach it by a wooded side road that cuts over from where Main Street has just turned into Refuge Road. When I come into this place I move into this thinness, this twilight mind. Red winged blackbirds call and fly and gather in a tree snaked in winter with dry strands of encroaching brown kudzu. The kudzu is green and dense in summer but I always remember it as winter brown when I think of this place. Before I come to the meadow I notice by the roadside several spirals of thick treebranch gone to vine, dangling out into air like suspensions of forestborn walking stick. I have one of these in an old clay churn at home. My mother brought it back from the woods because she liked its shape. I might have too, I guess. I see foxes here often, sometimes darting pale and fast into weeds and once trotting dark and bold along the upper road from town. That was a bright summer day and I called out to the fox, thinking it was a little dog. It came on with its feral trot, curious and fleet. I felt a pang of fear for a moment, as there had been a very determined rabid raccoon attacking car tires at the single red light over in nearby Talking Rock a couple of days earlier. But the fox turned at an angle and slipped into some weeds. No fox sightings tonight except for a black and white decal on the back window of a big truck parked in front of a house on the way back to town. Tonight too I find a movie ticket stub from 2005 in the ditch grass. (A rather bad comedy. Child and senior.) A tallish conifer has fallen in the yard of the little gray hermit house that sits across from the lower, wilder meadow. This house never shows any sign of life aside from the garbage bin out front and the array of planters and gardening tools on the porch. The tree is split just below its lowest branches, doubtless by Friday's wild tornadic storm. There is a little statue in front of the house. Just a small gray girl, I think. There is an enigmatic stillness there, like that I imagine a witch's cottage in the woods might have. A wildness in the order. Neat brown stacks of firewood in the yard. An old push mower just inside a little shed. A man must live there, I think, but there is a feminine sensibility to the place too, evident in the gray stone girl and the queue of windchimes that hangs from the porch rafters.
I see a groundhog in the thick wild grass up on the hill near the abandoned shacks. It scurries and stops, a wedge of fat tawny fur hurrying and then ducking down fast. Further on there is the still brown marshy water by the wild meadow. My friend and I are talking of ceremonies of acknowledgment and passage and my mother's childhood in this town and hermetic revelations of goddesses. Sun setting like water, liquid silver in clouds. A parting of that heavier air so that vision is freed up? I remember the phantom blues music of late last night, something that was subtle like the tinny buzz of a distant radio but persistent. I had wondered if my friend was listening to music downstairs but he told me later he had not been.
I feel that old restlessness here tonight. Lots of fallen branches in the road, both large thick ones and small ones more like big twigs. I remember the previous Friday's small tornado and how it came on quickly, the air turning green and little limbs beginning to snap and fly. We didn't see it but the next day as I was out walking in town I saw the horizontal trunks of many tall uprooted trees in people's yards and then one in the ravine behind my house. I thought too of yesterday morning's wild violent Monday morning dreams, of sunny Easter and the hinge of absence into presence. As we walked tonight I talked to my friend about a Hallowe'en party I had been to several years ago and how my small-town lawyer cousin had surprised me by referring to the occasion as Samhain. Pronouncing it right too. These things have been with me quite a bit lately. The notion of thinness, of places where worlds shift into each other and thresholds open. Portals. Passage. I think about how I want to extrapolate something coherent and concrete and definitive about what this place means to me. How it holds liminality. The space of running foxes, walkers between worlds. The quick flush of fat tail and narrow vulpine body into underbrush. What is not quite seen but felt. The need to flush it out and know it. A nod to an imagined reconciliation between that need to see and letting that animal hide. Letting it be known some other way.
Brownness of barbed wire fence and blackberry bushes not budded yet. Thorn tree dark and fractalled against pale sky. The creak of its dangling storm-damaged branch, not quite fallen but not connected. This is a reminder for me of the scrapey rasp of that big pine that day at the ballground pond last month. That last pond day before a leavetaking. That other tree was growing bare and dying, its red blond inner wood moaning like the rafters of a house in wind: a tree not house yet but still tree, still with itself all of a piece despite the rift. I sat under it and looked up, listening. Seeing. Pocks and holes of missing wood where woodpeckers (?) had been. Termites, too?
What do I want to take away from this walk along the meadow road? That Robert Duncan poem I found in the battered old Norton anthology one day reminds me of this space. Often I am permitted to return to a meadow. I always want to pull everything I feel here into my arms. Even the trash, the detritus, the ugliness of shed paper and plastic by the side of the road. Of course I want it gone but my heart does not completely shut it out. The cars rush down through this place so fast. I always have to walk in damp red roadside mud when they come by. Once I ran into a couple of slow walking Latino boys, two teenagers with low hanging jeans and slouches. They smiled and nodded, silent, courteous. Their faces shadowed. Sometimes there is a big yellow shaggy dog capering in the meadow, a chow or collie mix I think. It doesn't bark but watches. In summer there are thistles everywhere, a density of white pinwheels of thistlefuzz and those thick-faced thistle blossoms, some bright pink and some a paleness almost white, some striated green and cream and bloody red. The air is full. In winter there is a mammoth made of kudzu rearing to greet what could be another mammoth but might also not be. A heron sometimes hangs out in the funky smelling marshy part of the creek but I haven't seen it in awhile. I miss its angly lift of leg and wing. Red-winged blackbirds call and perch and gather in that bare tree up on the hill. Doves make noises like we say grief sounds. They perch on the powerline beyond the marsh, plump clichés of benedictory witness.
I kissed a man I loved here one night in late November a couple of years ago, just before Thanksgiving. Somebody called down the hill from that big ugly new brick house to ask if we needed anything. A warning, really. I had been taking pictures of us and the flash gave us away. The man I was with, Ron, played at emerging from the spectral autumn kudzu on the walk back. He was wearing an orange plaid thrift store flannel shirt I had given him and we laughed. I remember a small herd of deer playing in the wilder meadow last May when I walked there with him. The air was pale and full of things emerging but I sagged with a paradoxical restlessness.
And I remember this past October on this road. Samhain. Bright and sunny, night moving in slow. I waved to a neighborhood woman, a kind-faced African-American lady who sat dressed as a black-hatted witch on the porch of an old house up on Refuge Road. I felt peaceful and strong but shadowed too. The light was turning a tall dead pine a sort of flaming auburn on the road just above. Its spiky branches stood out at angles with dead needles catching the sunset. A hang glider moved along slow just above that tree and I took a picture. It seemed to pause when I did.
In solitude it is best here. I go far inside and yet am turned all outside in as well. I remember a Bob Holroyd song I listened to here, running, the song dense and alive with percussion and the throaty thrum of didgeridoo. Awakening the spirits, or reawakening them. A trance state, really. Moving along faster than usual and noticing so much but not naming it.
Not tonight but many other times there has been a big bull standing up in the tamer meadow on the hill. I seem to see his horns first, their length and tapering sharpness. They hold a wedge of big twilight sky in the cup of their curve. A wide meadow gate leads into the field and just beyond it are several rather singular trees that sometimes shelter the bull and cows as well. There are also some stumps in the grass there on the way back towards town that always seem like small ground mammals to me, about to move towards or away from me. Suspended in motion, creatures of burrow and tunnel.
The first time I drove along this road was in 2003 and I was listening to a Joe Henry song, Go with God. I told a friend about it in an email later. It seemed odd to mention it then. The bull was there that first time through, his big horns turned towards the road. Standing still and solemn. The sun was going down and the field seemed rapt with its brassy light.
I have walked out into the wilder meadow along that little road a few times, till I felt the woods beyond get closer and my knees were in the grass. It always feels as if I'm walking out into the spread of something holy, a ceremonial plain or something wilder than a table but somehow rather like one.
Tonight the air smells like snakes and I remember a song with those words in it. The grainy flush of dusk comes on and the shapes of things go silent as I walk up the hill towards Refuge Road.

Naming

2010-03-26T11:25:00.000-07:00

This time it’s a sliver of light, a headlight blooming blue through the bottom of the doorframe, bouncing off glass and catching on the starry brownness of my inner eyelid. The other night it was a yip, coyote probably, over near the singular prick of light down near the right hand corner of sharptop’s pyramid. I get up and bash around in the kitchen, gnawing on a banana and pouring myself half a glass of orange juice. Tonight I guess I’ll hang out with Thomas Merton in Alaska, resolving to keep a better journal myself, admiring the brisk energy of his wry hungry punches of haiku. When I was ten I couldn’t sleep one night and lay on the rollaway bed out on the screen porch, watching the horses’ shadows rub their shedding spring haunches against the gate, hearing the first tags of cricketvoice in the woods. Another time in winter I lay on the parquet floor of the living room and warmed into the pop of the melting logbark as the night’s fire died. I was sad and the blue window-triangle of constellations holding onto the big old ceiling beams up above me made me sadder. I pushed through the sorrow and named the pricks of star, lining them up into sunburned shoulders and deer rifles, fallen oak leaves and chimneys spumed with smoke, horses’ newly combed manes and the frayed edges of patchwork quilts. This has become a habit over the years when the puddle of blanket and pillow sends me into other rooms just to be in a different space. Sometimes I have the same formations of planet and distant sun in my head for years but then it feels like it’s time for something else. Right now I have an old rusted out hoe I found in a corner of a shed, a stray hound dog’s notched ear, the furl of a koi fin I saw in my father’s pond, the silhouette of the checkout lady at the Piggly Wiggly who also works at the elementary school caferia, and a teapot shaped like most of a diminishing moon. These trails and squares, spikes and circles, pentagrams and blips fall me asleep when I can’t get there alone. They have their stories, or sometimes just the start or the middle of a story. Seldom just the end. I let them hold onto my pettiness, the trembling earnest giddiness I find it hard to share, my still sometimes unutterable grief, my remorse, and my whispers. I won’t tell you the names behind the shapes. Make up your own where you see them. Listen for the sounds they need and meet them where they live.

--lks 2008

a silver bowl

2010-03-22T18:12:00.000-07:00

Empty as the taste of ice or water, the wheel of Mind I’ve spun and tossed like a rigged carnival wheel or a bent penny posing as an I Ching coin has rattled into stillness: a mandala waiting for a big hand to push its branches of sand together. Fearless in the disappearance of all its shapes and patterns as they disintegrate like crumbled cornbread will in a glass of frothy buttermilk. A silver bowl holds light where Mind’s wheel once whirled and clattered: a chalice of connective circle, whole and intact. No path, no map, no distance, no compass. No setting forth nor travel, no leavetaking. No coming home.

A Shining

2010-03-21T09:00:00.000-07:00

I am full of a shining,
lost in a forest of sun.
The sound of snow is
invisible,
a trickster's scatter,
a raven's icy thought.
The air is making the quiet
new
and the bones of its wings
young and strong
as it flies.

lks 12/28/09

Illumination

2010-03-20T21:06:00.000-07:00

A scrawl of smoke to the west travels outside the forest at night. Sitting next to the fireplace, I listen for small noises. The sounds that I know best are the whisk of a homemade broom across a dusty floor, the whisper of a chilly wind through the tops of tall trees, the susurrous flooding of Southern rivers.
*
These are not ordinary playing cards. Soon you will be expected to speak their disappeared language. To parse words from faces and numbers, from three colors, or four. To talk about the spy's incomplete mission, the village of subterranean ninjas, the soldier's tattered coat: a dark and somber shell with its wool lining shrugging loose from buttonholes. The varmint in the garden.
*
The horses' hooves have trampled the high meadow grass. They will be here soon. We plunge toward the future without a clue, dribbling a hapless trail of words behind us, a glossolalia of fear and retreat, as he closes the distance between our slow caravan and his fast stallion. When he arrives, it is a day of silences. The crickets, too, seem puzzled.
*
He has to spend all his time managing this place. Some of his answers have satisfied our need for a perfect story. Still, he mesmerizes us with his telling. It despises the brassy sun and loves dark, damp places, crevices of secret richness and loamy wealth. Me, I'm a moss kind of person, so I listen good.
*
Milkweed grows in places where it is not always wanted. You could call this a home or a shack. The vines are all you can see from the road. Still, it has some running water, and a place to hide out when funnel clouds tear through the lonesome pastures.
*
I also sought a beloved meeting place in the village. For years he lived alone in sparsely furnished rooms. But he comes out to be with us whenever the sun shines directly on the longleaf pines. Once, he brought us a fistful of mica and a few slippery pumpkin seeds. This was during the time of the abandoned marigolds. Unexpectedly possessed by some urgent instinct, I suddenly felt a new connection with everything alive and breathing. Walking through the sleeping house, I saw that ferns grew everywhere there.
*
Some of us liked to play a game. The sky was slowly darkening, and I heard my pounding heart in the blood of my listening ears: tiny books made from old newspapers, powder horns full of the sift of ancient narratives. I tried to write them down but couldn't.
*
Every year I think it may not happen. While the light is still new in the morning, the ceremony in the old garden begins. It is the keeper of our mysteries. The unexpected colors clash and then blend.
*
I only wish I could stop. It's never enough. Somehow I always leave things out: the ship in the bottle, the branches of winter blooms, the pestle and mortar I found in my great-aunt's attic, still dusty with someone's private work.
*
Behind him was his other world. When would he have had time to build this bridge? When we are trapped in the world of a story, a gathering of imaginary friends reminds us that we should not say a word.
*
Today, he smiled at me for the first time: a scent of citrus, like a freshly sliced lemon.
*
The shamans arrive, and then the young detectives, washing away the colors of everything that slowed me down. The power lines above my head spit and sizzle with electricity and solutions, alchemy and healing. Maybe just one more day, here. You know the way that light can make you dizzy, its voice a secret you used to know the name of.
*
Our mother was once a dancer, before the time we live in now. She showed us the shadow side of the quiet cove. But the knees of the swampland's cypress trees had their own brilliant ideas.
*
We made our wishes on Mars and Venus, and the next morning, before any other light could greet us, we woke up floating. These woods, he said, are yours. What is said is not always what is heard.
--lks November 2009

Longswamp

2009-08-26T17:59:00.000-07:00

The first story I knew about swamps came from the neighbor lady who was my best friend’s mother. She told us Bigfoot had taken up residence in an abandoned treefort next to the dark brown teawater of the creek we used to dam up with sticks and leaves and fistfuls of loamy mud. We watched and waited up at the edge of the trees but we never got near that soft earth again. I moved away not long after that and I missed the swamp, as well as the one behind my own house. we used to ride our horses through the woods where that swamp was and we always got nervous about where the ground began to give. We could never remember where that was. I tried to mark the spot one time with a big swatch of green moss held in place by a rock I liked but when I checked, the rock and the moss had been replaced by a fallen treelimb bigger than I was.
This swamp is big. Longswamp, a lurch of falling sod cut through by a drying fiddlebow of creekbed. This swamp hurts for rain now, its backbone an arch of resistance poking up through the places where softness comes to settle for the night. I tried to give it some help the other day and I’m hoping the solemn steps I took across its western edge will bring on days of cold and drenching winter rain. I’ll suck it up and wear one of those lamps on my head I guess when this happens, if it happens, so those soft places can sag deeper, like the belly of some big hurting thing you love and want to mend.
This swamp has a mind of its own and I’m not just talking about the way it’s changing without rain. Sometimes I go to sit on a log in this swamp and I hear it telling me things, a soliloquoy of earthfunk and possumhabits, a tale I won’t even be able to remember hearing once I head back home. Other times I tell it something, not a secret but maybe a rhyme or a line from a song, and it opens up its big old sweaty swamphands and just hands those words right back, humming the way words do just below the brainspace of language, hanging out on the threshold between meaning and the flatline beauty of _____________. It can’t help but be what it is, a churn for the dawn songs of birds and a fertile hotspot where I could go blind waiting for its foxfire. It has tried, I know, to give up the sound it makes when no one is around to hear, that buzz that you think is your imagination telling on you for not getting enough sleep, that whisper of sulphur, that growl you wish you could carry around inside you like the memory of your mother’s voice.
This swamp doesn’t need anything new. It sustains itself through a variety of methods: the ritual spatter of Grape Nuts and birdseed out into one of its puddles when I’m thankful, the bluejayfeather I choose to leave alone on one of its logs instead of sticking it on my dashboard like a fractalled strand of jesus’ hair. This swamp is not just long but deep and it can conjure up old stories like you wouldn’t believe. It gave me a dream about a purple tricycle the other day, the one I had when I was five years old. I could feel the streamers in my hand and I remembered how my little brother picked up a dead wharf rat and left it on the rusting bananatriangle of tricycleseat for me to find. It was a gift, not a trick. A homecoming, rank and ready to return back where it came from. This swamp will tell me other things too if I’m not careful, like how the stars converged when I was born to make the shape of some big fish no one’s caught yet, up there in the jetstreams of midafternoon, not visible yet but waiting to be.

lks 2008

Standing

2009-08-26T17:55:00.000-07:00

For M.

It’s midsummer and I’m standing in line at the airport, waiting for someone to check my bag. I burn my mouth on strong Italian coffee and try to read a letter I found on my car seat before I left home. The purple silk scarf tagging my luggage tickles my bare calf. I remember when I bought it, years ago when you and I still knew each other. It smelled like sandalwood then and you stole it from me for no good reason. It lived in the hall closet with your ties and an old woolen overcoat. You sheltered me under the deep arm of that coat when I called you from bars to walk me home through bad neighborhoods. One night I found the scarf in the coat’s deep pocket when I stuck my cold hand down inside it. I took you to task for your thievery but you didn’t want to hear it.
I remember the time I picked up a cookie from a chipped yellow plate on your kitchen table and held it to my face, inhaling the cinnamon and nutmeg. It was New Year’s Eve and I wore a short skirt and the purple silk scarf but no coat. You were sober and I was not. We listened to Jerry Jeff Walker and took a walk downtown. You told me a story and I tried to listen. We looked at some fireworks behind a clock tower and burned our tongues on hot chocolate in white paper cups. You held my hand and I played a joke on you, a rare moment of successful sleight of hand that made me laugh and stagger. But you didn’t think it was funny.
We sat on an old wooden bench near the post office and I ripped my red fishnet stockings on a splinter.
The dry air was cold, and a little boy laughed up in my face when the year turned. Not a mockery but a happy child’s shout in the street. A banner of laughter that I wish I could hear when I play with the edge of this fabric, but which hides from my fingers and doesn’t smell like anything much just now.

How We Forget Things

2009-08-19T03:54:00.000-07:00

How do we forget? what are the ways we lose track of flavor, of words spoken, of song, of color and texture? Of the scents of our childhood, despite their persistence and the supplication of olfactory yearning in the almostdreamspace just before we sleep?
Decay: the collapse of small walls in fields and the images you held of how they were hiding places for fieldmice and groundnesting birds. The passage of wood into clay as the treeforts of your childhood tumbled from the clefts and crotches of oaks into the salty dry swamps where you once swore you saw Sasquatch hulking in the twilight. The erosion of fabric in your memory palaces or more precisely of the way your first lover's cotton t-shirt felt, slightly damp with perspiration and dusty from the dry earth of July, against your cheek.
Obliterative subsumption: the replacement of the scent of kerosene at the forbidden cabin with that of your mother's Shalimar cologne, drying slowly in a squat glass bottle in this morning's bathroom cabinet. The falling away of the way the tackroom smelled in spring when hay and leather came together, raising up sweetness to the crooked rafters and marrying the aroma of horsehide as you walked your mare across the field after she'd been running. In its place is the chalkdust funk of your classroom, fallen pencil shavings like sawdust beside a bookshelf in a harsh fluorescence you're not sure you'll ever quite get used to.
Interference: the way your recollection of a song from your first year of college gets mixed up with the chords of something you ran across on public radio's Saturday night jazz broadcast last weekend. The Composer of Delfinado steps in where South Central Rain once was and you try to get back the unintelligible growl you used to love, but it won't come.
Failure to Retrieve: you remember that you were supposed to remember a number, or several of them, a set of digits once branded on your brainpan with the merciless archery of infatuation and need. All you see when you try to bring the figures up are hash marks and half-assed runic swirls.
Repression: Your best friend did you wrong but you aren't sure how or when. You were both twelve, and she had a certain look on her face. She was wearing a striped tank top and talking trash but that's all you know for sure. She's nowhere to be found to ask about the matter and you just have to furrow your brow and then leave things be.
Construction error: when you recreate that scene on the subway where you watched the little man busk for change by playing a godawful stream of Martian music from some bent and rusted horn that looked like no instrument you'd ever seen even a picture of in a book, and in your memory the man is tall and elegant, shabby but genteel in a jacket that fits and apologizes for the hole in its tweedy elbow in a quiet trashcanfire language you swear you once knew the alphabet of.
Failure to store: the apples went bad in the refrigerator drawer of your shortterm battery charger and you wish you'd made sure the acid was going to stay put. You'll be more careful next time and there won't be this brown slime on the corrugated slats where the MacIntoshes once sagged.
The case of infantile amnesia: you didn't fall on your head, exactly, but you knew how to float downhill in the air, not flying but drifting along some current nobody else seemed privy to, a swath of pale pink blankie above a banister, like Madeleine L'engle said she once could, God rest her soul. You know your body has learned a different physics now, perhaps a replacement register where weightlessness goes and language comes, a mirror stage of sorts, a recognition and a letting go, a loss and a finding, a rescue and a drowning, remembrance bowing and heading off into the shadows behind the makeshift stage of your consciousness while words skip forward, their paradoxical little devil's hearts an incandescent tumble of trouble and sabotage, of abundance and power. Ready or not, here they come, and what you forget is the bargain you strike with all that holds its finger in the pages of your soul's ongoing chapbook. An ocean. A big lake that shows its shores in droughts but always fills back up, come rain.

lks 2007

Hoarding

2009-08-18T19:27:00.000-07:00

( I wrote this in response to a prompt on another site: What do you have a hard time giving up?)

Pens. Not pencils, mind you. I don't much care about them though I suppose I should. and as a teacher I am uncomfortable with this predilection to keep my ink to myself and wait for the perfect chance to whip out that dusky green archival nib and make....a grocery list, perhaps, or a note to myself to get my car oil changed. I tend to hoard my pens, particularly ones with very fine narrow points. I don't like a blunt ballpoint. they are good for almost nothing except filling out official forms where you need multiple copies and you don't want there to be only dusty smudges where information should be. I like pens in dark deep colors like burgundy and forest green and purple. I keep basic blue and black ballpoints on hand for those students who, freakishly, do not have pens with which to write their essays or warm-ups. I can't imagine being in that situation. I like to travel light but there is always a small family of pens congregating in my bag, as if there were suddenly going to be some sort of apocalyptic event that would make pens a scarcity. Have I thought about the psychological implications of all this? sure. I think it means that should that creative epiphany come along, that light bulb moment that will set me to writing furiously no matter where I am, I want to be prepared to approach it with the perfect instrument for what it has to say. It might take me a little while to figure it out, but that's all right. The words have already learned patience, and I know they can wait.

The Teachable Moment

2009-08-18T03:57:00.001-07:00

The teachable moment likes to hang around near the back of the classroom, slouching a bit and keeping a low profile until she feels the need to force her hand and say her piece. She despises rubrics and the rectangles of spreadsheets. She lives for the marriage of whimsy and cynicism, for the freedom to cool her throat with spring water from dented plastic bottles when she's thirsty. She yearns for challenges issued from the innocuous scritch of bitten pencils clenched in the hands of quietly subversive children who want to know more than how to force comparisons into the overlap two whiteboard circles share. She smirks at Scantrons and loses worksheets in the hallway, folding them into paper airplanes dull with smudges and angry Gothic doodles. She listens for gaps in instruction, for space between the disembodied squares of vocabulary words scattered across the wall at the back of the room like laminated flash cards with no answers provided. The last time I saw the teachable moment, she interrupted me in class to ask a question about how sheet lightning is different from those bright and jagged electric bolts that stun people's hearts and leave steaks of scorch on the ground around them. I stood still for a minute and waited to hear the raised and eager student voices of explanation and anecdote to rush out in an unintelligible frenzy, but all anyone had to say was, "That's off topic. What are you thinking?" The teachable moment crossed her arms across her desk with her head down on them and fell asleep.

lks 8/09

This piece was inspired by Dave Bonta. Here's a link to his prose poem, found at his blogsite Via Negativa: http://www.vianegativa.us/2009/07/teachable-moment/

The Limnologist

2009-08-16T08:21:00.000-07:00

The Limnologist

For Katey Walters

She conjures forth bubbles of fire from frozen lakes. I heard it on the radio, circling the dark lanes of a parking deck. A big blue Suburban nearly backed into me as I listened to her talk about the flare of methane against the Siberian sky, just above the dense Russian ice, when she freed the gas from the face of the percolating lake. She is in love with “the power of water in its frozen and unfrozen forms,” and she unlocks it, standing back as it lets her have itself, a propulsion of conjured chemistry, beloved and unsettling, a threshold of flow, a heartbeat of alchemical liquid strong enough to free boulders with the rise of its release.

lks 2002/2009

a space like breath

2009-08-15T22:13:00.000-07:00

Between these waves of winter salt

and the fingers of deciduous stillness

that arc and lean above them,

beached

and whittled

into the sparse clarity of speechless ghosts,

there is a space like breath,

like air but greener,
generous with wind,
learning the lightness of release.

lks 8/15/09(My old friend Max challenged me this morning to write something to accompany this photograph. It had to include the word deciduous. It was fun. )

Numbers

2009-03-22T07:37:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking about numbers lately. What they mean, how I think of them. What they carry, or don't...I know that I acknowledge and work with the numbers that show me how to eat and travel and make my necessary way in the world at large, but the numbers that I live with show me things much larger than they are. I mark a kind of worldly time with them too but not as much as I used to. The intimacy they carry isn't about that marking off of shadow and sun. I can think of these numbers as sentient at times, almost, in the way that I can anthropomorphize ideograms and the moods I impose upon them or signatures and the things they show me about what they want. And the numbers I know always carry tags of luck and caution, unseen subvocalized scripts that show me runic messages from cultures that knew better than to quantify by habit and make that habit a mandate. My numbers have colors that remind me of when they came to mean what they do. The number four is the shade of Arizona desert, a sort of cimarron with a heart of nutty brown. Twelve is scarlet with black and white edges, like the Gothic lettering I know so well, reflecting flourescence behind framed glass in church basements. Three is the color of pewter, a trinitarian metal that is humbler than silver. Nine is viridian, a spread of mossy summer that harbors a song I overheard on a hiking trail near Brasstown. And eight is a color I don't know yet, a color that wants to be born into hue and tint but plays games with what it might represent. It's square but loopy and forms a field of linked lines like bars that might fall from an old corral with the push of a big wind. and it has a heart where circles come together and then away again, doubling up upon the sunny flush of four. Telling just enough of its story to make me hungry but not a syllable more. I have other numbers too, but these are the ones that stay with me. They don't hold size and richness the way that grainy paper does, and their value doesn't sag and sway when the math of oil and futures goes awry. Their stories morph and play like dreams with curves to sleep in, and the things they have to show me can't be traded, built, lost, or hoarded. You have to look behind the weight they carry to see this other luck, a way of measuring that stands outside of time and money to let you in on the mythos of what came before and is on the way, as well as what's right in front of you.