another rediscovered

from 2007

This ravine, still green and furious with foliage, is a kind of gap, its thirty-three descending wooden steps obscured by ferns and moss in October’s unseasonable heat. At the bottom, in the trough near the grotto where I stood with the spiderweb last month and played with light, I once buried my cat Tess, a gray and orange tortoiseshell who loved my mother. I wrapped her in a thinning ancient towel, white with marigolds across it, a brightness I saw the next morning from my deck, knowing I’d made the grave in that hard dark earth too shallow. That unearthing, however it happened, seemed to me then a kind of seamless holy thing, like Annie Dillard’s bloody tom, distributing gore across her waking body at dawn, his compact hunter’s form a tawny stamp of fecundity, much like the flare of vivid yellow I saw in the forest that morning: a flag, brash and empty.

rediscovery

When I was a kid, I had a subscription to Cricket magazine. I loved the running commentary from Cricket and Ladybug and the fat snail and the blind earthworm, down in the margins. I read each issue hungrily and memorized the artwork with my hungry little writer’s soul, fantasizing about pairing my own words with such beauty. When my parents split in 82, the magazines disappeared—or so I thought.
A couple of Decembers ago I found one of them under the sofa in my father’s house. Mice and elves on the cover, 1973. and then in January another, in a basket in the upstairs bathroom beneath Lake Wobegon Days. 1974, a Valentine’s issue, aswirl with candyhearts and paper roses imprinted with tiny cricket footprints. And, a few months later, still another, this time on a shelf beside the basement stairwell. Christmas 1974. I began to search for others, and they started turning up—in a small stack in one of the closets in the garret bedroom upstairs, behind the old yellow Ethan Allen dresser in the basement. I became obsessed with finding the Hallowe’en issue from, I think, 1974, simply and solely for the graphic on the cover. Having apparently nothing better to do for two days over spring break that year, I shuffled through the attic, determined to unearth that magazine. The cover was for me a completely perfect expression of Hallowe’en, always my favorite holiday. On the front was a city alight with the small and large peregrinations of the night, and on the back was a thrillingly haunted country scene depicting an assortment of ghosts and goblins and witches and jack o’lanterns marching and dancing through the fullmoonlit countryside. Hallowe’en was for me the cusp of the year, even as a child, a time when it seemed the progression of the seasons tilted and moved into newness. The magazine held all that—-the scent of pumpkinflesh carved and slightly scorched, the sense that anything was possible and that all the thin places of the world were standing open, enshrouded in a playful beneficent witchy silver mist. If I could only lay eyes on those goblins again!
I never did find the magazine, at least not yet.
But I did find a box of marching horses—a porcelain gray prancer with an illfitting white plastic saddle and a velvet sorrel with a stillsilky mane and tail and wide eyes. I found the gray tabbycat handpuppet I told endless stories to as a child, her green eyes milky and shot out. I found a journal I kept from the fifth grade through the seventh, beginning with a description of a November rainstorm and ending with a reminiscence about wandering the bridlepaths of the horse pasture behind our woods and imagining I was a deer. I found my guide to the care and training of Shetland sheepdogs, with my beloved Sheltie’s papers tucked inside. I found a pair of thick glasses with brown plastic frames in a bright red cloth case, the left much thicker, as ever, than the right. I found a decoupaged box with three of my baby teeth and a set of tiny castiron salt and pepper shakers in it. I found a yarn panda bear filled with foam, put together by my Grandma Floyd.
The thin places did open for me, it seems, in a seamless beckoning into the deepest satisfactions and sweetest treasures of my girlhood. Were they there all along, and I just didn’t look?
I’ll keep my eyes open better from now on.

copyright 2007 l.k. sorrells

the simple everything

The inexorable law
of light comes home
to us in the brave and
difficult voice of rain and
wind. Receive that
consuming love
and be made
into the simple everything
of God's perfect fire.

©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

morning prayer

Reverence draws out bliss.

Let the heat of the water on my neck in the morning be an engine for a righteous fire on behalf of my best efforts, my kindest impulses, and my truest hopes.

Let the taste of Greek yogurt and Grape Nuts I share with the dawn chorus remind me of every sweetness possible in the yearnings of sunrise over Sharptop.

Let the conversation I have with the barista who’s overwhelmed with latte orders be one of grounding humor and understanding.

Let the laughter I share with my students before the day begins be a chord of play and a cord of openness between us.

Let the hour I have to myself in the middle of the morning be a space for reclaiming my breath and honoring right livelihood with a little bit of stillness.

Let the ears I hear my students with be fresh and free of any judgment.

Let the air I share with the leaping deer in the meadow off Mineral Springs Road be clean and salvific, the kind of air that tells its own stories and makes them easy to hear, cool with coming October.

Let me understand my role in the sweep of the day with tenderness and fire, with patience and a lover’s soul.

Amen.

This is something I wrote several years ago and tweaked tonight. 

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.

Fresh

Torn down by longing,

I pass through a state of fitful meanness

and come out

on the other side,

transparent and content with the citrus fizz

of the cold medicine

you pour into a cup for me,

the light of your heart

in the middle of the day

like no bright sun

I’ve seen, a soft beam

that doesn’t burn

but nurtures,

a shine with no sharp edges.

You often play with metaphors

about light

(and other things),

your thoughts returning

to syllables

in strangeness,

telling new stories

inside the hoops

and wriggles of words,

each one a narrative of brightness

delivered with the particulars

of each moment’s unexpectant love

for its hues and angles,

for its curves and disparities.

Not a reconsideration,

but some kind

of birth.

©Laura Sorrells 2007

all rights reserved

I wrote this in 2007 for someone I loved very much.

Footwings

Thin wings catch

light and move against

hot glass

and rust:

tiny feet an intrusion of

even smaller movement,

a tickle,

a hand cupped

around an ear,

a node hummed

and spun,

inhabited.

©Laura Sorrells 2007

all rights reserved

Story

It’s all about the troll who lives under the bridge; the girl without a father; the boy with a third eye hidden in his forehead, a radiant liquid gem, the color of rubies.

It’s about the black bear by the bloodroot on Sunday: the moment of revelation in the rainy garden, right next to the sagging tomato cage and just behind the single aisle of shaggy sunflowers.

It’s about wanting something you can’t have, and about wanting nothing much at all.

It’s about the secret recipe for catfish chowder that came out of that August day on the hidden lake, two generations ago, when the big whiskered fish gave himself up and throngs of hungry people ate for days.

It is, in fact, about being fed, and about feeding the hungry.

It’s about the dispensation of clues without coercion, the unspoken urgency in how things might have been but never were.

It’s about getting off the country road and pulling in behind that old sedan with blue steam rising from its continent of hood, and then about what happens next: kindness, conversation, redemption, a shift : a chance to tell a different story, later, this time.

--©Laura Sorrells 2012

all rights reserved

This is a version of something I wrote in 2007 when I was in graduate school and planning a research project on the importance of narrative writing in the middle school curriculum. I am far from satisfied with it, but I think it contains a seed or two I may be able to use.

Epiphany Ashes

from 2007

The last time I was here

a mountain of coniferous fuel

awaited the snickering flames,

and we loaded on the greens,

hauling limbs and branches and trunks

and snapping pieces of tree

into the orange mouth of the Epiphany fire.

We stood around in down and flannel,

hugging ourselves and shivering.

A coyote howled up on Sassafras Mountain.

Today I pull together a snarl of rusted metal,

the pale green glass nose

of an old-fashioned Coke bottle,

 a dented metal bowl,

and a stick, long as a branch

but barer,

to frame a place of ash and pagan collusion against the cold,

a marking of the passage of winter

and the exchange of sacred gifts.

The dry grass crackles around my heels.

The auburn pinestraw

and the green imperious blossom

of an invading dandelion

have become the gifts these Epiphany ashes offer me,

the sacramental metal of the bowl

the perfect shade of gray

(not silver)

in the summer light.

©Laura Sorrells 2007

all rights reserved

Hooks

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?

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

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.