when?

Beside this big old bed is a paper lamp. It is a column of orange light whispering to someone I can’t see as I sit on the edge of the bed and wait for my thoughts to stop. I know something I cannot say, can’t even begin to articulate, and the orange light holds that knowledge in its secret supernatural voice like clear water in a metal bowl. The story of light has been trying to let me know something in my dreams. I have been resistant to it, like everyone else before me. But there is no denying the reality of its narrative, its power, its tricky strength, its trajectory of claiming. Filaments of orange light peer through little holes in the paper lamp’s cylindrical body and I think of a column of fire, a tongue of flame dancing and insistent. Something burning but stable and unchanging. When will I know what to do? When will the silent fire decide to speak my name? I sigh and slide between the cool white cotton of the bedsheets. The lamp’s glass bulb flickers like a candle, goes out for a second, then reappears, tinged with a purple undercurrent that is impossible to identify with my eyes but is somehow undeniably present nonetheless. I sit up and listen for the wind, for the way the branches of the shedding red oaks sound against the glass of the big windows that open onto the forest. A shower of acorns pelts the tin roof and the lamp gutters like a torch and goes out. Breathless but not exactly fearful, I close my eyes to hear what the fire has to say, adding a layer of chosen darkness to the hologram of orange and purple that inhabits the new dark of the air around me. 

Snow Day the Second

Snow Day Number Two. The house is warm and secure, but parts of it are what you might call ‘broken.’ It needs so much work. Essentially it is solid, but I see the places where restoration needs to happen, where cracks and shifts show me what it needs. Brokenness is sometimes just a pain in the ass, but it can also be beautiful. As I sit and look out over the snow-touched landscape of the mountain forest outside my window, I see the beauty in the brokenness of the big hornets’ nest falling apart in the cold winter air. I see it in the psychedelic vibrancy of the top part of a glass Victorian gazing ball I once had on a stand in the front yard. Now the glass ball sits atop the glass table on my snowy deck and captures hints of the shapes surrounding it. I notice the shards of a broken cup, pale green and cream colored with strands of peat-brown. I remember when an old boyfriend of mine, a man I almost married, bought me that cup at the local Arts Center. There were tiny insects—not ants, more like candleflies or termites, but not quite those either---all over the larger, deeper pieces of pottery on the table with the cup. There was something haunting and curiously compelling about their presence, there in the sharpening air of late autumn. I think now too about the brokenness of memory, or its potential brokenness. Who can say when a memory’s life becomes broken? Perhaps it never fully does. I do know that the courage a person with such a memory can have is more powerful than many other things that are, or seem to be, fully intact, whole, and undamaged. The way such a person asks kindly and respectfully for the favor of a phone call for information, over and over even after the information was acquired and written down in two places, can begin to break my heart. I think of the patience that question entails. Its asking implies that that question has already, perhaps, been asked and not acknowledged or responded to. It does not harbor irritation or anger in the context of that. It just, quietly and lovingly, asks again. There is something about that echo that reminds me of the grace of prayer. I am not sure if I am thinking about the listener or the one who is praying, or maybe of the Voice of God and the one receiving that Voice. Maybe it’s a dialectic of both. Maybe the asking and the answering are so closely connected that they can become almost the same. I don’t know what that would look or sound like. Maybe that coming together would obliterate the need for asking, but maybe not. Maybe the asking would carry its own grace, its own respectful, adoring petition for inclusion in the heartbeat of relationship. There is, inherent in all of this, a sweet brokenness that, paradoxically, is not truly and finally broken at all, at least not in any sense that keeps out what needs to get in or keeps in what needs to be released. This Lent, living into that heartbeat seems to be what I need. I don’t know how to define it or describe it more concretely or adequately. It wants to come to live in my heart, and I want to let it. That’s all I seem to need to know for now.

©Laura Sorrells 2015

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

approach

Tonight was the first night of autumn’s approach. Cool, windy, with wild golden light strobing across the smoky blue of Sharptop and the mountains around it. A rainbow, faint and tall, showed up over to my left as I drove past the Piggly Wiggly and across the train tracks. I went into town, parked my truck on Refuge Road, and walked into the fading light, towards the park and the haunted little pond with the one tree in it. As I walked I realized how hidden I’d let my vision become. I’d stepped away from the expansiveness of spirit with which I’ve always looked at this town, the sleepy little town my mother grew up in, the town I relocated to at thirty. I walked into the park. The tractor show is tomorrow so some men and their families were camping there with their RV’s, their folding camp chairs, and their ancient rusty John Deeres. I waved at the people I walked past and went up past the old county post office, which has been resettled in the middle of the park, and then down to the pond with the single tree. D. and I used to walk here. Of course I walked here before that too but this place has the silent singular energy he can carry. The tree had been pruned or cut but was still there in the middle of the little pond. The water was low and layered with algae. It was getting dark so I couldn’t tell what colors the algae held but I found myself glad that I wondered what they were. I walked through the woods up past the pond towards the firehouse and its big old barn and antique fire engines. I didn’t hang out there but turned and came back to the park and then up into town. This town is almost never in any kind of hurry, but there was a lonesome rush to the wind as I walked past the old county jail and the fountain that I jumped into one Fourth of July a couple of years ago. I had had on shorts and a bathing suit and no one seemed to mind. People waved nonchalantly to me. It was just getting dark then too. A little boy joined me after asking his daddy if he could. The water wasn’t deep. It felt good. I stood under the part of the fountain that brought water down from above and tried to coax D. into the fountain with me. He would have none of it, which surprised me. Remembering that night this evening I felt light and happy, strong and full of the quiet peace this past year's transformation has brought. Nothing is missing. The light is perfect as it changes.

©Laura Sorrells 2012

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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

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the wordless question

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

©Laura Sorrells 2012
 all rights reserved

Tentbuilding

 

This is from 2007. I plan to write something new very soon.

Last night I read something about impermanence and I remembered the time when my mother gave me the kaleidoscope. I was about twenty-two and living temporarily in the downstairs bedroom of my mother’s house. It was a surprise when she handed me a brass cylinder in a soft cobalt blue velvet cloth with a drawstring on one end that tied with a white ribbon. I don’t know where Mom got the scope, and it was apparent to me that she had just acquired it, but I never asked her where it came from. It was midsummer and I was drinking too much. I remember one night I lay awake and watched the foxfire-green pulse of a firefly that had gotten into the house. It was flying intermittently around the room the next morning, and when I went off to work I left my mother a note to warn her that it was there, dormant and flareless against the windowpane. For some reason I was afraid she’d think it was a wasp or a bee and kill it. It seemed so fragile to me, so vulnerable, and its tiny folded wings, black with red stripes at the edges, tightened my throat with their smallness.The kaleidoscope held colors darker and less bright than you might expect: slate, oxblood, cleargold, winesong, deep purple, palest winterblue, hard rust. No cerulean, scarlet, or fuchsia, or kellygreen. Reflective tones. Strong, subtle. I can still see them when I hold the kaleidoscope up to lamplight now and they’re as pure as they were then. The blue cloth encasing the scope is musty and the circle at the end that I hold up to my eye has come loose. All it needs is some super glue but I hesitate to fix it. The circle is spotted with rust and I rather like how its tones of sienna and gray fit into the colorscape of the glass at the other end of the tube. When my mother gave me this kaleidoscope, she told me that change was the only constant and to celebrate that. I like having to hold the loose metal ring against my eye when I hold the kaleidoscope up to the light, a scrap of fallenness gently acknowledged but not negated or rejected. A tag of flow and scatter, of attachment come loose and propped lightly against the grooves of its house of glass and metal. 

©Laura Sorrells 2007

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