the wordless question

The wordless question
your breath releases
is becoming
the chalice my
blazing heart
adores

©Laura Sorrells 2012
 all rights reserved

a shout in a dream

Always, the radical
wisdom of paradox
brings me the work
my spirit yearns
for. The austere gifts
of conversion reveal
a frontier I have always
longed for in the
secret obedience of
my heart. Love's
pensive psalm travels through
and with me
like the surprise of a shout
in a dream, an ancient
source remembered,
holy, sweet, and fierce.

©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

shed skins

I wrote this in 2007 in response to a writing prompt of some sort.

I haven’t been around snakes all that much, but I’ve always felt a tenderness for them. When I was a kid we talked about big fierce shiny black racers that would turn themselves into hoops and whirl after us across the fields where we played. These tales didn’t make me afraid of snakes, though. I remember holding my friend Mark’s pet blacksnake in an old dive bar in Athens, Georgia, feeling its dry narrow body curve around my forearms through the skin of Southern Comfort I was wearing. And another time, we were paddling down a blackwater river in south Georgia one unseasonably warm February day and we nearly crashed into a big water moccasin sunning itself on a branch on the banks. We steered away and I watched the snake get smaller with some odd sense of missing it. Mostly around here I just see the dry paper shells of snakeskins shed and left by Cove Road or down by the path into the ravine. Or I read about them, about how Dennis Covington got caught up in handling serpents in backwoods Alabama churches, and some ancient pagan part of me wonders about the trickiness of that, the sliding of muscle over sleeve onto arm, the flare or hiddenness of fangs, the thickness of those triangled heads. There’s mystery there I suppose but also plainness, the elemental earthliness of snakebelly, reptile eye. There was, I remember now, also a large boa constrictor that lived in the walls of the house my family rented the year my parents split, or so we were told by the people who lived there before us. They were friends of ours, and I knew that snake; it had lived in my eighth grade classroom the previous year, and I never felt frightened for an instant of its alleged presence in the plumbing. It felt reassuring, a hunger gone outlaw, a jailbreak, a movement from domesticity into wildness, from a glass box into the shadowed wall and floorspaces I couldn’t even imagine the dimensions of, the ones we slept between and above, the ones that held us tame and gave us heat and water. I liked to think of Bo the boa curled around the plastic knee of a pipe, warm with the pressure of city water, sleeping off a feast of mice and crickets, a fallen creature, lonesome, large, and grand with the solitude of escape.

They sag in just the way I remember, clotting against each other in nests of purple and gold, skins thinning and flesh softening in cracks of sidewalk concrete.  As a child I used to eat them off a tree at the edge of a cotton field, loving them more than wild plums but not as much as blackberries. Their feral sweetness in my throat tickled with its hint of something gone to ruin, something almost too wild to be with. Only once I picked them before they’d ripened, the blister of their greenness sending me home for water in a hurry, my mouth full of trickery and insolence. Some years later I made some jam with them. It sat on my shelf in jars until someone insisted I spread it on toast, and I did. My teeth missed the skins and the nudge of the pit. Wasps still crawl inside their golden hearts, I notice now, intoxicated with loamy fruitflesh and the heady disappearing nourishment of summer.

©Laura Sorrells 2007--2012

all rights reserved

a poem by Molly Peacock

The Soul House

To the soul house no guests can be asked
though it is calm as a lake, its shore so prepared
anyone who stops by wants to build there.
But no. Who lives here lives unmasked.
Across the waxed floors slips only a soul
in a soul's bathrobe, tattered of course.
This is what spirits at home wear. That bowl
received real plums, the vases real flowers.
Soul breath is quite real, too, its naked powers
insisting it be housed exclusively
for its air alone---pure being. And no
secrets in the soul house, only privacy.
A place to grow in, but not outgrow.
Not emptiness, but emptiedness. A source.

--Molly Peacock

A certain gentle light
can carry everything
into the desert
my soul returns to.
Without you,
no flame of love,
no tree of blessing
reaching across the
hidden field of night
to breathe me
quietly home.

©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved