something older

from 2008......

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

©Laura Sorrells 2008

all rights reserved

a walkabout

Tasting the scent of root,
I become the sea.
There is an art to this.
A vast interiority
makes me curious. Barefoot
all day, I remember
my alignment with the tides.
I attend to the patterned world
beyond the dichotomies
of the question.
This is no easy task. Crickets
call to the East.
Who knows
when a walkabout
begins?

©Laura Sorrells 2010
some rights reserved

I wrote this found poem in 2010 using Laura Sewall's amazing and compelling book Sight and Sensibility: the Ecopsychology of Seeing. I had lost the notebook I wrote it in and only found it the other day. I am excited about this, because it's full of things I wrote that I thought I might never see again.

mapmaking

"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