Gather. Discover. Cultivate.
Eyes like a growling. Eyes like a treasure box. Storefront reflection, candid photograph, inverted glint on spectacle glass.
Eyes tethering me to corporeality.
They write their stories on my body. Make their confessions on my body. Cast the runes and decode the signs and plan their fortune on my body. Ink the map of their nightmares on my body. X the spot of their rescue on my body.
Petals from nameless tress, blossoms pink as sisters
edge sidewalk, gutters, stairs
drawing a perfect pillowed frame around everything that separates us.
With a form to cement the end
of a project that’s kept her here eight years,
she stands at the threshold
of my office. Her offering of gratitude
a satchel of lotions and oils, heavy with the perfume of peach flowers.
The girl in me feels the kiss of a sundress on her calves. Remember
grass? Body paint, sun-streaked boys,
pennants stained with soot and crushed blackberries,
gymnastic arcing bonfires,
bare arms in pas de deux with dusk.
Continue reading “Office Hours”
Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
– William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act ii, Scene 1
In case of paralysis, break glass. Out there
is here. Stairs, a whining thud, fat-bellied
cicada trapped in a breezeway
flings itself from wall to wall
until it surrenders
to defeat, so much like gravity.
Even with its trident of five eyes,
it is blind to the way through.
Corridor becomes vault. Had it been born
a bluebottle butterfly, it might stand a better chance,
its photoreceptors detecting
a million colors
more than those five eyes,
and far beyond what our feeble pair perceive
(and so believe). We are as wary of spectrometers
and their evidence of hidden hues
as we are of quantum wavefunction
and infrared snapshots of the Kuiper belt. Continue reading “Side Way”
You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, “far removed from the seats of strife,” as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge.
– Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods
With a little vacation away from work and my kiddo off canoeing at day camp, it’s time for a fix of woods. I pull up Hiking Upward to find something near enough to hit in a few hours but far enough for solitude.
This is the goal: solitude. And its accompanying quiet.
Humans are social creatures, sure, and we need to be in proximity to people as much for a sense of connection as for all the stuff — the supermarket and hospital, the auto mechanic and school. To survive, we need to be in community. Even so, too much proximity to too many others can take its toll. The buzz of engines and clang of machines, the soundtrack of urban and suburban life, can jam the signals. When I start to notice myself too focused on the clock and task list, too alert, too aware of every demand and every passing vehicle, I know it’s time to seek out a forest. Continue reading “Think Global, Hike Local”
Deadheading flowers will encourage more blooms on flowering plants. The normal goal of a plant is to flower, set seeds and die. Since we want them to continue to set flowers. . . we want to discourage flowers from setting seed. Deadheading the flower as it expires will redirect the plants energy from setting seed to creating more blooms. Additionally, keeping your plants free of dying material will discourage disease and allow more parts of your plant to receive sunlight.
From Cedar Circle Farm organic farmstand and education center
Someday I will live where I can garden naked. For now I make do with stepping out onto the balcony at daybreak, damp from a shower and dressed in enough to mask my skin’s craving.
July’s rain is nothing to its glare. A geranium in its pink pot drinks up half the jug without draining a drop. Everyone is thirsty.
A spider bobs on filament above a mess of thyme. Every time my clumsy elbows tear loose her spun walls, she rebuilds. I take care to duck under her strands but she knows better than to trust me. She skitters to the safety of the railing, her back an arrow of malachite flashing through a mica shield.
The thyme has tangled itself into the rosemary. Both started from seed two years ago. Now they are a wild fury. Winter buried their leggy stems, spring drowned them in pools of choked mud, and now summer burns them raw. As determined as their spider neighbor, they go on. New strands unfurl sometime in the night. When sun steams open the sky, tiny leaves press towards light. They grow even when the only sustenance is a stolen sip from morning’s turgid heat. Even left forgotten in the corner, they climb out of their barren beds and peel open their seams to free a thin, bristling marrow.
The marigolds and petunias perched up in boxes have curled in and darkened. I deadhead the withered, closing my fingertips gently around each base and letting the dry tissue fall free. It is more of a coax than a tug. Picking blackberries requires the same light touch. The ripe ones slip loose. Any that resist are left to darken their bite to sugar.
Ample rain and sun have kept these blossoms in a state of perpetual return. They begin even as they end. The petunias are tricky this way. Bud or compost? At a glance, it’s hard to know which are closed for good and which are waiting to open. The only way to tell is with a tiny stroke, just enough for the purple fullness to lay its pulse against the skin. The gesture is almost imperceptible. Does it fold itself over and surrender to its end? Or does it flex and hold inside its cocoon of flesh? Touch has no influence on the dormant thing, only on me. Its signal sounds through cell, through our common organelles, that it is bud and not corpse. I let go and step back. Somewhere deep in its furred sepal it clings to the threads of its root, churning sustenance into the shape of itself, murmuring, here, I am here, don’t rush me, I’ll know when it’s time to wake up.
Image: “Earth Goddess” from a 2013 exhibition at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens by Mosaïcultures Internationales de Montréal
The trees are stage set,
a Las Vegas cabaret
on this suburban strip.
Lightning bugs in their drunken throb
dip and tumble
loose as the purple rope
of night falls
open. They couldn’t care less
who lurks here gaping
at their naked hunger.
Oblivious to the shape of you
emptying out of me,
they fill it the way they do
every hollow place, the way light
always does
but for just that blink
no matter how long we want it
bright and no matter how tight
we seal the lid. It goes out
again, a strobe
pulse, a chemical
flash burning to photon
guttering to black
before we can pin it in place
on this map of shadows.
Somehow the flicker
is enough, more
than enough, each firefly’s rutting
insistence a fizz that tickles full
the belly like sky
even with all that air
between each burst of light.
Image: Wolfepaw, “Pregnant Lightning Bug” at Deviant Art
2 hawks burst from the upper branches
1 doe steps, pauses, steps again into the brush
1 neon-green bug skitters under the cover of a fallen leaf
On its back, 1 tiny frog pinwheels its legs until I toe it upright and it springs into the weeds
3 patches of vines curl around their stash of not-yet-ripe raspberries
5 fingers of thorns twist across the frothy pink blush of not-yet-ripe blackberries
1 pond plucks and echoes with the calls of rubber-band frogs
2 tractors packed with children and parents wave and rumble and sway and wave some more
12 rows of new corn cascade up and out, as high as a goat’s belly
1 creek warbles along its stone bank, becomes another as it bends into shadow, another as it reappears in a cut of morning light
100 blades of grass tickle four bare calves
1 lone cow glances up and continues to chew, 1 ear flicking at a half dozen flies
1 roller truck with 2 steel wheels makes 6, 7, 8 passes over the gravel lot pressing its noise over every other word
3 children sit in 3 patches of shade eating 3 mounds of shaved ice in 3 meting stripes of flavor
4 children in helmets lead 4 stoic horses into a barn
8 children with bare heads ride 8 plastic horses in lazy circles
2 women step between damp sponges of earth into the cascading chiaroscuro of leaf and web and wing
Image: Walt Curlee, “Appalachian Blackberry Patch Farm” from Walt Curlee Art
We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to loosen and untie.
– Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table
The sun rides in on the back of a fierce wind. Even though the equinox is just days from now, this taste of spring will slip away again tomorrow. Thank goodness. Winter is much safer.
The inevitability of change is worrisome. Buds unfurl and something in us pushes open. That something undoubtedly lacks the social grace to wait for an invitation. Who knows what will shatter? What will bruise? All of this is in the service of “growth.” What seems so lovely when talking garden metaphors is brutal when ripping old scar tissue to realign poorly set bones. It’s all a matter of location and scope, and so much is out of our hands.
I step out onto the scoured mud of the battlefield. The gusts whip through my hair. They bend the dog’s leash into a bow that moans like a cello string. I did not expect this violence in the air. We walk anyway, all 5 1/2 miles of swamp and field, in the last of winter’s glare. The dog leaps after grasshoppers, burying her nose in crackling grass.
With every step into relentless headwinds, I make my plans, rehearse my lines, catalog the tasks undone. Each thought is a scrap of debris stuck to the walls of my skull. Eventually, I remember to let the rushing air scrub the hull clean. I have to remember this over and over again.
The dog trots ahead, snuffles in damp leaves, falls back, prances up onto a berm. With one a paw raised, she surveys the thrashing field, alert for predator or prey in the brush. Down in the low wet, peepers sing and sing.
The sun creeps across the celestial equator. Under the vast and rippled blue, I walk blind into the next churning eddy. My skin thrills at the prying insistence of those gusts. Light snakes in under collar, hairline, wrist.
I am not ready for what’s coming.
I stride towards it anyway.
I gulp it down.
I howl back in its face.
With two plastic bags for gloves, you make another grab for the beast. She is not even halfway across the blacktop. Cars roar past seeking the good parking spots.
The thing hops like a frog but has bone-snapping jaws. She is bigger than a beach ball and twice as slippery. Who knew such creatures still inhabited this place?
She snarls and flaps her leathery mitts before twisting airborne out of your reach. The rain sheets down in the flash of your hazard lights. Her fury has backed her now to the curb — the wrong direction entirely. You go in again. Again.
You stopped for this. Without a poncho or a plan, you planted yourself between this creature and her ruin. Turtles are supposed to take the long view but this one must have decided to go rogue. Here you are pushing back that inevitable day when the only animals left are in pet stores and Aesop’s Fables, and your only reward is a thorough bruising
She was safe and you were gone before I had a chance to speak for her. For me too. It’s never enough but here it is: Thank you.
On the brink of leaving this home for the next (inshallah), and I still don’t know what I’m after. Place? Family? Community? Safety? The list is long and it changes with the breeze.
Ambiguous purpose calls for simple acts. I turn to my son and say, “Let’s go outside.”
These days, he joins me. This is new. It used to be a struggle, cajoling and begging before demanding or giving up. Now, he pounds down the stairs, “I’ll put her leash on! Here, let me!” He throws open the sliding glass door and calls her with his quasi wolf-whistles. She is suspicious of his intentions but ducks inside, unable to resist the word “walk.”
Flexi-leash in hand, Bug races down the driveway dragging the dog. She tosses a few desperate glances back at me but I’m no help to her now. Bug has finally learned to slow long enough to let her have a break for her bladder. It rarely lasts past the last drop so she forgoes all olfactory temptations gets down to business. They lope down the swath of grass between the fences. At the bottom where the year’s accumulated leaves lay in drifts, Bug snaps off her leash and she tears off into the trees. He squeals in delight and tramps after her, knee-deep in brambles.
The dog is the leader but doesn’t know it. Winding and snoofling through brown tangles, she takes us on a looping journey up and back down the hillside. Scattered clumps of daffodils poke their way up into patches of sun and purplish flowers unfurl from buried brush. Light threads its way down through dry spindles scratching the sky. I carry a plastic shopping bag and collect the crumpled cans and muck-filled Corona bottles that peek up through the leaves.
I follow Bug. Bug follows the dog. The dog follows her nose. We come upon a creek snaking out from under a neighbor’s chicken wire fence. Across the way is a clutch of bamboo as high as a rooftop. It bends against the breeze. The road beyond is near enough to keep me vigilant. Bug fords the brook with a single leap and slips up the muddy bank beyond. He picks his way through the deep green flutes, swishing them low. Feathered leaves stroke the water’s golden skin.
“I’m in the bamboo jungle! There is a tornado coming! Get out of the storm, Mommy!” I duck across and hide with him in the cool dark there. Cars roar just feet from our back and I holler the dog back from the roadside. She bounds into the creek, splashing us with wet silt.
When it is time to go, we gather leash and garbage and assorted leafy treasures. I urge. Bug dawdles. The dog drips. Eventually we shimmy into a dry creek-bed and follow the tracks of raccoons and deer back to the trail into our neighborhood. Just as we start up the hill, we turn and see a strange sight. In all our years of walking here, we have never come across such a thing.
A boy.
He is making his jerky way over the buried roots up to a log that bridges the dry trench. His black hair and pale skin trace a ghostly curve over the hillside. He looks up and sees us. I wave. He pauses then waves back. Bug and dog and I are poised on the forest edge ready to go home.
“One second, Mom,” Bug says. And he is off. He plows straight through the weeds and pricker bushes and heads straight uphill. The boy leaps off the log, starts to climb, and then slows. Bug is talking to him. He turns and responds. In a blink, they are deep into it. By the time I have gotten the dog turned and have approached the pair, they are discussing the bamboo forest and the forts up on hilltop that some older kids built years ago. “We come in here all the time,” the boy says.
“So do I!” Bug cries.
They talk pets. Neighbors. Teachers. Movies. Books. The boy is into the Warriors series and Bug is reading JK Rowling. I hang back and marvel at their ease. They compare notes on the best scenes from the last Harry Potter movie. Bug seeks and seeks a common footing. The boy, a few years older, is happy to oblige. They giggle about an explosion at a quidditch match then giggle some more when the dog grunts and tries to lick the boy’s hand off.
The sun is sinking and it is past time for dinner. Bug manages to tear himself away. We plod back up the swath of grass. Bug watches the boy return to his own porch and join a group of children there. A grown man sees us and waves a big Hullo. I return the greeting.
“We come in here all the time,” the boy had said. We had never seen him, yet here he was. We have paid attention to this place for years without looking for anything. The dog’s nose has been a truer guide than our own intention. Only in today’s purposeless looking do we stumble upon what we didn’t know we’d been after: a person who shares our place and a similar way of wandering through it.
My son’s bold delight stuns me. Even with no idea what he will find, he bridges the distance to meet what glances against his sense of wonder. Call it innocence. Call it courage. Whatever it is, in our new home (inshallah), may that wide-open not-looking to guide us to what we seek.
Shannon E. Williams 