This Nest

This nest is a shadow slipping away from itself into the body of the world.

This nest is the back of a pirate’s head, stern and foolish in its seadrenched tousle of cloth.

This nest is the wing of a raptor, tipped with sky and the shouts of smaller creatures on the forest floor below.

This nest is the punctuation of weather.

This nest is a whirlwind, mute but full of consequence.

This nest is an acclamation, a bow to the magic of work in the night.

This nest is a cave, silent until you go deep enough to hear the sound of waterfalls.

This nest is a knot in the archetypal tree of life, puzzled by its own antiquity and size.

This nest is the way a well looks suspended in air and soft with the deficit of shallow mud.

This nest is a big velvet curtain with a heavy tasseled cord to make it move.

This nest is a wooden barrel waiting for the warm rain of April.

This nest is the head of a bear, asleep in a place no one knows to look for.

This nest has the bold but fragile determination of wax across the lip of an envelope, waiting to be disturbed and even broken.

This nest is a witness to the work of dry days in midwinter.

This nest is the shift of a clenched fist into an outstretched palm, offered sideways as a salutation and a nod.

This nest wants to be a bonfire but settles for claiming the bodies of fierce and dangerous creatures who carry the sting of flame.

This nest is a saint, a relic of patience.

This nest is the cousin of the mountaintop it frames against the silver winter sky.

This nest is some kind of promise, a paradox of stillness hoarding strength.

This nest is a cloud heavy with repentance and ready to shed its burdens into the waiting boughs of leafless trees in Lent.

This nest has a language made of scents and shapes, of the flavors of treebark and basil, of the song that the eaves sing in high winds.

This nest knows things about the land that no one else does. It might be waiting for the question that will make it hum like a harp or a banjo.

This nest is the cape of a journeying hero, ragged from the clutch of foreign caverns.

This nest is a sheet of lightning, waiting for the chance to be a fork.

This nest is a boulder stuck in the cleft of a rushing river, eager to make friends with stranded paddlers.

This nest is the head of a giant, used to the way things look in thinning air.

This nest claims its own sovereignty but still does what the stormwinds say it should.

This nest knows the syllables of three seasons and hopes to learn the language of the fourth.

This nest is not a compromise or a loss. It lives with being torn apart and shredded. A little bit of its sleeping heart will hang around like a hologram in the space above the forest when it falls, even if the textures of its walls have long since crumbled. Its brokenness is part of the horizon’s memory palace forever, one of those subtle claims that nature has on time, a bookmark inserted in between the pages of an empty wordless book shaped like a circle.

©Laura Sorrells 2015

all rights reserved

Newborn

It’s haphazard and I don’t like it, this way I have, when I’m living alone, of collapsing into self-neglect when it comes to how and what I eat. I know better. Rice cakes broken in half like sacramental wafers and nibbled as I sweep or read. Peanut butter slathered loosely on heels of whole wheat loaf bread. I’m not down to Sunbeam yet but maybe getting there. Lots of coffee. The French press is working overtime. I unwittingly bought a pound of decaf Sumatra the other day and buzzed around organizing my shelves and folding clothes until I happened to notice there was nothing behind the imagined push I felt from the beans. Diet soda, once my sworn enemy, crowds my refrigerator shelves in half-full bottles that I’ll empty and recycle soon. Some days I don’t eat till evening, eschewing the corn dogs and cardboard pizza triangles the school cafeteria offers. Other days I go ahead and dance with the devil and I always regret it: flavorless chicken sandwiches that would make Thich Naht Hanh shudder and throw up his patient hands, wilted huddles of what passes for salad, and the inevitable applesauce. Nowadays I don’t even boil water for oatmeal, much less sit down at my dining room table to eat it slow with raisins and honey like I used to. I deserve some homemade guacamole, an organic spinach salad nurtured with the sweetest flakes of carrot you can think of, and fresh crusty French bread dipped in EVOO. I need some green tea, the kind flavored with rose petals, or maybe some pomegranate juice, pure and expensive. Bring me something clean and wild, something delicate, something strong. Hurry it onto the plate, into my glass, and sit me down in front of it. light me a candle and tell me something about the sky. Hold my hand and break bread with me, and slow me down when I chew too fast. Remind me to hear the way I taste my food and to smell the colors as if they were newborn: fragile, wet, and hooked by the miracle of how to swallow.

©Laura Sorrells 2012

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

this slow stream

Surrounded by change,
listen for a flower
of fire
remember to trust
the secret color
this slow stream
thinks

--lks 2011

This is from the haiku magnets.

A Shining

I am full of a shining,
lost in a forest of sun.
The sound of snow is
invisible,
a trickster's scatter,
a raven's icy thought.
The air is making the quiet
new
and the bones of its wings
young and strong
as it flies.

lks 12/28/09