Prose & Poetry

The longing moves outward through me from deep inside; it takes form. The Trinity Tree, he called it, named by the Christian mystic in the Rio Grande south valley: the ancient three-trunked Cottonwood in the sheltered courtyard behind his adobe contemplative center. It lost one of its three trunk-arms: the force of the storm had recently taken one. The meaning of its loss, the mystic pondered, a microcosmic reflection carrying a message for each of us to find about these globally troubled times.
 
In ...

My haste takes me away from what surrounds me. The tree that needs trimming brushes against and catches my hair as I pass under its branches—an unspoken reminder of what else needs attention in this explosion of greenery and decay. I slide my garden gloves on and lift the shovel into the yellow, rusty wheelbarrow, fill it, then drop dark chunks of compost around the rosebush. Repeating this task, the shovel—with a mind of its own—slams against the wheelbarrow with a clang, spilling ...

We strolled along the ancient path that day. There was silence in the ruins, but also the call of birds. Small buttercup yellow flowers – their blossoms freshly opened—greeted us, as we admired them and gazed beyond to the remaining Roman walls of Ephesus, once a great city.
 
Mosaic panels still flowed artfully along the street front of that single remaining library wall. The city, once vibrant, was silent, unpeople for centuries.
 
I paused, caught between the past and this ...

I’m here—in an auditorium, a student listening to some avant-garde John Cage of a man onstage, banging on assorted bits and pieces to produce odd, startling musical sounds we would miss in the rush of a day. Maybe we’d be poorer without them.
 
And now he’s plucking strings wired up to a living cactus. The resulting sounds are high-pitched, sharp, breaking the silence so we lean in, intrigued by this cactus-noise, wondering what the sounds might mean.
 
And ...

 
 
I sat in the front, paddling the canoe through the delicate riffles on the Macal River. My boyfriend sat behind me--the rudder--steering us along. Vibrant birds chirped in the jungle canopy as we steered into a beach along a quiet eddy, filled with the carefree grace of buttery-yellow water lilies. We left the canoe there.
 
And then onward we went, the next morning, like the little pilgrims of ruins, foliage, and grace that we were.
 
I stood in the cobbled street that early ...

 
 
The light box is a friend this far north in autumn and winter, and even shockingly into spring, and if I’m honest, once, up to the edges of summer.
 
Its brightness vanquishes blackness and shadow, lights me up in a neon-sign-above-the-highway kind of way, even though birds chirp outside the window, and a light-gray glow of dawn is lifting the edges of horizon as if to say, here—come outside!
 
Maybe the bright fresh twists of air carrying their stories of the ...

 
The stench of acrid smoke rises and spreads.
 
Men cloaked in masks, ski hats, gloves and guns, heat of their anger a contrast to cold whiteness of snow, fog of breath, snap and clatter, pushing and shoving, the caw and screech of madmen.
 
My heart startles—a legal observer for years—I see the one filming who was pushed by madmen and fell as I might have in those years before knees ached and stamina failed, and yet one man rose to help her. It could’ve been me ...