Adam Mackie Colorado State University Writing Project Summer Institute Plus 2014 adampmackie@gmail.com
pedaling “…we’re out there somewhere between the known and the unknown, trying to reel in both for a closer look…” -anne lamott With the push of a smile, pedaling: I’m afraid of the alternative, the tension between what has already happened, and what is to come: closer, closer. The sunlight glistening off the river is gorgeous, as I turn the corner under the bridge. There’s a runner adjusting her headphones. I slow down for a dog. A woman’s smiling eyes smile. I smile back. I think about smiles. Smiles filling me up with hope, with life. The mystery in a smile, and the pain in a smile withheld. Riding my bike as a child, for hours, pedaling: Arriving at the creek, always the creek - an open area between houses – I’m safe.
there they were …spectacularly bizarre, echoing a lie, corrupt, sick tactics… …out of the light, into the darkness, the starkness of the night air startled them. There they were. In a wilderness of the land they knew so well. There they were, scared, unsure; they didn’t know which way to go. They just had to keep moving. They couldn’t turn back. Although they were no longer being watched, they thought they were watched. They walked… …the narrow dark path without any hope of light, darkness to darkness…
photographs The Spider-Man cake, the Mop-top hair cut, the three candles, me,
the fall off the porch, the lies that we tell, the hospital, pain,
the boat in the yard, the anchor on the floor, the fall stitches
the train, and the country, the change and the money, currency I can’t touch, scars.
the bang It only took one shot to do the trick, one pinky-sized shot from the sacred case, the bang echoed all through the neighborhood; people in the street looked up for thunder, his glasses fell to the ground and shattered, the hubcaps never fully stopped spinning, semi-automatic mouths kept sounding, popping off rounds before the young and unarmed, day after day, the same lines repeated, aiming to protect God-given freedoms crafted by chilly hands made out to steal an entire arsenal of un-breathed breaths discharged in a life after this one.
dragonfly It’s easy to forget. Yet, I encounter many reminders. I notice a dragonfly on the screen, I stare, iridescence.
something about the Way, the Word rests, the Word rolls off the tongue, rests on my ear.
“Put on your shoes.”
It feels good to hear, and say.
I look past the dragonfly. The light, the light falls
Out the front door, dragonfly still there, motionless,
on the floor, there, my red boots, one on its side, my red boots,
frozen on a sunny day, the dragonfly floats, the sunshine, I pick up a stick.
“I will.”
Okay. Left boot on right foot, right boot on left foot, “I’m a cowboy.”
I’ll swing with decapitating force. The resistance of air and sunlight; I’m walking. I’ll remember this.
“Head out to the car, love.”
Soon, I’ll be older. I’ll look back at myself. I’ll wonder. Who might I have been?
Something is strange
I’ll remember, myself, different.
a tree like an apocalyptic cloud In the beginning, the end is nearing, the end is on its way to beginning a tree like an apocalyptic cloud darkening the wilderness’ horizon of a world that was, a world that came before, a world we continue calling the case, a best of all possible worlds, withering, a world folding in on itself when the end comes, no one sees it coming, everything is over, and all vanishes. After all becomes new, a child looks back through the sky, where she sees a reflection of a world that is, and the world that is, is seeing a world, there to come in the end, beginnings show their face peeking around a nearby corner, cast out across an endless landscape to another reveling generation’s birth. It’s the destruction, not the death, entering into the endless pain, leading to a final demise, repeating the same cycle endlessly in a world, born in a minute, beginning, an eventual ending.
salvo Save yourselves. How can we go on? It’s over. You win. It’s over. Surrender conquers the conquest, ends it. An invention in silence, a de-centralizing hope.
pure profit One word spoken from the heart so truly: otherworldly and of this one's majesty: the sky is not inside, the sun can't choose to hide.
a prayer Prayer falls from my lips, at the end of a season, the bench hasn’t moved. I see the bench from the very first day, there, where I once played, where some other dragonfly flies. The morning is the same, the air, the grass, the rain. I wonder. “Oh, God, will you please show me the truth,” I pray as I do. The morning shifts, & I slightly sift: The bouncing & fresh blades, & the light between toes, together are green.