Small Enough

Is your moment small enough? Can it shrink down to a place where pine needles carry the sacristy of their thinness along the brown earth, an unseen chamber for the sleek of evergreen arrows? Can it cradle the running legs of skinks from cats, their blueness striped on shiny black? Can it forge a hidey hole for crickets, plump and lucky? (and for whom is that luck intended? the one whose linoleum cools those tiny cricket feet, who totes it out to safety?or does it live, like silent falling trees in lonely forests, along its own small plane of fate and fortune?) Or is it like a tiny burbling engine, setting loose a change in heat and daylight?


Can this small moment make you happy? And is it small enough to change your heart, to take up home in places where you bleed and breathe and fade? to show you how to lie against the scrappy breathing dirt where these shifts happen, and take inside its little seeds and wings? If you shrink your sight down small enough you'll see the changing scales of green anoles as brown earth turns them sandy. If you let it steal your size, your moment's heart can carry you in this same place forever, an empty warmskinned spirit in the rune of present vision. Absolved of any yearning, any reach.

A Flood Story

Shattered by wild weather,
we measure floodwater
with ink and narrative.
You listen to these rogue spirits,
becoming the rising geometry
of wet churning magma.
I wonder at your simple repair,
the moveless, lucid energy of
a shabby fabric
absorbing tsunami mud,
welcoming the jigsaw of tragedy
into your mad arroyo heart.

 


 

Every word I reach
finds delight
in the language
of waking

©Laura Sorrells 2009
all rights reserved

What Kinds of Words?

--after Neruda's Book of Questions

What kinds of words might the kudzu whisper to the magnolia branches as it overtakes them?


I imagine them to be syllables of consolation and care, spoken with tenderness despite the encroachment of vine over pod. Inexorability curls around each phrase in a drawl, slowed so that the emerging noises sound like a record played at the wrong speed, lulling branches and blossoms into acquiescence.

How long does it take for rust to darken into bloody burnt sienna?

No one can tell. The flakes defy analysis. Their carbon craquelure hearts don’t like being studied. They change with the slowness of snowdrops settling into soil when flurries fall and the earth is too warm for them to stick.

When will this well run dry? And when it does, what will you do for drinking?

Its water, like the backside of that old barrel I found down in the ravine last fall, has been rusty for some time now, and there's no telling what will happen next. I had a dream the other night about a tall machine, like a crane or an android giraffe, lanky with angles of metal that reach up to the sky when they should somehow be digging. When I woke I felt taller for a moment, and also deeper, as if the soles of my feet had met up with some spilled honey or errant tar while I walked in my sleep.

Whose face do you see in the moon?

Last time I looked, it was a bitter old man, in love with rocks, who collected them in heaps and hid them behind big sheets of wavy glass for no one to hold and touch. That glass is cracked and clamped together with big metal pincers now, and I see stick figures of men running in the stacks of marble alongside the buildings where the rocks still wait for someone to see them, know them, collect them, love them.

How do you know what those rocks need?

I do not know for sure but I had a feeling last time I was with them that they were lonely, that their coldness belied an ache for touch, a stony pulse that no scope can find. Of course, I could be wrong.

What kind of birds are those in the big white oak down by the train tracks?

They don't resemble any other birds I've ever seen. Their feathers catch the rain and turn it blue. They sound like killdeers do at dusk, but they don't play games in the grass to keep things safe at home. There are four of them and they share branches with six or seven crows in peace, the bigger darker birds still as silhouettes in a shadow box.

How do you know what to gamble on?

Anything can merit the tenderness of risk. It might be numbers, taken from some pool of pattern we all dip into when we need to quantify or guess. It could be weather: the blessing of rain in lakes, the welcome screen of snow on grass in early morning, the return of warmth. Or it could be something else entirely: a roll of the dice into the grace of shadow and the diminishment of wealth. Smallness, a challenge and a psalm, dealt out like manna or a sacrament as things fall apart and the center splinters into pieces of itself in places we can't reach or see. Loss, a subtraction resisted at first but then embraced and even loved.

When will we know when to quit?

When the smoke turns colors we don't see now. When cities percolate with the sounds of moving feet, not rushing but ambling, sharing the roads with the fed travelers who once sat hungry and alone on crowded hillsides. A multitude, at peace and heading towards some common space of work and gentle effort, a tribe finally able to claim its sustaining voice in the spaces where the words once slept.

© Laura Sorrells 2010
All rights reserved


For once, this is not a found poem.

the body of everything

A transformation
is traveling within
the thirst of this weather.
Anywhere
can be a portal.
Each cell is a shaman,
burning and simple.
The body of everything
connects and absolves:
a vision,
a name,
a story.
The landscape's cosmology
is a family.
Such bright increasing.
Such readiness.
Such space.

--lks July 2010
© copyright Laura Sorrells
All rights reserved

This is a found poem from Sacred Fire magazine, with a couple of words added by me.

seeking and rising

Into the sterile complacency
of neglected danger,
a primeval testimony
intrudes.
Risk seeks recognition.
It renounces the mind of safety.
Imagine yourself
an unknown fool,
serving a restless yearning,
a jester who expects a stage
but dances a liminal dream,
along the edge
of rupture and shadow.
Be that acrobat.
Rise into origin,
impervious, pure,
and empty.

©Laura Sorrells 2010
All rights reserved

This is another found poem; I wrote it using Sallie Nichols' book Jung and Tarot: an Archetypal Journey (which I found used in the Canton, Georgia Goodwill store, between a tattered Paula Deen cookbook and an old copy of The House with a Clock in Its Walls.)

Some notes on a planned piece of writing

Thin place---red winged blackbirds, dry kudzu, spirals of thick branch hanging from trees. Fox decal on truck. Recurrent fox theme, sighting of swiftly trotting bold dark gray fox on perpendicular road that connects back up to refuge road. I thought it was a little dog at first and called out. The fox came on and I felt a little afraid, as there had been a rabid raccoon attacking car tires that week out in Talking Rock. Tonight I found a ticket stub in ditch grass. Downed tree in yard of little gray hermit house. No sign of life. Little statue in front of house. Enigmatic stillness to that place, like a witch’s cottage in the woods. A pagan feel to it. Tumbles of firewood in yard. A man must live there but there is a feminine sensibility to the place too. Groundhog in grass up on the hill near the abandoned shacks, hard to see. Still brown marshy water. Talking of ceremony and my mom’s death and hermetic revelation of goddesses. Sun setting like water, liquid silver in clouds. A parting so that vision is freed up? Remembering phantom blues music of previous night. Restlessness. Branches in road. Thoughts of Good Friday tornado and of wild violent Monday morning dreams, of Easter and sacrifice and presence. Thinness. Portals. Exchanges. Ship’s captain exchanging self for crew in pirate escapade. What does this space mean to me? I want to write something about it. How it holds liminality. The space of running foxes. Quick flush of tail and narrow body into underbrush. What is not quite seen but felt. The need to flush it out and know it. a reconciliation between that need and letting it hide. Letting it be known in some other way. Brownness of barbed wire fence and blackberry bushes not budded yet. Thorn tree dark and fractalled against pale sky. The creak of its dangling storm damaged branch. Beautiful, haunted, lonely. Not quite fallen but not connected. Reminder of the creak of that big pine that day at the ballground pond. Termite damage, red blond wood moaning like the rafters of a house in wind. Tree not house yet but still tree, still with itself all of a piece despite the rift. Pocks and holes of missing wood where woodpeckers (?) have been.


What to take away from walk along meadow road? Robert Duncan poem Always I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow. I always want to pull everything I feel there into my arms. Even the trash, the detritus, the ugliness of shed paper and plastic by the side of the road. The cars rush down through there so fast. Once on a summer afternoon when it was very hot a couple of slow walking Latino teens. Two boys with low hanging jeans and slouches. Nonchalant nods and small waves. Sometimes a big yellow shaggy dog capering in the meadow. In summer, thistles everywhere. Dense jungle of white pinwheels of thistlefuzz and the thick blossoms, some bright pink, others more muteds, some striated pink and green and white. The air is full. In winter a mammoth made of kudzu rearing to greet what could be another mammoth but might also not be. A heron sometimes hanging out in the funky smelling marshy part of the creek…I haven’t seen it in awhile. Red winged blackbirds fly in the field and gather in that bare tree up on the hill. Ron and I kissed here that night in late November 07, right before Thanksgiving. Someone called down the hill from that big ugly new brick house to ask if we needed anything. Guarded brusque almost fearful tone in that man’s homeowner’s voice, a warning. Ron played at emerging from the spectral kudzu on the walk back. I took a picture of him in bad crepuscular light and his orange cap flowed. He had his head bowed and one knee slightly raised, braced against the wall of the little house on Manor Street that is gone now. A small herd of deer playing in field one day in May when I walked there with Ron. Deep restlessness and sadness and unease, almost always, walking along this road with him. On Halloween too. Bright and sunny. Unseasonably warm. Felt peaceful and present but shadowed too. The light was turning tall dead pine a sort of flaming auburn on road just above. Gloaming. Hang gliders. Not orange or brown enough for it to feel like autumn but the cicadas were noticeably absent. Or their voices were. In solitude it is best. Bob Holroyd trance didgeridoo song walking past the honeysuckle and smelling the sweetness, almost cloying. Vivid sunsets with the air like lemon and the smell of fertility everywhere. And those singular trees. There are some stumps in that field going back towards town that always seem like small ground mammals to me, about to move towards or away from me. First time I drove this road was in 03 and I was listening to a Joe Henry song, go with god. I told Mitch about it in an email later. There was a bull there with long tapered horns, standing still and solemn. Power. I have walked out into the meadow along that little pasture road a few times. I always feel like I am trespassing. Last time I came away with itchy legs from plodding through hillocks of weeds. Still it felt like I was walking out into the spread of something holy. I can hear voices coming down from the houses over to the left. They seem too close.

©Laura Sorrells 2010
Some rights reserved