This Nest

This nest is a shadow slipping away from itself into the body of the world.

This nest is the back of a pirate’s head, stern and foolish in its seadrenched tousle of cloth.

This nest is the wing of a raptor, tipped with sky and the shouts of smaller creatures on the forest floor below.

This nest is the punctuation of weather.

This nest is a whirlwind, mute but full of consequence.

This nest is an acclamation, a bow to the magic of work in the night.

This nest is a cave, silent until you go deep enough to hear the sound of waterfalls.

This nest is a knot in the archetypal tree of life, puzzled by its own antiquity and size.

This nest is the way a well looks suspended in air and soft with the deficit of shallow mud.

This nest is a big velvet curtain with a heavy tasseled cord to make it move.

This nest is a wooden barrel waiting for the warm rain of April.

This nest is the head of a bear, asleep in a place no one knows to look for.

This nest has the bold but fragile determination of wax across the lip of an envelope, waiting to be disturbed and even broken.

This nest is a witness to the work of dry days in midwinter.

This nest is the shift of a clenched fist into an outstretched palm, offered sideways as a salutation and a nod.

This nest wants to be a bonfire but settles for claiming the bodies of fierce and dangerous creatures who carry the sting of flame.

This nest is a saint, a relic of patience.

This nest is the cousin of the mountaintop it frames against the silver winter sky.

This nest is some kind of promise, a paradox of stillness hoarding strength.

This nest is a cloud heavy with repentance and ready to shed its burdens into the waiting boughs of leafless trees in Lent.

This nest has a language made of scents and shapes, of the flavors of treebark and basil, of the song that the eaves sing in high winds.

This nest knows things about the land that no one else does. It might be waiting for the question that will make it hum like a harp or a banjo.

This nest is the cape of a journeying hero, ragged from the clutch of foreign caverns.

This nest is a sheet of lightning, waiting for the chance to be a fork.

This nest is a boulder stuck in the cleft of a rushing river, eager to make friends with stranded paddlers.

This nest is the head of a giant, used to the way things look in thinning air.

This nest claims its own sovereignty but still does what the stormwinds say it should.

This nest knows the syllables of three seasons and hopes to learn the language of the fourth.

This nest is not a compromise or a loss. It lives with being torn apart and shredded. A little bit of its sleeping heart will hang around like a hologram in the space above the forest when it falls, even if the textures of its walls have long since crumbled. Its brokenness is part of the horizon’s memory palace forever, one of those subtle claims that nature has on time, a bookmark inserted in between the pages of an empty wordless book shaped like a circle.

©Laura Sorrells 2015

all rights reserved

a doorway, vanishing

Bring me the prophetic riddle

you have promised.

Reveal to me

the wheel of union, the

spacious all, the

gentle passion of

our tears. A furnace

of love breathes

through the Body’s

warm return. Everyone

here is a fountain,

a desert, a host.

A compass, a likeness,

a branch. A door-

way vanishing into

your speechless,

infinite heart.

----©Laura Sorrells 2013

all rights reserved

This Book

This book is a paper sailboat careening into the spires of cypress knees.

This book is a barn burning, erasing the beams that stood in front of the big yellow moon.

This book is a microscope, rescued from a box in the attic of your childhood.

This book is a tender young beech leaf yearning to know the sun.

This book is a grandfatherly archetype, playing games with magic in the middle of the night.

This book is a wanderer. It likes to go places without names, places in between the places on the maps.

This book is neither a telegram nor a text message.

This book is a skinny bear emerging from the grotto in the forest, hungry for grubs and cat food.

This book is an alligator’s leg pushing away from logs in the courtyard pond.

This book is a wild thing trying to be tame.

This book is something like a mystery or a riddle. Its pages are neither gray nor blue. They carry a texture like depth, a seriousness that gets behind language and shoves it around.

This book is a foxtail with a bristly tip, given as a gift.

This book is a cloud of brown-headed cowbirds full of corn and winter.

This book is a travelogue, a clumsy try at keeping track of all the ways to talk to people in between the towns of Appalachia.

This book is a city skyline bristling with bridges.

This book is a bridge tagged with blue.

This book is the furl of tarpaulin beneath the bridge, a rectangle of chill in January.

This book is a labyrinth, a web of careful bricks edged with stiff tufts of leftover grass.

This book is an empty suit of armor on display in a place where no one knows its story.

This book is a carpenter’s cat’s paw with nothing to nudge loose from beams or siding.

This book is the slender bleachy jawbone of a fox or dog, found settling into tar on the traintracks near Talking Rock Creek.

This book is a mug of jasmine tea, remembering how sweet it was to be a flower.

This book is the place where poems go to be alone when no one wants to read them.

This book is a monocle, always hot from starting tiny fires in checkout lines.

This book is the big old wind that tears down limbs from oak trees and sings to itself in the cove.

This book is cousin to the Eastern Forest Field Guide under the seat in the truck.

This book is a superhero’s diary, full of hyperbole and mischief.

This book is the unwritten thing that has no synonym, no nomenclature to show itself to others. It sings its little song of consolation. It whistles past the graveyard in the moonlight. It is a cliché, a cannonball, a memorized stanza from high school, an excuse, an homage, a playground, and a whisper. It got lost once but found its way back with nothing missing. You looked and looked, expecting to see a chunk of font cut away from the middle with someone’s tiny scissors, but everything was there, all the words that courted you and made you write them down for some unspoken reason you aren’t sure exists.

This book is all topography, all raised edges showing you what to see and how to get around it.

This book knows your name but won’t say it.

This book is the last story you’ll ever need: a simpleness, a foundling, a caress, a stumble, a woodsplitter, a pillow, a koan, a dream half-remembered in the morning, a plate of scrambled eggs with lots of pepper, an afterthought, a raincoat, a weathervane, a kiss.

-----©Laura Sorrells 2013
all rights reserved

This

This flame, this ribbon, this branch, this windblown cloudbank covering up the sun.
This song, this crevice, this hammer, this net,
this scrap of orange fabric in the grass.
This pause, this shoelace, this errant ladybug with distended wings crawling across the soft gray crawlspace of my pillow.
This hymn, this bird, this bit of news I wish I hadn't overheard but did.
This wasp fallen into wine.
This lost sentence of love trembling with need,
this half-acre of of sawdust and clay,
this trembling oak leaf suspended by nothing visible from a tender twig in the small gray rain.
This crow, this dog, this laughing coyote, this shed skin that wants to find itself a home in dirt.
This choir stall, this stairwell, this echo of an antiphon in darkness.
This shoe, this hearth, this rock, this bell,
this dazzle of lonesome verbiage truncated into a punctuation full of fire and the scent of piney heartwood as it catches.
This pen, this slip of paper made from sand and bloodroot, wanting nothing but the touch of a thought too small to shout, too big to whisper, too unrepentant to have it out with God,
too shy and wild to say its name in any place where anyone might hear.

©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

This is another poem from Thanksgiving week of this year, when I was on retreat at Gethsemani.

This Leaf

This leaf is an atlas of small worlds that travel silently.

This leaf is a tabula rasa, a scrim of thinning blankness waiting for change.

This leaf is the empty swimming pool after Labor Day, a shape turned deeper by emptiness.

This leaf is the tilt of the bird-feeder’s wooden roof clambered on by squirrels, spinning from a cord of fraying rope.

This leaf is a patchwork quilt, or the lining of one, found at a thrift store and waiting for its cotton body.

This leaf is an acoustic guitar secretly yearning for the buzz of electricity.

This leaf is the pond that is filling back up with water after months of crackling drought.

This leaf is a plastic tugboat the color of a jack o’lantern, waiting to be mysteriously sunken in a small moat.

This leaf is a cloud fallen to earth, limning what it touches with the disappearance of winter.

This leaf is a mirror, cupping the shifts of seasons above it and showing them off to the sky.

This leaf is a skillet, sizzling with flour and waiting for the little green dice of homegrown okra to give it purpose and flavors.

This leaf is the lens you lost from your glasses last year when you were climbing up a rocky bank to take a picture of a tree.

This leaf is a band-aid, the last one left in your upper left hand desk drawer, handed to a child whose elbow wants to wear the face of Batman.

This leaf is a sandalwood mala, sagging over the splinters of a wooden bench beside a pond you used to visit, its crimson tassel fading into rose in rain.

This leaf is the chamois shirt your old lover gave you, left beside the trail tree in the forest, its buttery warmth befriending other leaves now.

This leaf is the chalice that you found in the basement, one of a pair, tarnished but waiting to hold something wet.

This leaf is the puddle you stepped in in sockfeet, the touch of cold that woke you up.

This leaf is a shard of pottery tucked against the base of a big old oak tree in what used to be a garden.

This leaf is an anchor, but not one that works real well.

This leaf is the kayak you fell out of on the Coosawattee River near some rocks and roaring water.

This leaf is a crimson prayer flag ripped down by wind from the branch of a poplar in your yard.

This leaf is a page from a book in another language.

This leaf is the raft of logs and twine you dream of floating away on when you’re restless.

This leaf is a riverstone, cool to touch and carried in the pocket of your peacoat in December.

This leaf is a circle of abalone smoking with sage.

This leaf is a lost wooden chesspawn  lonesome for bishops and knights.

This leaf is the story of threshold you love like the poem you memorized in April, the one that sang like an angel might, the one you wrote down in four different places so you could read it whenever you wanted. It knows how to keep you up late at night and tell you things you need to hear.

This leaf is the note in the bottle, the koan you floated away on a rising Sapelo Island tide.

This leaf resists being part of constructed art and does not enjoy the way tape feels between it and thick journal paper.

This leaf is the magnifying glass you carry around to see even smaller.

This leaf is the top of a fencepost, once a circle but splayed into broadness by seasons.

This leaf is a crumbling cabin of tannin, its roofbeams collapsing in on the space inside it.

This leaf is the adventure of touch, the challenge of handclasp and holding.

This leaf is a page from the book I write every day, the one where every word carries more than most people would be able to see, the one with the color of slow smoke and pondwater at its heart, the one synonymous with the best prayer I’ve offered, the one that holds my fingers captive and shows them what to do when they don’t know. No one will ever read it, but its chapters love the world I give it relentlessly and without fear, certain of the rightness of moments and the syllables of speech, determined to keep on talking even when its writer’s voice is soft with another poem’s hidden longing.

©Laura Sorrells 2012

all rights reserved

This Shell

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