shrine

I made it to this café, to sit in front of this computer with a beer (although not the most tasty one) after hunting down my son at Yosemite National Park with the expert assistance of super-sleuth Levinski. Yes, my only, magical son, who has dreams swirling about him and histories of grandfathers and mothers who have told me in my own dreams that he will be special, that he IS special and nothing should surprise me. But it does—and infuriates me.

I have made the commitment to do this—I have made a crazy airline reservation and ungodly travel itinerary to fly to Iowa to take a workshop on writing about Place. It’s funny because Place for me is Many Places, but not here—not Austin. It is the cold biting wind of the farm in Dimmitt, or the arroyos and cicada sounds of Palo Duro Canyon—but it is as if this town is sterile for me, except of course for The Springs.

I remember writing a poem (now long burned in the fire) about swimming, about life below the surface of the water. That is an experience almost holy.  Which reminds me of another poem – long ago when Eliza was tiny, about lying beneath the Cottonwoods at Deep Eddy. The orgasmic Cottonwood. Gasp.

I guess I am wrong then. There is magic here. Here be dragons, and magic and grottos with random offerings and burning red dragonflies, and maidenhair fern.

If I were to do this right this would be a weaving, woof and weave, story and naturalism. The shift in my life, the “natural transition” as the Black Cohosh bottle calls it, and the loss of self somehow dovetailing into the life-cycle of the dragonfly, all told in books, not the internet. This will be my challenge.  Or maybe I don’t even know. I feel the urge to explore, to travel, to question and research and watch light shifting over a room, to see what is not being seen. I guess then I would like to be the see-er, the one who wonders what the burning red dragonfly notices about a woman standing by a grotto before a random collection of offerings at the statue of St. Francis and why she doesn’t want to move as long as it holds still, apprehending.

shadow

It is the time of year when the sun loses its crisp starch on things which draw themselves out far from their seat on the earth, leaning at an awkward angle toward evening. It is a time when you might see a woman walking alone along a cold trail, shrouded in the shadows of barren trees. The bridge casts a dark stain across the water and a grey heron calmly glides overhead, its ghostlike other skimming the ground.

There is an emptiness to winter, as if all the sand of time had drained away, and the glass jar aches to break, as if breaking might lead to relief at the end of a year painfully distended with days. A woman walking on a cold trail is an empty hour glass aching to break, a fleeting shadow, a ghost.

The sun illuminates the water and in the glow the fish and turtles appear. There is nothing more than this but a child sleeping in a warm bed on a cold night, or the vastness of an early morning solitude, or the shattering glass of an abrupt freedom that calls a woman to walk alone in winter on a trail filled with shadows.

burning

Winter came and went, and before long I was nestled in a tiny cabin in the piny woods 13 miles outside of Bastrop, Texas. There was considerable downsizing involved--going from a 3-bedroom house in Austin to a 400 square foot cabin required selectivity. Among the first things to be abandoned were plastics. Anything plastic: tupperware, kitchen utensils, toys. It all went to a good home somewhere in Austin, while we rebuilt a tiny life in the woods where room could only be spared for natural materials, heirlooms, ceramics,glass, and hand-crafted furniture. This is what life was like: I (or my daughter and I) would arrive home before dusk, make dinner, then sit on the porch until night, watching first the pileated woodpeckers and finches at the bird feeder, the lizards and possums and endangered toads who (finally) had discovered our little pond. Later the tall pines would grow dark, and the owls would begin to call to one another far and near. I imagine the life of a river stone, tumbling downstream toward it knows not where. Maybe this is the best way to describe how it has been since the fire. The fire took everything, left nothing but ash, and sifting through that ash for remnants of who I might have been did not help recreate that being, not yet anyway. Still tumbling. But I have an unusual, lingering fascination with fire. I watch the heat rise and wonder: Was that what it was like? Did it hiss, was it fast? How long did my animals suffer? Tonight as I watch the dying embers of the chiminea, I am alone, and I am thinking of books lost: Annie Dillard, Adrianne Rich, and I think of this fragment of Song:

If I'm lonely it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore in the last red light of the year that knows what it is, that knows it's neither ice nor mud nor winter light but wood, with a gift for burning.

okra

returning home on Christmas day, it is cold and tonight it will freeze. The garden is barren except for the okra that juts up like punji sticks, leafless and yet continuing to produce, miraculously, okra, inedible and alien in shape.

this day extraordinary blossoms emerge. overnight a hard freeze, and I wake to check on them. they are vibrant in the morning sun bathing fragile petals in warmth. tonight another, harder, freeze. I am not sure they will make it, these hot summer plants that delight me with their insistence upon bringing forth beauty into the gray cold day.

present

Leavenworth, WA Summer 2010

My God, I look at the creek…If I seek the senses and skill of children, the information of a thousand books, the innocence of puppies, even the insights of my own city past, I do so only, solely, and entirely that I might look well at the creek…
Here is the word from a subatomic physicist: “Everything that has already happened is particles, everything in the future is waves.” Let me twist his meaning. Here it comes. The particles are broken; the waves are translucent, laving, roiling with beauty like sharks. The present is the wave that explodes over my head, flinging the air with particles at the height of its breathless unroll; it is the live water and the light that bears from undisclosed sources the freshest news, renewed and renewing, world without end.
-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, pp. 102-3

Escape

It often feels best to lay low, inconspicuous, instead of waving your spirit around from high places like a lightning rod."
--Annie Dillard

ghost limbs

Tonight I am thinking of Sudek and the war, his desperate searching for the limb that he lost in the war, furious at this war and that war and the wars we wage among ourselves, and the fear that war is as much who we are as love, and a part of me nods and knows that is true and I am not afraid but just resigned to the dark side of life that takes away what you most love when you least expect it, and you are looking for that thing the rest of your life, like some condemnation to hell, while others shop in malls or online and watch the fashionable TV shows, you reside in the black shadows of a pain so exquisite you would release yourself from it, but cannot because what you love might be out there, might be found.

The deep, necessary excavation begins. Last weekend or the week before I was listening to Selected Shorts on NPR, and transfixed by a story by T. Coraghessan Boyle about a man delivering a kidney for a transplant. He is, like all of us, caught in the immediacy of the everyday, of the things that we think of moment by moment of our urban lives as important. He is furious and frustrated as traffic impedes his delivery due to a mudslide at the nearby town of La Conchita.

A young woman frantically accosts him, begging for his help. Her child and husband are buried in the mud beneath the house while she had gone out only for a few minutes. Begrudgingly he abandons the everyday world of the traffic jam and follows her to the mess, where he hurls himself into digging, becoming the digging itself, excavating for he knows not what or why, but to uncover something that suddenly takes on more importance than even the awaiting recipient of the kidney still in the trunk of his car.

Maybe it is as much the abandoning as the digging. As we commit to the excavation, so maybe we abandon those things that no longer matter.

I had to search. Far outside the city, toward dawn, in the fields bathed by the morning dew, I finally found the place. But my arm wasn’t there—only the poor peasant farmhouse was still standing in its place. They had brought me into it that day I was shot in the right arm. They could never put it together again…
--Josef Sudek