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

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

all rights reserved

speechless

Almost everything tells
me news of the demolished
always
we craved.
When the speechless hinge
of loss
sings to my invisible
heart,
I surrender and become
its tender plaything.
At home in the story
you left me, I
hide inside the noise
of silence
and slowly start to
hear the praise
breathing in its
ancient room.


©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved