something asking

Something fierce
and patient
is asking for
my story.
Only the secret
you keep
can open its
longing into
the claiming
promise your
stillness teaches
me to need.

©Laura Sorrells 2014
all rights reserved

tell me a time

Gray: The ash is blowing towards the restaurant.
Maureen: Not any fire? Just ashes?
G: I guess. I don't know what blowing fire would look like.
M: Wouldn't there just be tongues of licking flame?
G: Well people always talk about tongues of flame. There's something Pentecostal about it. But fire does seem alive, doesn't it?
M: Yes. (Pauses.) I think it might be. Even the embers.
G: Even when you can't see any more flame through the smoke?
M: Sure.
G: Did you say you worked around here?
M: Yes. I work at the cafe just down the street, on the corner of Cobb and Sullivan.
G: Maxine's?
M: That's it. I don't think I've seen you in there. (Pauses and gazes intently at the fire.) Wow. This house has a balcony on the third story. 
G: The fire's not there yet.
M: I should go home and sleep. But this fire will keep me awake. Kind of a holographic imprint. Only with sound. Not a memory. More immediate. Bigger. More present. Do you ever get that?
G: Not quite.
M: Quite?
G: I have a kind of synesthesia that happens when I'm working sometimes. Usually it's strongest around the big cats. That sad old king with the tattered mane. Then sometimes with the lemurs. Don't ask me why.
M: Because they're so noisy?
G: (Chuckles.) I don't think so. But maybe.
M: What else?
G: The wolves.
M: (Softly but eagerly) I can see that. Kind of. Tell me something. Tell me a time.
G: With the wolves?
M: Yes. With the wolves.
G: (Takes a deep breath and rubs his eyes.) This was last week. These wolves are getting old. Their attachment to each other is almost (pauses again).....palpable. They don't have the territory to heal when they need to. So things just hang around in this air.....(Sweeps an arm towards the entrance to the zoo, down the street.) 
M: Go on. 
G: So, they bay and yip and howl during the day, now. Midmorning, midafternoon. There doesn't seem to be a pattern to it. I've paid very close attention and it seems to happen independently of anything I can see. So last week this big male was loping across the grass towards the edge, the fence, where the hidden gate is. I could see his fur through flashing through the leaves. He knew I was watching him. He ran right up to the gate. Like he could go through it or it wasn't there. Then he skidded to a stop. Very undignified and very unlike him. He didn't know what to do with himself, after that. I felt embarrassed and sad for him. I went the other way. 
M: Wow.
G: I know. You know what's really odd, though? Not what happened but how I received it. How it (pauses) registered with me. (Glances at her as if to make sure she is following him.)
M: Please. Tell me the rest.
G: Well, it isn't a story. Just how.....well, it was like I heard him running. He wasn't making any noise, but it seemed like I could hear the air around him moving aside. Or something. Not his footfall, you understand. But the air itself. Like it was alive and trying to give him room. Moving aside for him....



I wrote this in response to a dialogue exercise a couple of summers ago and tweaked it a bit just now as I typed. The prompt read "A zookeeper talks to a waitress at a house fire." I named the zookeeper Gray and the waitress Maureen. I may do something more with this. I didn't come to a satisfactory stopping place.


©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

a shared seeing

I can’t quite see the mountain from where I am. Tall trees obscure its tip. A collar of pink clouds rises up from just above it. I am reminded of last October when I wrote about the shedding of old skin and the emptiness that follows. That skin has continued to fall away, mostly, with patches of reclamation here and there. There is loneliness in it but beauty too. A paradox, as ever. I have a little outdoor altar here, with a fading illustration of an artsy greeting-card rabbit amidst a little silver crucifix and a swathe of bright green flowered fabric. Shells and feathers are settling into the damp fabric after today’s rain. A tall spike of some kind of volunteer bulb spreads out across the glass table towards the forest. I light a tall white glass pillar candle and a glass pillar candle with an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on it, both brought in with dry wicks from my hearth. A whippoorwhill calls in the woods and I remember that I actually seem to have heard cicadas out at a friend’s horse rescue farm the other night. Seems improbable in May but it sure sounded like cicadas to me.

That night was one of connection, understanding, and conversation offered and shared with tremendous warmth and sincerity. I sat on a log beside a campfire with two people who had heretofore been strangers and talked about my spiritual journey and listened to them talk about theirs. We all believe in paying attention to synchronicity, and we talked about that. We laughed at our own misadventures and at the beautiful incongruities of being human. We talked about sacrifice and how we watch it happen and how some people seem to choose it, to take on the pain of others in a deliberate way, a profoundly unselfish and loving thing that is impossible to explain in words. It sounds trite. Unless you have seen it, it can sound maudlin and empty, platitudinous. But it is not. And I honor it in my heart every day. I know it when I feel it, more than when I see it. It is a palpable energy, a largesse of soul that I do not understand or even envy at this point but which I revere and am grateful for. It felt good to be able to say these things and have them be understood.

And we laughed and ate pizza and they drank a little beer. Finally it began to rain, and as the sweet early-summer smell of grass and hay began to saturate my senses I gathered up my camera and my old serape and the peacock feather one of my new friends had given me and headed home. 

--©Laura Sorrells 2012

all rights reserved

what the water said

Listen for the humming tremor
of story, for its
inexhaustible healing.
Breathe in the curative eros
the crazy river inspires.
Only a few shameless stars
remain to converse with
the giddy red body of dawn.
Be there among them.
Your own muscular language
of trance and tumult
is also the complete
stranger who conjures
your perfect medicine back
from the gray land of gravity.
Now, a storehouse of vision
gusts into your teaching.
You will never be lost
again.

I put together this found poem from David Abram's book Becoming Animal this afternoon.

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

all rights reserved

lullaby redux

Despite the lullaby intention set by my mix of chamomile and valerian I can’t go to sleep. Little mice feet sound larger than I hope they are behind my refrigerator and I remember how my brother’s big black dog chewed through the refrigerator coil while he and his family were away. A friend tells me how when he was hiking the Appalachian Trail mice chewed off a big hunk of his long hair and made themselves a nest, there in the shelter while he slept next to a skunk. The skunk may have slept through it too. My cats don’t seem inclined to do anything about these noises. The other morning the tiny corpse of a mouse lay next to Penelope’s fat gray paws in the kitchen and though it hurt my heart to see the creature’s little pink feet still and lifeless I was glad at its smallness. I’ve moved for now into the bedroom where I don’t usually sleep, the one where most of my books are and where an oil painting of sailboats hangs over the bed. My grandmother painted it when I was a little girl, and one of the boats has my name; another has my mother’s and another my aunt’s. I take a big bottle of lemon Pellegrino water to bed with me as well as the cup of herb tea and a book I stopped reading four months ago. The house settles into the almost-winter night and my lonely heart aches a little for my lost love as I fall at last into slumber.

Write to the Prompt

Write a story about the time you left your sister’s jacket on the bus, and about the girl who found it, and how she wore it to the fair, even though it was much too big for her. Include details: how the seams enclosed her in a cave of sagging navy cotton, and how she filled the pockets with barrettes and Jolly Ranchers. Tell us about how the heat melted the Jolly Ranchers onto the barrettes, and how the girl, let’s call her Sylvia, dug a cocoon of blue raspberry stickiness away from the clip that held her bangs away from her face. Show us her expression when the candy came away clean and she could see again.
Write a research paper, if you can, about the difference between Ramen noodles and Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. Explain the exegesis of both forms of nourishment, and allude to the special ways you can address the inherent salty sameness of their bases. Tell us about the first time you made egg drop soup from that dry crackling package of Ramen and how good it tasted with a dusting of paprika across its skin as it cooled. Explain how, when you need to make more than one meal out of something, such a soup can become a casserole of sorts overnight, and how black pepper, when dusted across the surface of this second dish, works its way down into the soggy filaments of noodle, giving the whole thing a deceptive saline freshness for just a moment.

Write a poem about the imaginary creature you built from other animals you knew, back in the fourth grade. Tell us about the fine silver veins that flowed across the wings of the animal and how it had a voice, but one seldom heard, like yours. Tell us about your brainchild's feet, how nimble and creaturely they were, and about the animal’s tail. Tell us how it looped through your dreams as you first imagined this beast, and how it danced and darted like the tail of the Cowardly Lion, off balance and in rhythm with its own inner ley lines, a barometer of all the fears and energies its owner carried through the world. Give it a name, and have it roar.
Write a descriptive paper about a flamingo. Explain the flamingo’s perspective on life and show us all its needs and problems. Let us feel what it’s like to have knees that bend backwards. Have us see the river water it lives in through your new flamingo eyes. Take us with you when you fly away, and have us reach the horizon along with you, a part of one big wing, a rising of color from mud into sky, a departure, a choice, a leavetaking, and a joining, a cacophony of birdvoice dangling down along the joints of flying legs so that all the other animals still hear it, long after the migrating flock has left them behind.

lks 2007