My soul's prose, traversing linguistic landscapes.

the courage to begin… again

I forgot how little you can control the Story. You can control what you read, who you try to imitate, you can choose your subject—but you cannot control the Story as it emerges into itself.

I forgot that uncanny feeling. The Story will take you unaware, it will manifest itself in the margins and then crop out the body of the text; it will eat into your pages and lead you further and further away from the initial intent, from the Vision.

But the Vision, Annie Dillard says, must be gouged out, after all. It’s only purpose, however much you loved it and however central it seemed, was only to coax your towards writing again, only to give you the courage to begin.

{h}

For you, today.

At the end of February finding myself in a field,
I saw them there, across the way at the edge of the forest,
those wild turkeys shining in the noonday sun,
black and bulbous like cannonballs.

At first I thought they were a mirage -
the wind was so strong that day it hurt my eyes to look -
but they looked pleased and proud.

And then I noticed the robins, not far away,
hopping across the turf as robins do,
stopping at times, standing at attention and surveying the field before them,
only to continue their previous practice
and their matter-of-fact searching for worms.

The leaves and the trees and the wind thrust themselves at my senses,
rousing themselves cacophonously behind me,
like the child who is no longer the youngest in the family,
wanting so badly to be be noticed in the old family videos,
coming from off the screen and forcing her face in the camera lens,
when her parents are trying to film her baby sister -
received with a sigh and a modicum of irritation,
but with a laugh and surely not unwelcome.

I scuffed my feet and looked down at the sandals I hadn’t worn since
September, at the cracked and worn leather,
and at the young and earnest blades of grass,
swaying and crashing in the wind like waves on a beach,
and at my white, white feet.

And i smiled, realizing that i hadn’t been the only one that had come
to the field that day,
looking for spring.

[c]

When a poem finally comes

I know there must have been a reason for all those damn mornings blinking in the light and trying to contemplate existence before breakfast (holding a pen over the blank page, wordless to tears, hearing too much or too little and gathering nothing to say).

Rosie-the-bulldog poses outside the café window, unchained and waiting for her master; Korean War Veterans sit at tables with girls of eighty and flirt the same way they must have when they were all in their twenties, over coffee; I try to write, pretend to read, and instead send you secret pictures of Rosie.

And when the poem comes I forget it all.

I feel like a bulb has burst in my brain (like Katie’s paper whites on the windowsill, sitting in water for so many months until at last, a shoot of green, a bud, a blossom within two days).

There is a frantic flowering, too, in my heart (I must not forget that I can only write when I have been praying).

[h]

Swimming Surf Drive

In the morning the sea is nearly white
swallowed by sky
interrupted by the vineyard

I swim propelled by gasps and exhalations
my limbs tighten with cold
fighting seaweed with my feet
blinking against salt

Right elbows bend towards the line, imperceptible
on which whole ships teeter and disappear

Reaching forward to pull myself across the horizon
gathering fistfuls of day, hand over hand
with the cormorants watching

[h]