©
2023 by
Sandra Kleven & Mike Burwell, EditorsCover Photo Credit: Jan Tervonen, "Cattails" Table of Contents Photo Credit: Nard Claar, "Mist" Design and composition: Signe Nichols
ISBN: 9798371626813
Independently Published Published by Anchorage, Alaska www.cirquejournal.com
All future rights to material published in Cirque are retained by the individual authors and artists. cirquejournal@gmail.com
By shauNa PoTocky
Shauna Potocky’s debut book of poetry takes us from the edge of the Central Valley, California with its wildlife refuges and agricultural fields, through foothills and into the realm of summits within the Sierra Nevada, including colorful and scent-filled meanderings on the Eastside of this spectacular range. It is a journey of landscapes and time—cultural connections, histories, climbing and contemporary questions. The poet connects us to the unseen, to the tangible, to textures and tales, from the dusty past to today, and thoughtfully asks us how we will forge the future.
Shauna Potocky’s book calls us to join her travels through public lands that await us, know us and are part of us—trails, crevices, rivers, animals and mountain peaks. The fauna and the flora in each poem are a discovery, a relationship, a new life and an enlightenment. You will breathe deeply as you trek through her poems and drawings. You will become part of the earth’s true life, you will want to leave behind the manufactured freeze-dried urban-scapes. You will be at peace. Every poem is a new height, an unexpected vista, proof of her deep knowledge and love for the environment and its wiggly lives and grand miracles. The poems and drawings, the trails and compassion all lead us to a magnificent dawn indeed. This is a most necessary collection and a sure prize-winner.
Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States, EmeritusShauna Potocky has a deep love of high peaks, jagged ridgelines and ice. Her poetry reflects a remarkable connection to the natural world and her writings have appeared in a variety of publications and journals both at home and internationally. Her forthcoming book of poetry Sea Smoke, Spindrift and Other Spells is scheduled to be published by Cirque Press. Shauna Potocky is a poet and painter who lives in Seward, Alaska located within the traditional homelands of the Sugpiaq people.
Yosemite Dawning is an epic love poem for Yosemite National Park. These are not sentimental lines but rather a caretaker’s loving astonishment of Nature with one eye towards environmental despair and the other towards hope. The poet finds a legacy among the park’s jagged peaks: “Every route, they say, is a signature line.”
—Tawhida Tanya Evanson, author of Book of WingsMap and Interior Images by
by Penny Otwell
Published By:
January 2023
$18 on Amazon
When Joanne Townsend and I were introduced (by a poet, of course) over 45 years ago, we hit it off right away. After all, we had many things in common: a history with the Atlantic seaboard, raising sons, a reverence for history, flower gardening. But the most important thing we shared was a belief that poetry is a necessary component of civilization. Further, we weren’t kidding around: each of us was deeply committed to writing the best poetry she could. In particular, Joanne focused on helping the elderly struggling to express themselves. Her departure has left a big gap in my universe.
—Ann Chandonnet, author of Baby Abe: A Lullaby for Lincoln
Sandra Kleven
Michael Burwell Editors & Publishers
poems by JOANNE TOWNSEND
Former Alaska Poet Laureate, Joanne Townsend, had a naturalist’s eye and a poet’s ability to convey her emotions and love of nature. Her poems speak of pleasure as well as the sorrow of losing of her only son. When Joanne died, only a large unsorted pile of poems in hard copy was found. Her friends and colleagues in Las Cruces, New Mexico: Ellen Roberts Young, Christine Eber and Joseph Somoza, with assistance from Peter Goodman, F. Richard Thomas and Frank Varela composed this book. Joanne Townsend’s posthumous collection, Promise and Sadness , is a tribute to her life and legacy.
Transplanted is an honest, frank and unsentimental memoir about a life-threatening leukemia diagnosis and an against-all-odds recovery. Birgit Lennertz Sarrimanolis is a skilled writer. She packs the pages with the kind of medical and logistical details anyone dealing with cancer in Alaska will appreciate, and yet this is no “how to” manual. Her story is deeply personal—and that is why it moved my heart and gave me hope.
An exhilarating read, Transplanted is a braided story chronicling the author’s excruciating battle with cancer against the backdrop of Alaska’s far northern landscape, a place of wild contradictions and inclement weather. Engulfed in a wilderness of her own, made up of multiple hospitalizations and the weight of exhaustion and pain, the author takes refuge in the healing powers of the hills, trees, sky and trails she has so vividly come to love... The author’s eloquent language and crisp attentiveness to place, shine, both lyrically and poetically. As sure as permafrost resists the melt, she fights long and hard to regain her health, though her life will never be the same again. Quiet triumph can be found in the fog of loss, and this author artfully shows us how.
Monica Devine, Author of Water MaskBirgit Lennertz Sarrimanolis holds a BA in art history and German studies, an MA in art history, and a PhD in art education. Her work has appeared in Cirque Journal, Five on the Fifth, 49 Writers, Shark Reef, and Medicine and Meaning . She was a finalist in the 2020 Pacific Northwest Writers Association literary contest and won second place in the 2021 Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. She has lived in Indonesia, India, Chile, Argentina, Egypt, Germany, and Greece, but now calls Alaska home, where she writes overlooking the Tanana Valley. www.birgitsarrimanolis.com
M a r go Waring ’s poetry is t u n e d to the pitch and roll o f t h e seasons. Just as spring re t u rns cyclically to Southeast Al a ska ’s beaches, forest pat h s, a n d mountain peaks, yo ut h t o o ebbs and flows in the present t e n se, per m e a t i n g o ld age. In t h i s, these poems teach us to let m e m o ry carry us forward with the same agility that it carrie s u s back. I will listen to my stream, w r ites Waring. Hear it dissolve in the sea.
–Corinna Cook, author of LeavetakingsMargo Waring writes beautifully of place, time, memory, and aging. Her years of attention to the changing seasons and climate of southeast Alaska uncover, like March’s melting snows, her awareness of life’s gifts and the losses that come to us all.
–Nancy Lord, former Alaska writer laureate and author of Fishcamp, Beluga Days, and pH: A Novel
MARGO WARING grew up in working-class Brooklyn and began an academic life (New York University, University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin) of study and teaching. She relocated to Juneau, Alaska, in 1969, where she still lives with her husband, son, and several beloved dogs. Margo’s poetry has been published in Cirque, Tidal Echoes, Alaska Women Speak , electronic venues, and locally at Bus Omnibus and Writers Weir.
Rob Jacques’s poetry collection expands on the metaphysical themes of China’s great 11th Century poet, Su Tung-p’o, interpreting his thoughts on nature, life, love, and death for 21st Century America.
The ancient Chinese poets loved ambiguity, loved paradox, and would have loved the puzzling, reality-defying entanglements that frustrate and fascinate us today. They would have laughed at them, too, while exchanging good wine and poems with each other as they watched the moon rise and be reflected in the hundred rivers flowing through the thousand mountains surrounding them and all the ten thousand things.
“Rob Jacques hears thousand-year-old voices of Chinese poets and responds with new songs and harmonies. His works are beautiful testaments to poetic connection and the contemplation of space, body, and mind.”
— Deng Ming-Dao, author of365 Tao
Rob resides on a rural island in Washington State’s Puget Sound. His poetry has appeared in dozens of literary journals, including Atlanta Review, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, The Healing Muse, and American Literary Review.
Two collections of his poems have been published: War Poet (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017) and Adagio for Su Tung-p’o (Fernwood Press, 2019). A third collection, Dust and Dragons, will be published in late 2022.
Deeply moving, and deeply felt, On the Beach stands with the finest poetry and nature writing ever produced in the Treasure State.
–Brady Harrison, author of The Term Between: Stories
I wish this poet was sitting at my kitchen table, wise-cracking and spinning tales. His eyes and his heart are wide open. His intellect, both electric and electrifying, strikes lightning poem by poem. He’s humorous, humble, humane. At the height of his artistry, this poet winks and claims he’s “ever more certain of what I don’t know.”
–Lowell Jaeger, Montana Poet Laureate 2017-2019
Always in search of the solution to the mystery of himself and the relentlessly interesting cast of characters he tends to come across, Alan Weltzien throws his poems into the abyss and in so doing, staves off the inevitable long enough to make us ponder what we’re doing, wonder who we are, and why we do what we do.
– Aaron Parrett,
author of Maple & Lead: Stories
O. ALAN WELTZIEN, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Montana Western, retired in May 2020, closing out 40 years of full-time teaching. Weltzien has published ten books and four chapbooks, including The Norman Maclean Reader (University of Chicago Press, 2008); Savage West: The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage (University of Nevada Press); A Father and an Island (Lewis- Clark Press, 2008); and Exceptional Mountains: A Cultural History of the Pacific Northwest Volcanoes (University of Nebraska Press, 2016).
Sky Changes
On the Kuskokwim
a novel by Clifton Bates
In the course of a lifetime, so much has changed in rural Alaska. Time has eroded the past ways of living; leaving in its place, a complicated straddling of the old and new.
Bates Sandra Kleven Michael Burwell Editors & PublishersThe author takes us through the life and hard times of Kim-boy. From family loss to memories gained, Kimboy struggles to find his way and make sense of both time and place.
Samuel CrowI could very well have known Kimboy. I grew up in a town on the Kuskokwim at about the same timeperiod. I can attest that Sky Changes brings to the reader a sliver of the life among the Yup’ik during this time.
Dr. John WeiseSKY CHANGES On the Kuskokwim concerns the life of a riverine, Yup’ik Eskimo, growing up on the Kuskokwim River. This is the ninth largest river in the United States; a river most people, even many in Alaska, have never even heard about. It is somewhat of an idyllic account of Kim-boy’s life, but it includes harsh realities that are all too frequent occurrences for those living in this unfamiliar land.
Available on Amazon and at local venders. $16.95
David McElroy is a retired commercial pilot of small planes in the Arctic and a former smokejumper, fisherman, taxi driver, and English teacher. He is the author of four books of poetry, Making It Simple, Mark Making, Just Between Us, and Water the Rocks Make. He has been published in regional and national journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Cirque, Anteaus, Poetry Northwest, and Chicago Review. In 2016 he was the recipient of the Andy Hope award for poetry.
Alaska Press
The poems of Water the Rocks Make commit into words the turbulence of emotion and thought stirred up by life’s events: family trauma, psychiatric instability, the legal system, the death of a loved one, identity, cultural displacement, work, loss, creativity, and through everything, love.
In Anchorage, we are digging out from deep snow—30 inches in just a few days. The whole town has the vibe of a ski area. Snow like this muffles everything. Except my dog who must be heard. We Alaskans are still turning like dogs settling into the deep dark for long sleeps. But fingers tap keys, and the hours of light increase by minutes every day as we work to get this bright issue into print. Yes, there is a springtime. We have heard rumors of light and green.
Contests, We Have Contests— We have winners, too—so many winners! First, from the Order and Chaos contest: Many thanks to David McElroy who was our judge. This issue begins with the three top winners and the other selected poems. Pushcart: We picked six for our Pushcart Nominations. These are featured on another page along with this year’s Andy Hope winner, Mary Fogarty George for “Coastal Stories: A Cycle Written in Three Parts, Part One—Your Early Life” translated into Yugcetun (Yup'ik) by Julia Jimmie. Coming soon, a contest with Poems of Place, based on a deep belief that poems and other literature create the essence of a place. And we promise this. The subsequent contest will seek poems about puppies and other beloved animals. As a new dog owner, I have exposure now to the feelings of people about their pets—the loves, the kisses, the sad good-byes. Thanks, social media.
Soiree Summer—Last summer, Cirque’s associate editor, Cynthia Steele, and I toured the Pacific Northwest in August. This led to in-person contact with many of our contributors. A feature essay in this issue details our adventure.
Hitting Thirteen This Year—This is Cirque #25 and by that count we’ve been at this now for 12 ½ years. Coming of age, in a sense. We have thrived because of support from readers, writers, poets, photographers and other artists. This issue includes our second on-going feature on artists whose work has made the journal beautiful. Sheary Clough Suiter and Nard Claar have contributed to the aesthetic of most issues and it’s delightful to share more about them as interviewed by Cynthia Steele.
Out There in the Out There—Thank you for all you give us: writing, images, financial support. We are still largely run by volunteer energy. But the engine of support comes from “out there in the out there” to quote the title of Jerry McDonnell’s story collection (Cirque Press).
And when I look out there now, dark has settled over the deepest snow in years, six-foot icicles glimmer, and inside, the pup paces, sure there is something better for him beyond the door. This small husky is a guard dog. Not a cuddler. He prefers his perch by the window, keeping an eye out for all things sinister. He’s keeping us all safe. Happy New Year.
— Sandra L. Kleven, Publisher/Editor
With Michael Burwell and Cynthia Steele
Cirque: A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rims
Sandra Kleven and Mike Burwell, Editors Cynthia Steele, Associate Editor
Paul K. Haeder, Projects Editor
Signe Nichols, Designer
Published twice yearly near the Winter and Summer Solstice Anchorage, Alaska
Our mission: to build a literary community and memorialize writers, poets and artists of the region.
Volume 13 No. 1
Sandra Kleven Order, Chaos and/or What's Happening Now? 24
David McElroy Judging the Poetry Contest 25
Contest Winners 25-26
Contest Runners Up 27-34
Paul K. Haeder Bats: Conversations in a time of Plague. What's Love Got to do with it? 36
Sue Fagalde Lick Sharing This Patch of Earth 48
Wallace McDonald Windfall 50
Bill Sherwonit Remembering and Celebrating Gary Holthaus 58
R. Brett Stirling Two Swans, One Shot 61
Jean Anderson Greyhound Tales 66
Julian Appignani Young 71
Matthew Gigg Deadwork 73
Jesse Nee-Vogelman Uncle Earl 76
Mary Fogarty George Coastal Stories: A Cycle Written in Three Parts
Part One—Your Early Life 79
Part One Translation into Yugcetun (Yup'ik) 83
Ron McFarland Second Last Chances 86
Dave Rowan Idaho 91
Constance Bacchus the sweet blue sky has smudges forming up highway 2 & all eyes are on the hills they own 98
Tim Barnes Ancestor Salmon 99
Gabrielle Barnett Turnagain Ramble 99
Katie Bausler Freedom Flower 100
Christine Beck A Girl Walks Into a Bar 101
Kristina Boratino Selah 101
Nicholas Bradley The West 102
Jeffrey Brady Aubade Chilkoot 102
Thomas Brush Happy Hour at the Greenwood Car Show 103
Annis Cassells Not Invisible 104
Dale Champlin If I Were Sam Shepard 105
Susan Chase-Foster Mijas Above and Below 106
Michael Christenson Landscape Ablaze, with Nude 106
Nancy Christopherson What I Remember of That Brief Time 108
Mary Eliza Crane Gap of Dunloe 108
Nancy Deschu Seized 109
Peg Edera Stone Fruit Season 109
Gene Ervine Logging Suite 110
Leonora Rain-Lee Good Mahto 113
Nadine Fiedler Government Cove, Oregon 113
Karen Gookin In Winter 114
Scott Hanson Maggie and the Ocean 114
Marc Janssen Battery Russell 115
Rob Jacques Apologies for Sex in Old Age 116
Penny K Johnson To shatter one-on-top-the-other 116
Martha Kaplan Tracks Vein the Earth 117
Sarah Kersey Winter Eulogy 117
Nancy Knowles On Earth as It Is 118
Nathalie Kuroiwa-Lewis Relic 118
Eric le Fatte Boston Basin 119
Sherri Levine Last Year's Leaves 119
David McElroy Forced Landing 120
Thomas Mitchell The Silencing Properties of Rain 121
Rebecca Morse Where Rock Moves 122
Anne G Murphy Like Bones 122
David Oates Against the Tongue 123
Douglas Scott Oltrogge Language Therapy 123
Barbara Parchim shapeshifting 124
Bruce Parker Lost and Found 124
Shauna Potocky The Long Reach of Novarupta, Katmai 125
Timothy Pilgrim No time outs left 125
Diane Ray Stehekin 126
M. Ann Reed Abecedarian Song to Water 127
Ellen Reichman The Body 129
Katharine Salzmann Beatitudes From the Beginning of Time 130
Tom Sexton Water Street, Eastport 131
Kit Sibert under moonflowers 132
Craig Smith Garbage Day 132
Mary Lou Spartz Morning Fog 133
Cynthia Steele We were not exotic dancers 134
Mercury-Marvin Sunderland Your Face Latticed in Great Pine Trees 135
Gary Thomas Floating Dock 135
Lucy Tyrrell Night 136
Margo Waring Blessing This Southeast Alaska Land 136
Toby Widdicombe On Being English: Regina mortuus est. Vivat rex. 137
Richard Widerkehr As Linda And I Walk West In Late Afternoon 138
Robin Woolman Gown of Tiers 138
Cynthia Steele Artists of Cirque—Sheary Clough Suiter and Nard Claar 141
Paul K. Haeder A Review of Alan Weltzien's On the Beach: Poems 2016-2021 146
Kathleen Tarr An Interview with Alaskan Writer Marybeth Holleman 149
Paul K. Haeder Bones, Birth and Rebirth: Supplications in Emily Wall’s Poetic Journey 156
Cynthia Steele The August Cirque d' Soirées 162
David A. Goodrum
After AWP in Philadelphia last year, Cirque staff suggested, Patterns and/ or Chaos in Nature as the theme for Cirque’s first poetry contest. “What?” I implored. “Who could write a poem on that dense subject?” So we added the alternative, “What’s Happening Now.”
“Order, Patterns in Nature and Chaos," maybe even include chaos theory, and if you couldn’t come up with something on that subject, well, just write about anything.
More guidance was provided with these scientific clarifications: We can see that self-organization occurs in many physical, chemical, biological, robotic, and cognitive systems. Animal swarming, neural circuits, and black markets come to mind.
And if that’s not working for you, well, what’s happening, man?
We were not getting many entries, so at the end of August I wrote to the world in a widely cc’d email: You could win this. We’ve only got three entries. And we took off, ending with a respectable 50-something entries. About 20 of which are included in this section. The top winners, Jim Hanlen, Mary Odden and Emily Wall, pictured here will each receive $100. Thanks everyone for entering and attending the reading of the winners last fall.
A new contest has been set for Cirque #26. Poems about place. More on this soon.Jim Hanlen Mary Odden Emily Wall David McElroy
We were in the middle of clearing everything out of the house for the painters so at the last the floor was my desk and chair.
I read all of the poems several times, and I was glad that Sandy said I could pick three winners instead of just one and that I could pick several more for publication in this issue of Cirque. Thank you, Sandy, for your generosity of spirit to all of us inky wretches.
I apologize for whatever bias my selections or omissions may indicate, but I hope we all agree that writing, reading, and judging poetry is not akin to solving quadratic equations for a cranky teacher. It is not easy this thing we do, trying to make magic writing in the dark. Sometimes we do it better than other times, and so we keep writing hoping (metaphorically) to be struck by lightning.
At first I was struck at how grim most of the poems were. Not surprising, since we have been through recent dark times. (Since, in too many ways, we live in dark times.) There were many poems about death and the loss of loved ones. Often Alaskans wrote about rain; for west coasters, it was fire. Occasionally, there was a splash of humor—thank you, Jim. As I read and reread, I came to better appreciate how difficult it is to write about painful things without sentimentality that rings true and, yet, (oh my gosh) be fresh to the distant reader sitting somewhere on the floor. I feel admiration for all of you who faced the desolation of the blank page or screen and boldly began putting the words down, deleting some or all of them at times, and then putting down others, or the same ones in different arrangements. Again and again feeling your way along in the dark where our hands have important work to do—thank you Emily. And in this way we are singing, we are singing—thank you, Mary.
Thank you to everyone who submitted his or her poems. May the spark be with you.
The people who believe their dog will run up to them in heaven, well, it's not for everyone.
Even your mom won't open her arms to you, all the people you insulted standing beside her.
Your Irish countrymen would vote you out and off the island. My wife said what do you expect?
What faith? Born saved you renounced what everyone around you believes. So why
are you still here? Not even your brother and sister who came earlier won't hold your hand and walk you in.
It was a beautiful day. A front marched across the sky with nothing behind it or below it, just film and cawl over blue. My husband who does everything he does for me sat in a chair, his beautiful hands upon the arms and outside under their illusions I asked the thinning trees if they would be for me; I asked the hurt weather and the punched face of a homeless man I met at Walmart, its suppurating bruise blue as a poisonous plum if he could be for me, and a screaming baby dragged by its arm down aisles of soap and bread. I asked the mother, glowing like a tumor, if she would be for me, and sightless marchers radiant where they rub together or abrade against the guns of soldiers, marchers who all do everything they do for me, for something to carry: a smooth rock in my pocket, a sharp one in my shoe.
A bowl of warm milk made from wild grass. From Frog Hollow Farm: one silky rich peach. Garlic. Artichoke. One seductive olive. This is how much you should love your body.
From Frog Hollow Farm: one silky rich peach. You sit in the shade of an acacia, massage your own palms— yes, this is how much you should love your body. Make yourself a tender omelet: eggs, butter, chervil.
You sit in the shade of an acacia, massage your own palms: you smell garlic, artichoke. Seductive olives. Now, make yourself tenderness: with eggs, butter, chervil, with a bowl of warm milk, with these wild grasses.
And in the beginning there is a tiny living dot encircled by amniotic arms sent down a tube packed with food for the journey. A dot smaller than a comma the result of chromosome trading a white patch of life a whole new composition.
Then the shape-shifting begins: a row of nodules form the vertical line that is the foundation for all shapes;
this first line drawn on the viscous canvas, this primitive streak, begins by curling into itself;
a heart starts as a tube, swelling to its enormous task; appendages muster at the margins while the head gradually globalizes accentuated by two swellings that will become eyes;
and at last the caudal stump that marks the boundary between being and not being.
after great pain, a formal feeling comes —Emily Dickinson
In the quiet after disappointment fog settles over high peaks you wanted to see, salal and Oregon grape shine with their new rain, calm. Even the creek seems a distant thing down in its canyon.
Cleansing after anger, that the trail twisted into a maze, the weather worsened, you were too slow.
What follows fright, the gaping door of the old mine staring when you took the wrong spur.
At your age, the self no longer sobs until it’s spent. A facsimile.
You stop to gather salal berries, chew for the juice.
Hemlock and silver fir unwind the trail down. Silently, it seems. Without rancor, they release the oxygen you need.
The quiet that follows disappointment won’t rise again to talk.
You recognize what is— reading the leaves you know to unpuzzle the many greens. Too late in the season for blooms. Count the red berries— kinnikinic, rose hips, twisted stalk.
Match your steps to the earth underneath them, savor the fog-rain until you partner the hush outside.
Steve Dieffenbacher
In Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a cliff-side plowman is ignorant of the fatal splash, ships nestled in a bay edged with towering rocks. while here, leafless trees and quiet livestock quell all foreboding, a trailer with broken windows on one side, the field’s twin towers ordinary quivers of due decay as an airliner passes above a pale and distant building, perhaps a mill or dimming freak of light that might or might not be a target.
Nothing stops the dread of something about to happen— not the jet’s stilled, diagonal plunge, not the ragged foreground of early autumn or passive, grazing sheep and cows staring at the cameraman beside me. To the right in the pasture, beyond a fence, even the unfinished building, symbol of careful industry, is held in stasis under the plane whose bullet-shaped engines angle bluntly at the horizon to shatter the scene.
First there were those who no longer have names. Later, when they crossed the ocean, they found wealth buried in the land, and pretty soon after that, the wealth buried them. Time gathered on the rim of old glasses, once full. All that remained was in their hands. They tuned pianos, raised children, begged.
When I was born, I took the hands of my father and called them my own. I took the mouth of my mother and spoke. Like a map, I harbored the trails of generations; worn, weathered and carefully crafted to fit snug inside your wrinkled palm. I folded up tight as you walked the path, slouched in the folds and crevices of your skin, took in your scent, absorbed the trickles of sweat as the road turned rough.
You turn to me years later, looking for the way home. I turn to you; all that way back to you; unfolded. You point to my heart. I nod, searching then for that old place, that old nothing but
Forgiveness still hanging on to Time running away.
Kelly LenoxThe evening’s just cooling off when sudden sirens howl down the highway— someone’s Fourth of July eclipsed.
Slowly—crow by whitewater by wren— forest sounds return. Fir twigs jigsaw the sky as clouds cast a net to catch tonight’s buck moon.
Sparklers flicker by the Santiam River. Fountains brighten faces beside the cottage. Firecrackers echo upstream, and in the city marchers against police violence light bottle rockets, point lasers into eyes of cops who shoot rubber bullets, throw chemical grenades. With fire we claim our piebald freedoms.
Two months from now, fierce winds will snap poles whose sizzling wires ignite drought-crisped limbs. In moments, fire incinerates this swing, these trees, their birds. This town. Even a fire truck burns.
A hundred miles away, suburban air will coarsen, orange-brown. Sear eyes, lungs with the vapors of this cabin’s vinyl cushions, fiberglass shower, foam bed.
Tonight, clouds pushed aside, the moon rolls past the usual stars sprayed across the sky like stalled fireworks, and we sleep.
If it could wish you anything at all, It would be long life. You’re the one who wishes ill To it. Don’t bother. It never dies. It just goes out of date— News no longer new. Till then, It does what information does: surprise, As castles are surprised. It’s not a snake, Despite the name. It isn’t hungry For your blood. It loves You, in its way. You keep it young.
Mark Muroher mother kept a clean house before the cats took over now she comes here every day sifting the histories of other people searching the what was
finding feelings in teacups and treasure in cardboard boxes
the mangled shoe trees and wooden hangers
rust-blossomed spoons and bachelor skillets the minimal utensils required to put together a tiny kitchen
the old towels washed a thousand times dignity hangs on clean laundry
books rippled by warm fingertips waiting to share their dreams
battered lampshades
tools of lost function
plastic decoys, chipped Madonnas and collectable tins
retired galoshes and a hapless fedora the suits of dead men donations from out-of-state children those empty pockets and musty smiles and ties stained on sales calls to stores gone under
she stops to consider that flowery hippy dippy summer dress but flip flop weather is months away until then it’s just little spikes of hope on a time-frozen day tiny discoveries that make everything new again
here it is it costs 50 cents she buttons up the coat she got last week puts the thing in her pocket and goes out into the milky chill home to feed the cats
there is no loss only the tumor of memory keeping us connected to what’s gone looking into empty jars for what never goes away
write a poem paint a mountain and let it go to the garbage. can I? can you?
forget about creation let the moment go.
Let it go, my son sings. Let it go!
I sing too, the best refrain. we fling our arms in the air, release skyhigh. I don't care what they're going to say! the sparkly blue dress princess sings.
Let it go! to the garbage can! the recycling bin! a drawer! Let it go! no frame or matboard! not belonging somewhere to someone!
I wrote a poem about a gardener. Let it go! Is it finished? I ask.
If you think so, they say. Let it go! I do. not. a small poem, nice and that is all. Let it go!
do I get out more paper? Let it go! do I clean my brush and start again? this long walk, stepped on paper and canvas Let it go! fling them trail side, lighten the load, get to a going.
I tip the plastic box into one of the hollowed-out trunks, the ash mixing with loam and lichen, bits of bone like teeth chattering into the wood.
I put her inside the tree as my father once put me inside of her, she divined and divided my cells, grew me a tongue, a skull, two hands
with which I carry her now in weightless flecks of stone and cinder. After I came out of her, she held my naked body against hers,
she watched my grey eyes open and close, she lifted me up into the air to feel what it was like to hold a new life in her own two hands.
I wipe the sticky table with a gray-white rag, hawk-eye the place for jacked-up voices, guy who never smiles, pistol on the hip, the not-marriedto-each-other couple in the dark corner. Are you feeling it? This edgy world. The fuck it let’s live for the moment world .
And who can blame us? The news above the shuffleboard is on a constant loop of disaster: hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, corruption, mass shootings, extinctions, war—and no one with the balls to power it off.
So I make a new drink to usher in summer. I want three months of effervescence—a sparkling cocktail that goes down easy.
I mix Prosecco, elderflower liqueur, splash of club soda, drop in three ice cubes, a twist of orange peel. I list it on the booze-board as the summer special: St. Germaine Spritz.
I want to tip my glass to France, or Florida and those sunlit days of tolerable heat.
I want to toast a cool breeze from some jade-green ocean, half-empty bottle of bourbon slow-loping in my mouth, flicker of fly in the fruit-filled trees, feather of the great blue heron.
It was summer, early, or perhaps spring late; all time, and no time, hours or an eternity, time like torrents of snowmelt, roaring and whispering, both. The water carrying starlight down from the high peaks; time slow, like blossoms opening in their time, wild rose, daisy, lupin, paintbrush.
Our human time was not carnal, was incarnate, our intimacy like the spotted sandpipers’ tender probing among shining rocks at the river’s edge for nymphs and larvae, sustenance plucked from cold clear joy.
Our kindnesses showed a higher love as the blue heron paused on a dead branch of a snowing cottonwood tree, as our bodies rested on the bank below, as cedar waxwings danced from snag to sky, caught sparkling insects in the silent air’s sunlight above the singing rush of water that spilled toward its calmer home.
And a fritillary alit, sunlit, alight and spinning its dance on the yellow heart of a daisy for us… or not for us, just there: red, gold, orange, and silver afire, as wings opened and closed, not in sorrow, nor joy, not in acceptance or forgiveness or surrender or anything that calls for earthly tears, just there before us, below the peaks so high above, above the river sparkling past, day into night, as
wind stirred the trees above it, lifted our eyes beyond our eyes to the currents that move the stars.
Chimney leaning against the orange sky
Prom dress smudged across the concrete floor Fire-eaten shell of crib, the hollow ash of home These are songs bequeathed to the survivors
Untouched, I am given a different grief
The trees gone along the creek, the maples and the ash Cottonwoods, their leaves strewn black hearts Shuffled, reshuffled in the slow soot-dark eddies
This way was mine, these many years
From edge of my town to edge of next Place for warblers between the roads Last reach for salmon beyond the sea
This little forest will return, with care I will help in the replanting, but I know I am too old to stand in its shade again My walk, now, will be through the past
I have broken my mind the arm that writes now in a sling something leaked away onto the sidewalk the wind dropping humble blossoms from cherry trees while I walk home unprepared for rain startled by a flock of juncos shattering into flight at my approach.
I am stripped of pretty pretenses no pain exists from just so word constructions that have dammed up the voice of a child a submerged keening climbing through the trees that have begun to erupt and spread green against a sky that never was controllable.
Paul WinkelWe were Forever Young, our octet, a half century ago.
Spent our nights wandering Gaslight Square, drinking yards of beer at Cantina Chicka, listening to jazz and honky tonk at Frank Moskus’, sang Desolation Row as we passed alleys strewn with broken glass.
Spinning vinyl prayer wheels lifted supplications to our deities. We longed for nothing and were satisfied, joked and talked about the world outside.
But the world grew cold, scourges flayed us. Drugs, suicide, Vietnam, cancer, we fell, one by one.
Face to the wind, watch a setting sun, the dying of the light, the coming of the night.
Stairway to Little O'Malley Peak Cynthia Steele
Paul K. Haeder
The lie lulls or dreams, like the illusion. The truth is the only power, cheerful, inexhaustible. If we were able to live only of, and for truth: young and immortal energy in us. The man of truth does not age. A little more effort and he will not die.
— Albert CamusWe were up high in a cave, near the border of Laos. The one Vietnamese with us, a scientist, Viet, wondered what kind of crazy mad dogs and Englishmen we were.
He and I were the same age, 36, and most of the team members were in early 20’s, and one guy from Canada was 20.
Viet and I discussed his work on rural farming and the system of getting rice farmers to breed fish in the paddies, and to use fish to eat/take to market and utilizing fish poop to fertilize. Snails breed and live in abundance, too, for eating/market purposes. The water is actually cleaner this way for boiling consumption. Simple design, but lots of resistance and some hurdles to traverse. Even small twolight bulb output, low-flow power generators dropped in the water that slurries off through gravity: that’s another one of Viet’s passions.
Viet is one of hundreds of people I have come to love for their minds, souls and life’s passageways out of struggle and poverty (the war against Vietnam by France and USA, et al, for Viet and his family, tragedy piled onto tragedy), to a sense of purpose, a bit of calm. That calm is gained with intellectual fellowship.
I wonder about him, now, after 28 years have passed. His family, job, the state of Vietnam, the rapaciousness of capitalism conquering markets, tying up land, building exclusive resorts, and his own health with the additional pollutants in air, water, soil. The climate crisis. All of that, and then, of course, how’s he doing under this new plague, the other one, this bat plague and the attendant
plague of various forms of fascism and mental and physical lockdown?
I wonder as life and death moves like a circle of locusts through the land, inside cities, in rural places, within families. I can’t shake Ouroboros from my mind. Snake shaped as an eternal biological cycle of renewal or a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. The real snake I share the house with, ball python, leaves old skin sloughed off monthly, a transmigration of soul, his previous soul left for me to remark. Remade, in a sense, and the molt is the leftover negative of his (we call him Copernicus) life, monthly.
If only humans understood this transmigration. What a species we might become.
How can I touch the Ouroboros without thinking of a kind family man, Viet, who was not thrilled with my proclivity for finding real snakes in the hills and jungle. I did talk about the silver Ouroboros around my neck, the snake biting its own tail. I attempted to let him know that while it is a fertility symbol in some religions, with the tail of the snake a phallus and the mouth womb, that for me I hold it as circle of universal light, knowledge and rebirth, second birth, and death and struggle. Mine.
Circle, an encircling of my own beginning-middle-endbeginning.
I wonder about the symbol now, Ouroboros, in this propaganda operation lifting capitalists and technocrats above everyone… how out of synch are most scientists I know about, communicate with and read… being out of balance inside cages lined with hubris, well, that is the plague upon all of us. The battiness of our time. Shut-
down conversations. A place now where love is not a driver for our relations and relationships.
This is a plague of gigantic proportions, as scientists as mad in the head as Mengele dance with the devil, fill-in for Mother Nature, tinker with genes, extend and retract lifespans at the push of a gene editor, with contagions hacked and transmissibility amped up.
The reverberation echoes deep inside me since my life has been one of discovery and open dialogue, critical and systems thinking, research and discourse, mutual aid and writing.
So many days the past two years for me have displayed spiritual near dead-ends, where meaning is stripped like that molting snake’s skin from my own grounding, or lack of grounding. Conversations are clipped, and deep dives into logic and ethos, they are blips, like sand between dry fingers.
The work in Vietnam 28 years ago was all about embracing constructs way outside my own, and the discussions and deep excavation of those around me and myself were both beautiful and challenging, sometimes rough.
In Vietnam, on this biological survey, I was the lone American at 36, the same age as my old man who was shot (wounded badly) in Vietnam, farther south of where we were setting up a dark bird net to carry out a haphazard bat collecting sweep.
The dragon shaped smoke billowing in the village tethered me to other people, and with the British graduate students yammering about this or that Vietnamese fag (cigarette) and beer, I demanded a shift out of their meanderings. I wanted to leap into the darkness and float to the small earthen floor homes and sit and drink tea, gulp homemade whisky and watch the plastic figures on their tiny TVs while attempting to talk about their world, and mine.
The news, music and dramas were coming in from China broadcasters. It was surreal but familiar, rural, a place I had already been all my life.
Zither music ricocheted off near yelping dogs. The water buffalo pulled up air and mud with the sound of their reverse slurps conjoined like a dozen bowling balls smashing into a bog.
Time to think, time to contemplate. Again, the beauty is not always in the moment, but from a memory of a day before, maybe. The climb up was muddy, and everyone was wet. This was not a well-outfitted science team. Brits don’t always think of all the things to make it—roughing it—a little more bearable.
We dug our own latrine at base camp, cooked food on open fires, and there was one generator, and that was not for nighttime lighting. I crossed rivers (during the rainy season, so it was more like a wrestling match fully head in with leech-loving rapids) to resupply. The Russian motocross bikes we had bogged down and failed most of the time.
Now, the memories are raw, in the slipstream of poetic embrace, with some journalistic objectivity mixed in. At times, in the constant rain, isolated, in that jungle and in the primary forest, loneliness did mess with the mind.
Yet, there were always the Vietnamese and ethnic minority families we came across. And the deep recesses of limestone. Caves. The snakes, too, in trees, vipers and unmatched beautiful thin ones, as thin as flute reeds.
Caves of the mind and spirit, that’s an easy leap. Thinking of what we were doing as science and the fun of busting butt climbing through the underbrush, I knew that was a good thing, but the late night cave ceiling encounters and bats fluttering in and out, and the primitive villages down below (we hit five caves in five different places), and my own sense of mortality—the gut diseases, the shivers, the cuts and fungus between toes, and the wipeouts with the Minsk 250 cc motorbikes—this also shaped my stream of thought, the consciousness connected to these mates, and the idea of where I was.
Never another Vietnam. Those homeless guys I worked with back home. The military bases where I taught college classes. Guys like Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, and others I had run into back home as a journalist and literary hanger on, that too was evocative for me, in-country, on the edge of Laos. Real biodiversity work, but a haphazard way of shaping my feelings there.
I was the only American, and they came to know, not that kind of American. That was pointed out so many times. And the Vietnamese sought me out too, well, to embrace, arm wrestle, ask me what I thought of their country. My pretty nice diver’s watch they all touched, wanting to feel its weight.
“Is it real Rolex? You go under waves with it? Can we trade? Submariner, good shit!”
Amazing things were offered as trade—a huge chunk of jade bigger than a softball. A rare looking archeological carving of a turtle and tiger. A broken down 100 cc motorcycle. An M-16 rifle. Two book manuscripts that looked like they were from 1500, AD, Chinese or Korean. One gentleman offered to put me up for a year in his raised house on the edge of town. Just for the watch.
They all wanted to know what we were looking for in the caves. Again, ecology was not a word in the Vietnamese language, even with the scientists at the biological institute in Hanoi where we had gone before getting deep into primary forest.
I wrote many passages about what Vietnam is, what the war is, and what ecology might look like in a poor country, one where people were literally left starving to eat grass, bugs, and, bats.
This last cave went back pretty far, like an esophagus of our childhood’s worst nightmares. Monster chasing you into the night. Roaring and dark mouth, widening. Then, the sounds of bats way up, clinging before the appointed hour to break away and scurry into air for their eating hours, another evil memory soundtrack from movies. Rush hour out. Timed, this circadian urge, or the shape of sky with the sun over the horizon and filaments of photons hitting their eyes. Or electromagnetic fields emanating from heavens and bouncing into stones and valleys after the sun spills over into our night. Or the sounds of gnats and moths and dozens of other species turning sky into conveyor belts of feeding, breeding and flying toward light, or anything shiny or scaly.
The urge to leave and fly as mammals into the night, that is the wonder. The cycle of in and out, and then the hibernation, sometimes months at a time, depending on the bat species. Amazing species to learn from.
The corona virus blues, all that experimentation, all those samples collected. Specimens of viruses morphing from phase to serial phase. Labs, scientists, lights, hood ventilation, moon suits, all the research, and the nefarious ones, in spook-land, and the military, there, capturing data, unpublished reports and studies.
I had no thoughts of that stuff in 1994—pre-Covid SARSCoV2—C-19 blues. What three decades does to the shifting baselines, to the knowledge base, to the collective consciousness.
There are eight of us, and the seven of them smoke, with Viet only taking an offered rolled cigarette infrequently. We are not making fire, not making hot tea, not lighting the rocky floor with flames. Some have flashlights and some have head lamps.
Music below is clichéd ghostly. In the distance are the shapes of knobby up-thrust rock formations covered in matty jungle. Around us to the west us are hills, carpeted with picked-over jungle and then well-used paths leading to mountains, alpine, elfin and misty hidden cliffs.
The goal is to get bats going out (and then, later coming in), pull them gingerly out of the forgiving netting, measure them, weigh them, take notes, photograph
them, and then, let them go their merry ways out to the hunting grounds.
In the dark, essential, with focused beams of light on their, well, let’s call them faces only a mother bat would love. These are not the faces of those fruit bats (flying foxes) illustrating the book, Stellaluna which I read to my newborn child a year and a half after leaving Vietnam.
Echolocation. More than 1,400 species of bats around the world (we’re still discovering more). Most bats are endangered. Many bats are sick. Homes, caves, caverns, outcroppings and trees are contaminated with the whistling, chopping, sawing, bulldozing, burning, spraying, digging, razing, desiccating, polluting, damming efforts of man.
This is just one animal, one part of the biodiversity equation (oh, each bat species has its own niche, which is amazingly complex, cooperative, competitive, symbiotic, parallel with other species) but still illustrative of the never-ending story of Western scientists (white guys and gals, mostly) parachuting into someone else’s world and ramming through this or that study, this or that report, this or that deep analysis or any variety of scurrying bioblitz, transect of THEIR land, of THEIR people, of THEIR species, of THEIR habits.
I was loosely part of that parachuting into Vietnam, with wide open eyes, an open line of communication, and what I knew, more of less at the time, was all that love having everything to do with my own curiosity and haggard walkabout in life. Why I went to Vietnam—to help people back home exorcise their demons.
I also knew I was different, un-American, a product of that Vietnam War, and I was unabashedly anti-imperial, and that included being anti-Britain, in many forms, to go along with my anti-American (USA) frame of reference almost anywhere I went, reported on and taught at.
Then come to now, 2022, with Wuhan, World Military Games, DARPA, University of North Carolina, Anthony Fauci, EcoHealth Alliance, and other topics for which I have done deep dives into with hundreds of others into the sciences—that science, around viruses, and then, the darker side, bioweapons research around “those” viruses— facts, unresolved debates, all of that, not just locked up in my head, but swirling around like bats in, well, a cave, or
It began, or at least as we know it through the massive media system of command and control, with the end game selling us on a constant diet of fear: fear of not having enough, fear of not fitting in, fear of falling behind, fear of life, fear of death, fear of loneliness, fear of the unknown, fear of the known, fear of forgetting, fear of povertyeviction-foreclosure-bankruptcy-prison. The madmen of Madison Avenue intersecting with PT Barnum (that sucker born every nanosecond, now) and with Edward Bernays and the Chicago Boys and witch hunts, the Dulles Brothers and J. Edgar Hoover, and, well, so many tendrils to the root of evil for which this essay is not digging up.
Imagine a society brought up on duck and cover as a way to stave off nuclear annihilation. That science. That propaganda. That delusion.
That psychological fear of not being, or, of being this or that undesirable thing, for which has been preset, goes back hundreds of years, maybe more, but for us, now, 2022, this is the land of make-over after make-over; takeover after co-option; left-over after trickle-down, with the constant amnesia and marketing of lies, fabrications, half-truths and mythologies as the conduit for the fear of not having or fear of having. The process of studying this phenomenon, in anthropological terms, is agnotology which is using historical forensics to delve into the process of unknowing.
In this time of plague, corona plague, where oh where is the study of deliberate, culturally-induced ignorance or doubt? Throughout the land, throughout all those chambers of power, it seems, there is a hard and soft sell of a product, idea, concept, and much of this is through the constant publishing of inaccurate or misleading scientific studies. Propaganda as weapon, but also as teacher and marketer. Dangerous times. Mother and father, propagandists at birth.
Toward some ends, this agnotology illustrates a sort of paralysis, not just analysis paralysis, but this overlay in our culture of “more knowledge of a subject leaving us more uncertain—unknowing—than before.” It leaves many dry, confused, in a Stockholm Syndrome empty gut land of overeating, overspending, overdreaming.
The news broadcasts, already jimmy-rigged to confuse and colonize the average person, drew us in. It was lightning speed, the Wuhan lab, the plague, or in this case, a corona virus, setting us up with a novel awakening of the monsters and mobsters that are the characters of those many circles of hell Dante obsessed over.
For some, this was a military propaganda operation, and then others drew from history—a container ship full of papers, reports and books on the nefarious ways of the Western mind. We do not need to start with Josef Mengele, and we can go way back, seeing how Turtle Island, how all of the southern parts of America, was colonized using a sophisticated and effective contamination of not just the land and the spirit, but of the body.
It was religion ruled by the bank.
Before 2020, we had been looking into many plagues— bioweapons programs of the USA, in concert not just with the Department of Defense (offense) and DARPA, Fort Detrick, Plum Island, etc., but with the assistance of the web of scientists at private Tier One and state universities cooking up toxins, poisons, weapons of mass destruction. The same science that produces an X-Box is behind the illegal and murderous drone assassination program of Barak Obama, or the total awareness snooping programs and hacking which Edward Snowden uncovered.
The same marketing gurus and regulatory bodies that pumped out the many devilish heads of The Oxycontin Crisis are working their dark arts in the Corona Crisis. Except, now, since beginning in 2020, there are no real conversations, no critical debates about policies, about experimentation, about informed consent. We went from hating Pfizer and Johnson and Johnson, and Monsanto and Bayer et al., to, well, fill in the colonizing methodology now deployed. You can question “that” science, but not “this” science.
We are in a timeframe that leaves us on our own and then even though it is survival of the richest or healthiest, we have collectively been engineered to have a mob mentality on so many topics, tied to the drug companies, the government overreach, the cancel culture in academia, in the sciences and medicine.
Watching bats almost 30 years ago from a ledge overlooking a Vietnamese village, I am here now, in a
world that is, to use the pejorative, more than just batty. Or bats in the belfry.
Big-eared, Pearson’s horseshoe, round-leaf, Himalayan whisked, Chinese rufous, large myotis, all bats we identified, in their indignant struggle to get out of our nets and our gloved hands.
A rush, for sure, since my bat days started when I was seven, in a cabana on the Costa del Sol. I was enlisted to shoo away or capture a bat that had gotten into the little hideaway my family had rented for two weeks in Spain.
But really, bats and I started at age half a year. After my birth in California, my family took us to the Azores. Imagine that, the only mammal endemic to the islands is a bat—the Azores noctule (Nyctalus azoreum) found in the dry forests of the Azores. That was also in my dreams as a four-month-old and 4-year-old, all products of those shadows and darks shades the skies when we went out for evening walks, first me in a stroller and then pumping chubby legs to keep up with adults.
Always looking up. Avian and aerial lives of my dreams and thoughts. Even as a diver 16 years later, I’d go 90 feet down, and then, stop, looking up at life, at oceanic life with a sun filtering through. Inside the riot, part of the riot of marine life. Water is soul craft.
Bats’ destinations were always in my mind. Where do they come from? How do they hu nt at night? Where do they mate? What do they eat?
Batty conversations later in life were tied to the bats under Lake Austin, in Texas, and the big rush of bats at Carlsbad Caverns. Bats were always on my mind, I guess since I was a child on the Azores when an old skinny, dory-exhausted, bent-over fisherman whose name I have forgotten showed me and my sister that one bat species—later in my life filed away as, “Kingdom: Animalia; Phylum: Chordata; Class: Mammalia; Order: Chiroptera; Family: Vespertilionidae; Genus: Nyctalus.”
He had it in a huge off-green glass jar. I watched it flutter, trying to escape the prison and the photons.
Always watching the science journals for any new news on bats, that was me. In 2011, lo and behold, in that same
locale where I had been seven years earlier, three new bat species were “discovered” in Vietnam.
A small one, for sure, of the tube-nosed variety. Leave it up to the Hungarian scientist with the Natural History Museum to call it a tiny demon—“We chose the name Beelzebub to reflect the dark ‘diabolic’ coloration of the new species and its fierce protective behavior in the field,” said Gabor Csorba of the museum.
All the bats I held at bay had fierce dispositions. A given, really, since their modus operandi is to survive, and get out of the clutches of the evil demon, Homo sapiens. As I knew in 1994, bats represent a third of the known mammal species in South East Asia. As is true now, the correct number of bat species in the region may be twice the current count.
I must have held a hundred individual bats inside those caves.
Therein lays the problem of this conversation in a time of plague. Calling a spade a spade is one thing, but this naming of the “new” Vietnamese tropical bat, Murina beelzebub, displays both the fear in and the foolishness of the human species. What all those bats, civets, pangolins and myriad of other animals I interacted with in Indochina depend on is connected tropical forests for survival. The web of life is certainly not understood by most scientists, especially the virologists stuck in germ theory, stuck in a bio-safety level-four lab, with moon suits and all the equipment and sacrificial rodents and apes to play god with, or worse, to dance with the devil.
Bats are especially vulnerable due to ongoing deforestation in every region they’re found. We knew this before the French pulverized parts of Indochina, and we knew it during the American War on Vietnam, and I knew it in 1994. Today, we are more than in a time of plague— exploding myths, a propaganda exercise global and digital in scope.
I am thinking now, 2022, of Edward Curtain, a magnificent essayist, or shall I say, he turns the essay into an interlinking memoir of universal vigor. Words from him can for many be raptures enrapturing into philosophical depths, raptures of the mind, spirit and glory of finding love in all the right places. What’s love got to do with it is we have only ourselves to look to in the end for our own personal
answers:
The person with whom we are all most intimate is oneself. It’s just the way it is. I don’t mean that in some oracular Delphic ‘know thyself’ way, or in any deep psychoanalytical sense, but very simply. We have our own thoughts and feelings that come and go like breaths, most of which never get expressed in words. Together with our actions, including speech, they make up our lives. We try to anchor them with photos and memorabilia and lots of things, but time has no mercy; it sweeps us all away. Then our things remain for a while until they become a burden to those who remain, and then the things go. As the song reminds us, ‘We come and go like a ripple on a stream.’
Hell, who knows if this is accurate, attributed to Heraclitus, but for me it is apropos, confounding, too—No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.
I’ve used this and a dozen other quotes to ice break classes, to have fellow travelers (students) look at one epigram, deep dive into it, so they might find not only literal and denotative meanings, but so they can apply a sense of personal self and life passage to the quote.
Projection into the future, a new self, that self, hidden, but certainly trapped in our heads from the time of birth, and the birth of recognition, as butterflies alight on chubby baby legs on a beach, or through the shadows of dusk and the capes of wind where that Azores bat makes me, for the first time—me, my, his being, me, outside my “self” into the skies of another mammal…
We were ecologists, seeping into the mud, crossing leechinfested engorged rivers, jumping over cobras, dancing under the canopy as gibbons threw feces and branches at us. We were hunting for some personal connection to the diversity in the biodiversity game, hoping to unlock other forms of passion beside just knowing things in the scientific way.
We came to THEIR land to find OUR selves. That is what love is, really, a passion to unravel humanity’s connectivity, and to push away the fears that capitalism has feed us since
its lofty reckoning with people, land, hopes and dreams. Imagine, carving up South America: Portugal gets Brazil, and Spain gets the rest… Edicts from the Holy See. God, Country, Mother Be Damned! This is the deadly game of capitalism—there is no love in it, and the getting is the game. Accumulation, consumerism, all the throwaway in the waste stream is anti-love, and it all draws closer and closer each year into a self-hate, a sort of misanthropy against self, against humanity.
We are not rubbish, and we are not Soylent Green, yet from all that emanates out of the powers that be, from all the literature and video games and movies, that seems to be the thesis of the day—humanity is the disease, the cancer, so be done with it, and this way shall be our way, according to the folks at Davos and partners of the World Economic Forum and Aspen Institute, et al. They have the narratives all written, either in plain sight or under their secret plague blankets.
I write to stop the plague. I visit with people outside my frame to learn how to continue to love people.
I just talked to a radical thinker, a farmer, who decided to email me and arrange a day to drive out to the coast where I live and have a beer and talk. Great guy. He’s been an inventor, been a restaurant owner, and now he is working a farm, three acres.
He sought me out in an act of love. Love being that innate desire of wanting the human touch. His isolation from many friends and family—who have decided to cut ties because of his deep analysis of things during the lockdowns and mandates for this batty virus—propelled him to contact me vis-à-vis one of the radical sites where I have been publishing for 17 years.
Human and humane touch. And while I can be sort of an anomaly or freak in the natural/predisposed/ prepackaged order of things in this country, yes, and I am naturally bombastic, recalcitrant, a regular A-1 ODD (oppositional defiance disorder), the reciprocation was an act of love on my part. Jef was seeking more than validation, more than a safe harbor from which to discuss and stay attuned to what we both agree is one positive aspect of Homos sapiens— critical thinking. We were having a conversation—we covered a lot of ground, from the bioweapons programs, to permaculture, transition cities, the staged economy, great thinkers like Ed Curtain, and others. That is the act of
self-awareness and validation demonstrating humans can be cooperative, thinking, caring, and set in some ethos of mutual aid.
That is what those bat caves represent and symbolize for me. And a hundred other conversations, in other times of plague—the plagues centered around the oppression, the suppression, the depression, the inflammation, enslavement that this Un-United States of Amnesia under capitalism which has unleashed plague after plague through the powerbrokers and power hoarders of the world—trillionaire companies like BlackRock and Vanguard, as well as the billionaires and millionaires working their rackets. Murder Incorporated as a moniker for the USA is not my term. Far be it for me to steal so many prescient concepts of what this country is, has been, has become, is becoming and will be in 10 years. Try a century from now. Not even a ghost of ourselves will be in the air. The digital memory will be theirs, not ours. The Great Reset is upon us.
I am not sure how many reading this even know what the great reset is. So be it.
But Jef reached out, drove out from Albany, Oregon, and we broke bread (tortillas) and hoisted brew. One telling comment he made, for me as super emblematic of our times, and even for my own time working as an educator and social worker, is the desperation of youth: “My wife is an elementary teacher, and she says they are being trained on how to spot a suicidal youngster. What the fuck is going on? Elementary students over the past year have doubled and triple their suicide rates. Elementary kids. Overdosing on opioids. Goddamn this entire thing is crazy.”
Therein lays the critical thinking we traversed. The cause and the effect of those suicides, turning around to see now what the effects have turned into: new causes for ever more new effects.
Effect/cause/cause/effect. This is what is missing in deep dive discourses across the land.
But I go back to bats—Chiroptera. My Arizona days, after leaving the Azores and Paris and Germany (all those bats and gargoyle creatures throughout the Old World, I do recall). Running through the desert, into the mountains, I encountered riot after riot of animals—reptiles like Gila monsters, mammals like kit foxes, amazing arachnids like
battalions of tarantulas after a monsoon, and sci-fi bugs like Palos Verdes beetles. And, the bats. In caves, under ledges, in abandoned buildings, inside mine shafts, hanging from cottonwoods. Typically, it was the vampires and the freetails which entranced me, but I loved the the lesser longnosed bat (Leptonycteris curasoae yerbabuenae), and the Mexican long-tongued bat, Choeronycteris mexicana. So many encounters I’ve had with these mammals since they give birth and raise their young in southern Arizona from early spring through summer.
Just the list of the more than two dozen bat species in Arizona is remarkable, poetic:
Ghost-faced bat Mormoops meglophylla
California leaf-nosed bat Macrotus californicus
Mexican long-tongued bat Choeronycteris mexicana
Lesser long-nosed bat Leptonycteris curasoae
Yuma myotis Myotis yumanensis
Cave myotis Myotis velifer brevis
Occult little brown bat Myotis lucifugus occultus
Long-eared myotis Myotis evotis
Southwestern myotis Myotis auriculus
Fringed myotis Myotis thysanodes
Long-legged myotis Myotis volans
California myotis Myotis californicus
Western small-footed myotis Myotis ciliolabrum
Silver-haired bat Lasionycteris noctivagans
Western pipistrelle Pipistrellus hasperus
Big brown bat Eptesicus fuscus
Western red bat Lasiurus blossevillii
Southern yellow bat Lasiurus ega
Hoary bat Lasiurus cinereus
Spotted bat Euderma maculatum
Allen's lappet-browed bat Idionycteris phyllotis
Townsend's big-eared bat Corynorhinus townsendii
Pallid bat Antrozous pallidus
Mexican free-tailed bat Tadarida brasiliensis mexicana
Pocketed free-tailed bat Nyctinomops femorosaccus
Big free-tailed bat Nyctinomops macrotis
Greater western mastiff bat Eumops perotis californicus
Underwood's mastiff bat Eumops underwoodi
Missing from the list is the vampire, the vampire bats, a species of the subfamily Desmodontinae, also of the leafnosed variety found in Mexico, Central and South America. They latch onto birds (turkeys) or cattle for a blood diet, a feeding trait called hematophagy.
I’ve seen the bats lapping up blood from the backs of cattle in Chiapas and Guatemala. I have talked to local ranchers and farmers, and guano collectors. I have talked with a few Mexican biologists. All about bats. This is a fascinating creature, and the 1,400 known species of bats cover almost a third of all mammal species, but not many are into hematophagy. Most bats suck nectar and dive for insects, fish, lizards, snakes.
The vampires were once in synch with nature, integrated into a balanced food web, until the “conquest” by Spain, when the blood, cross, steel and germs introduced cattle and horses and the corrales, which gave the species, Desmodus rotundus, or the vampire bat, an immobilized source of blood. There were not many of these vampiros before the Spanish invasion, since they fed (lapping up the blood) of the pavo, wild turkeys.
For Desmodus rotundus, every corral was a cafeteria, so the number of vampire bats in Mexico has been growing steadily for centuries. Think of life out of balance, Koyaanisqatsi, or Life-Unraveling from Cohesion, this one incursion into the land with these domesticated bovines creating a huge population explosion.
Alas, those unsuspecting cows and horses don’t just end up with open wounds, however, since vampire bats often leave them with paralytic rabies. The reaction of a rancher watching many of his animals die slow, horrible deaths, that is a sight to behold, and who cannot empathize with his desire to seek out the bats’ home and blow it to kingdom come.
This fear of bats—this misidentification of all bats as vampires—has put so many non-blood sucking species in peril, on the brink of extinction. Caves are blown up, or the openings are caged with chicken wire. All those millions of pounds of insects scooped up by the insectivores are now back as miniature demons in the out of whack food web. Whereupon, millions of gallons of insecticides are applied to “handle” the crop-eating and parasite-laden pests. The vicious cycle of man’s continuing fear, and lack of critical thinking and deep holistic understanding of how to stay in balance with the cycles of nature, with the food web—with bats—has much to do with our current epoch: a world soon to be without ice.
I go back to the movie, Koyaanisqatsi, which is actually a Hopi word defined as "life of moral corruption and turmoil"
or "life out of balance." Getting deeper into the word, the prefix koyaanis—means "corrupted" or "chaotic," and the word qatsi means "life" or "existence." The film actually adds to the meaning— “crazy life, life out of balance, life in turmoil, life disintegrating, and a state of life that calls for another way of living."
We went to several caves, and we met some resilient guano collectors. We ate and slept in the caves, and the food—canned tuna and hard ramen noodles—came in contact with everything. There were no antiseptic wipes. We drank river water treated with iodine. Lots of quartsized bottles of beer. The Brits chain smoked. We played cards on the earth. Bats flew above, around, near, and on two occasions, slammed into my hat. Bia Hanoi, 333 and some Chinese brands we sipped during the breaks between rush hours. We carried out what we packed in.
One night I woke up shivering, around 3 am, before the rush hour back to the caves, and I pulled a huge black centipede from the thin piece of canvas I was using for a bedroll. Welts, shivers, temperature of 40 Celsius (104 F). Oh, the vagaries of roughing it in a country of dragon boats, Russian busses, endless streams of bicycles and motorcycles, dogs running around, and poor and good people. Plastic bags and junk stacked to the moon and back.
Bats, magnificent and weird bats. The cataloguing was haphazard, and one of the fellows was wanting to get (discover) a bat yet to be catalogued by Western science, and then he’d write about it, get a short article in the Mammalian Journal. Help with his doctoral dissertation. Cheers. He was a Scotsman, age 23, talking to me, 36. Asking me about the war, the American War on Vietnam, the effects of it at home, etc.
I reminded him of his history, UK’s: Operation Masterdom but also known as the Southern Resistance War (Vietnamese: Nam Bộ kháng chiến) by the Vietnamese. This was a post–World War II armed conflict involving a largely British-Indian and French task force and Japanese troops. They went up against the Viet Minh, the Vietnamese communist movement, for control of the southern half of the country, after the Japanese surrender. The Brits lost.
I reminded him that arms were being sent by the Brits to South Vietnam. I reminded him plenty of Brits fought in
Vietnam, through resignation and then enlisting in the armed forces of Australia and New Zealand. Canadians enlisted in US forces. Plenty of covert operations were carried out by Britain. Britain officially recognized and supported South Vietnamese President Diem who requested help and received it: British Advisory Mission to South Vietnam (BRIAM).
Down the mountain we slogged—dirty, disheveled, stinky. We ended up in one of the villages not located on our maps. We drank Bia Hoi by the gallon—draft beer. The kids and old people watched us from the slated walls. Definite oddities, as the guys had long hair, and the two women had shaved sides and beads in the back, braided. Red-haired Ian, with huge flowing scarlet beard. Doctor Viet helped with the translation. He was gulping green tea, steamy in the night air.
We drank and ate with miners, farmers and foresters. I ended up in a constant arm-wrestling match with all number of guys. We were in close quarters, and like all of Vietnam, it seemed, there were old and young, boy and man, some females, grabbing our hands as we walked through their small rural/outback town. We were on display, and back at the beer garden, slash restaurant (the lady and man who owned it let us crash there at night on benches and tables for a small fee), more people came out to see who these vagrants were.
We talked about bats, showed them a book of bats we used for identification purposes. We got one lead after the next on caves close by. Endless caves. Huge colonies. Amazing stories of flying foxes bigger than the dogs they were eating. One older lady that first evening brought our science troupe seven deep fried bats. Horseshoe. Down the hatch, bloke.
Most people were healthy, yet the men smoked cigarettes and bongs-full of tobacco. The women chewed betel nut, as the telltale aftereffect of dark stained teeth when they smiled. I asked to try some and they laughed, but I persisted. The numbing effects of a mild narcotic were not unlike the first few chews of a coca leaf.
Bats, for sure, and that love’s gotta have it for the people riff was running through my head, no matter how far away we were culturally, how unusual our thinking styles might have been. People of the land, simple people, survivors, cutting, slicing, gutting, shooting, frying, boiling, mashing
anything around them to survive. To eat. I loved them inside, my own way. With these words, too. Then, and now.
Coffee plantations and fields of tea plants: all these operations were locally supported through local labor, but the products and the profits are shipped out of the region, many times lugged overland to China or in container ships to Europe.
The coffee and tea operations were cutting into more and more of the forest. More and more checkerboard pieces of land appeared. More and more fractured so-called habitat for any number of animals— reptiles, amphibians, birds, ground mammals, larger species like deer, and the elusive Asian tiger. And the people came to settle in order to work the plantations, and, alas, more trails up into the woods, more hunting, more rattan cutting, and, the bats. Caves to traverse, deeply spelunked, for that rich fertilizer, guano. Hunting in the dark for bats to eat. And then, down the hills and mountains, maybe great hornbills sacrificed for brooms sold at markets. Brooms of magnificent feathers. That is not ecology, Vietnam style.
Viet and I talked about ecology, and biodiversity. At the time there was no word in Vietnamese for ecology. Or at least no group of words to define it as a holistic concept— he was a tree expert with some engineering background who happened to fall into a job with the Hanoi Biological Institute. But drilling down, we did find common language for this field of biology that describes the relationships of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings. The idea of one species being a large part of the whole is not always understood in most cultures. You know, take one colony of bats out of the equation, and in 10 years, you have children with skin lesions and with GI issues and tumors in the mouths of older people. Because of the pesticides!
How is that bat connected to us, the food, the air, the soil, and then we talked about the insects, the pests, the crop eaters, and even mosquitoes bearing malaria and other diseases, how in places like Mexico, the amount of
poisons applied to crops goes up each year, and the pests that once were food for the bats, well, they are at war with the farmers.
Then, those toxins, those bug killers getting into the food chain, and through bioaccumulation in other species, like fish they eat, the toll comes later, in other forms of human degradation, including covered-up chronic diseases. We talked about the eagle, American Bald Eagle, and the application of DDT throughout the land cutting into the reproductive tracks of eagles and causing shells too thin, which in turn resulted in broken incubating eggs. Near extinction.
In Vietnam, and elsewhere, there is a rare mountain-hawk eagle, also known Hodgson’s. So many animals in Vietnam are on the edge of extinction, including the water buffalo; black-crested gibbon; Indochinese tiger; red-shanked douc; Siamese crocodile; Vietnam flying frog; Vietnamese gecko; Delacour’s langur; banded eagle ray. The Indochinese tiger is probably extinct, as is the Javan rhinoceros and Northern Sumatran rhinoceros. So many different bird, snake, and frog species are extinct in Vietnam, but actual numbers are unknown.
War, suffering, food, starvation, the will of one species, man, to live above all others.
Man, at the top, the progenitor of the Seventh Mass Extinction, it our tribute to over consumption and throwaway everything society, our Anthropocene.
So many of us even now in this great critical thinking extinction event—lockdowns, mandates, de-platforming, delisting, stopping the scientific method of testing and retesting hypothesis—want to know origins. Simple stuff, for most thinking humanity. How did we get bogged down in Afghanistan, or Vietnam? How did we allow the social safety nets to get frayed and shredded? How did we become so reliant on other countries’ farming and manufacturing? How possible is it that there’s life outside
our galaxy? Is there water on Mars, and if so, so what? How do we get back to a precautionary principle and holistic approach to human health? First do no harm, isn’t that the medical credo, and where is it now?
The origin stories—who was on Turtle Island before “contact,” and what was that land bridge all about? Who were the ancient seafarers? How are we the sum total of the virome’s and biome’s magnificent interplay of bacteria and viruses?
We want history, and we are—some of us—looking at history with new lenses, new information, much more deeper considerations and intersectionalities. If there are social determinants of health, then there are determinants of vaccine policy tied to decades of research, both open scientific research and the nefarious stuff of governments/ militaries looking for weaponizing almost anything on earth, including bacteria and viruses?
If science can give us napalm, white phosphorous, depleted uranium ammunition, well, what else is science cooking up under the auspices of money-making, profits, and, well, paranoia vis-à-vis weaponizing?
The story of bat research goes way back. The bat is a good example of diversity, since there are 1,400 species, and more yet to be discovered. More than two decades of “paranoia” around bioterrorism have ramped up U.S. funding for a “subgenre of viral surveillance that entails hunting and studying previously unknown viruses in wildlife.”
“Outbreak prediction,” goes beyond just tracking diseases that affect people. The public health officials have relied on this for almost a century to understand the precursors and causes of epidemics. This new viral research is all about “discovering” the most dangerous pathogens before they jump to humans. But is that just it, discovery?
Again, many of us are for this robust form of research— basically hunting viruses in remote locations and then transporting, storing, and experimenting on the most dangerous pathogens. Many of us like myself are doubting the real value of this pursuit of viruses which have yet to infect people. In fact, we believe that this method of research could be the fuse that ignites the bomb, the next and the next and the next pandemic. There is much evidence this SARS-CoV2 is all about that
sort of accident, those sorts of genetic and serial passage experiments. Some of the groups and government agencies are corrupt, and many individuals over the past twenty-four months have sought out my opinion about secret military and military-private sector research on disease, on ways to weaponize viruses.
Yet, if this were an essay on the history of bioweapons, on the Nazis, Japanese, Americans and the Russians working on various biological and chemical weapons, which are in simple terms, weapons of mass destruction, or mass death, then we’d be looking at an entirely different method of presenting the evidence, history, perspectives, quotes and conclusions. And implications.
This is the Conversation in a Time of Plague, however, looking at my own relationship with words. Accordingly, many times throughout even this writing process, my words are sounding hollow, anachronistic, empty. Given the subtext to this essay or my position, that is, of having a deep love of earth and people and those interrelationships with my own fears, doubts and frailties, now, in 2022, as I hit the speed limit of 65 years of age, almost each paragraph sounds off kilter, not of my time, or of “their” time.
I knew that fruit bats are natural hosts of the Nipah virus, which can cause brain swelling, seizures, comas, and ultimately death in humans. We found out the Zika virus, which causes babies to be born with very small heads and other potentially deadly birth defects, was isolated in a rhesus monkey. MERS, the coronavirus that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome, was traced to camels from Saudi Arabia. And HIV infects baboons and chimpanzees, and whether it jumped species naturally or with a little help from science, the virus is responsible for killing 36 million people worldwide.
The current plague of silence, in this unfolding Decade of Corona, speaks of palm civets sold in markets, and then this SARS found in horseshoe bats living in remote caves in Yunnan Province infecting miners.
However, I embrace those bats, the pathogens, the love of evolution, this human terrain of ups and down, starts and false starts. I love the brains and the discourse which was so elegant and humane, before this love and death in a time of plague, or pandemic, or as it is now, endemic.
I was with many bat species, colonies and individuals, and I upset their homes, their flight patterns by playing scientist with “real” scientists. That was the essence of a truckload (vectors) of pathogens entering my body, and my mind. I like this statement from a pathogen person:
“Squirming, clawed and toothy animals bite and scratch during collection of body fluids. Teeth and talons easily penetrate the thin gloves required to maintain dexterity when handling fragile wildlife. And overhead, angry bats release a fine patina of virus-laden urine aerosols,” as infectious disease specialist Michael Callahan wrote of his virus-hunting expeditions. “The fact that researchers are not infected every time they do a field collection is a question that continues to stump us.”
That bat lady from China was featured in a Scientific American article, “How China’s ‘Bat Woman’ Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus, in June 2020. Her name is Shi Zhengli. And just up until mid-2020, there was a robust exchange of research and knowledge between China, USA and other nations.
But in the time of coronavirus, the discourse has been scuttled. That’s the bat crazy angle of this I am coming from. Listen to her quoted in the article: The efforts paid off. The pathogen hunters discovered hundreds of bat-borne coronaviruses with incredible genetic diversity. “The majority of them are harmless,” Shi Zhengli said. “But dozens belong to the same group as SARS. They can infect human lung cells in a petri dish and cause SARS-like diseases in mice.”
In Shitou Cave—where painstaking scrutiny has yielded a natural genetic library of bat-borne viruses—the team discovered a coronavirus strain that came from horseshoe bats with a genomic sequence nearly 97 percent identical to the one found in civets in Guangdong. The finding concluded a decade-long search for the natural reservoir of the SARS coronavirus.
The horseshoe bats, man, are my friends in those caves along the Laotian border. The entire unfolding of today, as I write this, for me, is interspersed with my own evolution in this world—a dangerous one, for sure, since for me, Capitalism is a disease, and it is closing in on more and more people, not as something to benefit them, but for which to exploit them, and to rub them out, as Jimmy Cagney said.
The screws are being tightened. The propaganda set forth a hundred years ago. Our planned and perceived lives and deaths are all marketed, and put into play. There are both overt and covert agendas, and there are still some of us who want to see through the power plays, expose the actors in this theater of the dominant, and report on the suppression, oppression and obsessions the marketers (tin soldiers for the billionaires) foist upon children as soon as they are born!
Now, how is this going to connect and do a bang-up job concluding an essay on bats? You see, even with my love of nature, my engagement with people, in other places, through their own eyes and mine, as they are Eyes Wide Open, I still have this sense that even the crazy ones like those that reach out to me across states and oceans (I don’t mean crazy in that way, so hold your horses, Cancel Culture) are actually the ones that count. They have a truth in them from decades living their own truths in a world of lies.
Maybe the key for me know is what Jean-Paul Sartre said, succinctly: “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”
The formulae have already been sketched out. We know what is right from wrong, deep down, if we decide to traverse that dark cave and explore the hidden meaning of being a man or woman in this world. What it is to be with bats, with the flights in and out of our own dark caves… that will always be the wave of human touch in me. Ironically, it is the bat which pulls the human from me.
Even in that darkness, there is light, and the bats are blended into space, that obsidian trench which for them is home and roost, the place of supplication to the energy god. And where they rest, we tear into. But we know deep down the flight of the bat is true, as is the gait of a wolf, even one espying a lamb out on old Jake’s ranch.
Ready for reconfirmation, or some moment in struggle when recharging of life is the memory. This is it, a bat essay, tied loosely to love of humanity—that humanity— struggling, for sure, and most times losing the battle. But to have that chance to be in the middle of bats, or on a
reef with a hundred small hammerheads overhead, that is the shape of dreams and nightmares, both the balance of being alive in our time.
grass and cut flowers—dandelions, daisies, little purple blossoms for which I have no name. The flowers are pretty and draw bumblebees and butterflies, but I’m told they destroy the lawn and must be eradicated.
On Friday, the garbage truck will scoop up the cart, turn it upside down and empty it into its stinking hopper of garden cuttings and rotting food.
The spinning of the earth makes me dizzy. I sit up and watch the robin fly into the tallest alder tree. Do the trees remember the men who came last year with chainsaws and cut away the branches hanging inside the fence? Do they feel the cuts? Do the raw edges burn in the sun?
What right do I have to cut the grass and trees? Like any animal, I have a right to a den, a burrow, a hideyhole, but do I need all this? I’m not that big. I’m just one woman, living in an 1,800-square-foot ranch house with four bedrooms, two baths, living room, family room, kitchen and laundry room on a third-acre lot which includes a deck, hot tub, and a garden shed. All for just me? But it’s my home. Is it my fault my husband died, and I’m down to one aged dog with titanium plates in her knees?
Sue Fagalde Lick
Sweaty from mowing the lawn, I lie on the deck and watch the clouds slide by as the earth spins. Pines, alders, and spruce surround me like tall mother guardians. I am a tiny speck riding this patch of earth, held on only by gravity. What if gravity let go?
This particular patch is near Newport, Oregon, just across Highway 101 from the Pacific Ocean. From Memorial Day to Labor Day, the surf and summer traffic blend into one constant hum, but it’s quiet here in the forest.
I inhale the smell of cut grass and watch a robin hop two-footed near the cooling lawnmower. The bird glances my way then pulls up a worm, shaking its head to swallow it down.
From the trees to my right, I hear another robin singing. His mate? Are there chicks? The nest is well hidden by thick leaves. Come winter, the trees will be bare, and the robins will be gone.
Near the fence, the compost cart is half full of
In the 55 years since the house was built, four different families have lived here with their children, dogs, cats, parrots and goldfish. One built the shed. Another added the deck and hot tub. Another turned the original garage into a family room and built a new garage. My husband and I, retiring here after a life in California, installed the chain link fence to keep our dogs from running away.
I grew up in suburbia, where the native grasses were replaced by fruit orchards, which were replaced by post-war subdivisions, shopping centers, and high-tech factories. Non-native trees were brought in, and nonnative sod was planted and mowed to create perfect green carpets in front of every house. Six-foot wooden fences divided the properties into back-to-back and side-byside quarter-acre sections with paved streets, sidewalks and driveways. To find nature required a drive to distant mountains, oceans, lakes, or rivers, all crowded by other people seeking the same thing. In our San Jose yards, wild animals were considered invaders. People spread bugkiller, weed killer, rat pellets, and slug poison. This is our place, we said. We are not willing to share.
But I live in the woods now, surrounded by these glorious mother trees, kept company by all the creatures, seen and unseen.
In the Bible, God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals
on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.” In college, my English professors talked about the “great chain of being,” which put humans at the top, just below God, with everything else subservient. That seems pretty clear, but I’m not comfortable with reigning over all. I am not God.
If humans abandoned this place, nature would close in. It happened to the property next door. Pines, berries, ferns, and salal have grown too thick for humans to walk or even crawl through. How long would it take to erase all memory of me? While I sleep in my house, bears, raccoons, deer and wild cats retake possession. I see their droppings, their claw marks, and my garbage spread on the lawn. Are they just waiting for me and the dog to go away?
I can’t lie here all day. My arms are starting to sunburn. I have work to do. I pull myself off the deck and go to the shed. As I open the door, I hear the scritch of little feet. A black rat jumps off the rafter, runs down the far wall, and disappears. Is he still inside, or has he escaped through a tiny hole?
I don’t scream. I have seen rats before. I picked up a garter snake that wandered into the laundry room. I touched a possum feigning death on the lawn. I have had squirrels jump at me from the wood pile. It’s not like when we moved in 22 years ago and I declared I would never leave the deck because someone said there were garter snakes in the grass.
There are. They have beautiful black and red stripes, and they won’t hurt me.
I stand in the doorway, smelling rat dung, noting the shreds of empty dog food bags I saved to collect dog droppings. The crumbs left in just one of those bags could feed a rat for weeks. I have learned not to leave my trash out for the bears, but I forgot about smaller trash for smaller creatures.
Ratatouille, the 2018 Christmas rat, got in through the baseboard under the stove and snuck around my house for weeks. First I saw holes in the wrapped candy boxes under the Christmas tree. Then more holes in the dog’s Milk-bone box. Then I found droppings among the dishes in the china cabinet. I thought my visitor was a mouse and put out “humane” mouse traps, planning to catch and relocate it. But nothing went into the traps.
The mouse chewed into my corn meal box and left calling cards on the counter. When it nosed my expensive soap from the bathroom across the bedroom carpet, I wondered just how big this mouse was. Then one night
while watching TV, I saw our invader, a black rat, flipping a mouse trap around in the hallway like a toy. I chased it into the office and closed the door.
When I called my neighbor, he came stomping over with his shotgun, big man to the rescue. Ratatouille was out of sight by then, and I didn’t want the neighbor shooting up my house or splattering the rat on my grass-green carpet. He went back home and got an oldfashioned rat trap, setting it up with a piece of cheese. A few minutes after he left, I was reading in the living room when I heard a snap. Ratatouille was dead, the bar across his neck. I felt sad. He had seemed so happy playing in the hallway. The dog at my heels, I put on rubber gloves and took the rat corpse out to the woods to become one with the leaves and pine needles—or to be eaten by whatever eats dead rats.
Ratatouille was in my house, eating my food, shitting in the good china, and running across my bedroom while I slept. This new rat in the shed has caused me no harm. I think about setting a trap. But I don’t. I ask him to please leave my new leather gloves alone, close the door, and return to the deck.
The dog, busy chewing on a piece of wood, missed the whole thing.
Do other animals watch me in fear or curiosity? Am I predator or friend? Why do I walk upright, legs moving separately instead of hopping on two feet like the robin or four feet like a squirrel? Why can’t I fly or climb trees? What about my canine companion? Would she kill them if she caught them? Could I stop her? Why is she with me instead of living on her own like the other animals? Why does she allow me to put a collar around her neck and lead her around on a leash?
Do the trees and the robins remember what this land was like before the house, the deck, the hot tub, and the chain link fence? Do they ignore the humans, knowing the land is really theirs, knowing nothing of real estate and mortgages, knowing we’ll leave eventually?
Can you really purchase a piece of the earth and everything that dwells on it? Money means nothing to the birds and butterflies. Do I own the rats and robins? Is not this exchange of money ultimately futile because our time here is limited and the earth will remain?
A dark-brown slug moves slowly across the deck, its feelers swaying side to side. I won’t kill it. It does not hurt me. Nor will I harm the spider coming toward me. I nudge it away.
A mosquito has bitten my hand between the
ligaments of my index and middle finger. I didn’t hear it or see it, but my skin itches tremendously. Does the mosquito have a right to bite me? I’m sitting here, big and juicy like the blackberries I pull off the vines that grow wild by the fence. If I can harvest the berries for cobbler, why shouldn’t the mosquito feed off my blood? But if I see it, I will smash it without a second thought.
Hot and thirsty, I go into my house, followed by the dog. I close the sliding glass door and let nature have the yard for now.
At dusk I look down from my deck and see dozens of darkbrown slugs. It’s like an invasion of fat pus-colored snakes. I see the holes they make in the leaves of my roses and hydrangeas, but the plants survive. The slugs’ only danger to me is the sticky ooze if I accidently step on one. But I am not comfortable with so many of them. I’m afraid everywhere I walk is a slug. I think about putting out the “Deadline” slug killer I used in California or luring them to drown in a bowl of beer. But this is Oregon. This is the woods. I don’t want to kill things.
Yes, I eat meat every day. We won’t think about that.
In the house, a long-legged spider hangs above my shower. Another perches in the corner. Their webs line my house and grab me whenever I enter a room. I brush the webs away, cursing. If I can reach the spiders, I trap them in plastic containers and relocate them to the lawn. If I can’t reach them, I talk to them, tell them to stay where they are.
One insomniac night, twitchy and anxious, I decide to take a bath, turn on the red light installed by a previous owner, and see something moving in the water. Without my glasses, I think it’s a hair, reach for it, then realize it’s a spider. I jump back, run for my plastic container and scoop the spider into a puddle of water. I dump it on the grass outside. I never see the spider again; I suspect it drowned. When it’s the spider or me at 2 a.m., I choose myself.
A few days later, when I’m painting my shed on another hot August afternoon, I meet several spiders hanging on the pitted wood. I paint around them and nudge them away with the end of my brush, but I accidentally paint over a spider, paralyzing it as it dies covered in blue-gray ooze. Even if we try not to kill anything, we do.
The dog and I come upon a just-killed garter snake, hit by our gardener’s truck before he stopped to talk to me about trimming my hedge. I’m sure he had no idea he killed a snake. The snake is half upside down, its white belly arcing upward in a final writhe of pain. It will be flattened
by more tires and eventually disintegrate and disappear. When I’m driving, bugs splatter on my windshield. Birds have slammed into my windshield and my bumper. Once, I hit a raccoon running across the Coast Highway near the Les Schwab tire store. How many other creatures have I killed or hurt without knowing it?
Now in my kitchen making dinner, I admire the view out the window. The robin hops, looks around, hops again, pecks into the shorn lawn. Near the fence, a Stellar’s jay squawks. Across the yard, juncos with black hoods skitter around seeking food. A pileated woodpecker floats down and joins the party. I admire the red patch on its head, the black ring around its neck, and the herringbone pattern on its wings.
I wish I could go out and join the birds, but they would fly away. “It’s okay,” I’d say. “I won’t hurt you.” But to them, my voice is like the growl of a cougar. So I watch from the window, knowing this place is as much theirs as mine. I imagine the rat asleep in the shed and the bears plotting their midnight raids while I plan what I’ll watch on TV. It all belongs to all of us.
I fill the dog’s bowl with kibble and canned food, hold it up while I say grace, and we settle down to eat, snug in our house surrounded by the mother trees.
Wallace McDonald
remembrance
For a several years, I didn’t know what had become of the Decorah. After Phil had decided to retire and had sold her, she’d been taken from Petersburg and was tied up for a while in a stall at Fisherman’s Terminal on Lake Union. During a visit to Seattle when I’d walked the docks and saw her there, most of the paint was gone and all the equipment with any value stripped off her. She was a hulk, still floating, automatic bilge pumps cycling on and off constantly to keep her that way. She was a sorry sight then, but when I looked for her a couple of years later, she wasn’t to be found and the harbormaster had no record or personal recollection of a vessel of that name. I assumed she must have been towed somewhere and sunk or demolished, so I was surprised when I visited Astoria a couple of year later that there was mention of her in the local newspaper. She had been tied up to a dock in Seaside, right down the coast, when apparently
the automatic bilge pumps had failed and she’d become a nuisance wreck, sunk at the dock with just the mast showing at high water. I had no desire to see that.
I had crewed on her, fishing Tanner crab, Bairdi, out of Petersburg when Phil Clausen was her master. She’d been built at Sagstad’s in 1911 for a Norwegian come to Seattle by way of Iowa, constructed for sail to carry dories for longlining halibut. Later she’d been lengthened and powered, a wheelhouse added with cable and pulley steering, and a system of gears and jack-shafts for operating deck equipment, and she was operated as a freighter and salmon trap tender in territorial days. She was a schooner, ninety some feet of thick fir planking fastened to close-spaced oak ribs joined to a massive oak keel and bowstem.
It’s been over 50 years since Phil rescued her after she’d been run aground and had sunk on Colorado Reef in Wrangell Narrows. He’d gotten salvage rights from the insurers, and at low water when she went dry, he stuffed her full of empty 55-gallon fuel drums and inflated buoy bags in the hold, the engine room, the fo’c’sle, every nook and cranny. With a couple of portable gas-powered pumps working as the tide came in, she floated just enough so she could be moved higher on the beach. When she went dry again Phil patched tarps and plywood sheets over fractures in her hull so she could be floated off the reef and towed to a shipyard. There she was hauled out on the railway where cracked ribs were sistered with new wood, and broken planks replaced, then caulk and pitch in the seams, then paint and new zincs. And he had her sheathed with ironbark up the bow stem and around the waterline and extending up the starboard side where the crab pots would bang against her side when they came aboard as she rolled.
Phil’s crab grounds are north of town, up a long inlet that retreating glaciers left behind an eon ago, steep rocky slopes forested deep green beneath snow-covered crags, a place where Phil claims to know the location of every submerged rock within a fathom or two of the surface because he has hit every one of them at some time or other. That was why he had the yard lag an inchand-a-half thick steel bugshoe along the keel, in case there’s another rock he hasn’t found yet. Tanner crab is a
winter fishery. Back then, right after New Year’s, we’d time the lulls between weather fronts to run out with the deck full of tied-up coils of buoyline and with red buoys with the Decorah’s identifying number painted on, hanging in bunches tied to the railings. An insulated wood locker would be full of boxed frozen herring, with a pile of empty plastic bait jars secured with gagnions to stainless-steel snaps.
We run the Decorah north out of Petersburg, Phil with his son, Steve, and me as crew. Up in the inlet Phil throttles down when we arrive at the particular spot where on a rising tide Phil maneuvers the Decorah to nudge up against a smooth beach inside a protected bight where he stores his crab pots in stacks along the beach fringe.
We row ashore in a skiff, trailing a long loop of buoyline. One of us gets to climb the spar tree that has a purse block lashed to its trunk high above, and pull up the bight and loop it into the block; then, climbing down, we begin. One pot at a time, strap its bridle to the loop and use the hydraulic-powered crab block to drag pots from the beach to winch aboard and stack them on the deck. When the deck is filled with pots, Phil backs the Decorah off the beach, and we begin setting them in the shallows, to each pot’s bridle we secure tiedup shots of buoyline and a buoy. We spend a few minutes on each pot replacing any worn lacings that attach the nylon web to the steel frame and replacing door hinges with new heavy nylon twine. Then we cut off what’s left of last year’s cotton twine securing the escape panel with new cotton. After each load is set, we time the tide to return to the beach for another load to set, until the last of the hundred come aboard which stay stacked aboard anticipating noon on opening day.
It’s a good time for a mug-up, so Steve and I head aft to the galley for coffee and some kind of snack. We share the cooking, so I get to do breakfasts while Steve takes care of dinner. It’s also my turn to make the soup of the week, which I’ve begun in a big kettle simmering in the middle of the cast-iron top of the Olympic oil stove that provides our cabin heat and hot water along with its cooktop and oven. The engine throttles down and slips out of gear and Phil lets us drift in the middle of the bay, climbs down the wheelhouse ladder with empty mug in hand and an unlit cigarette in his lips, gives the kettle
a stir. “Southeast soup,” he pronounces, a local name for pea soup which is purported to bring the wind around to Southeast. “I guess that’s ok as long as it doesn’t blow too hard.” He sits down with us at the table, Steve slides a lighter across to him and he lights his cigarette. Rules of deportment include don’t wear your hat when seated at the table, no mention of barnyard animals is permitted, particularly horses, and absolutely no whistling or you’ll call up a Northerly. I’ve been assured it’s all documented, which is also why we never leave town on a Friday. “Let me have a look at the tide book” says Phil exhaling smoke, and he scans the columns. “Minus tide just after daybreak” he muses. Steve and I know what that means.
After our mug-up, we open up the bait locker and pull out a few boxes of frozen herring to partly thaw overnight, fill a tote with empty bait jars, inventory extra buoyline stacked on the foredeck, coiled and sorted by length. I guess we’re ready. Phil motors across to a particular spot and we drop anchor for the night. Next morning the minus tide reveals a wide flat beach, and Steve and I load shovels and rakes and empty five-gallon buckets and head ashore in the skiff, and we’re back in less than an hour with buckets full of clams, which we sort into mesh bags: little steamers, bigger chowder clams, a few cockles. They’re then suspended in the flooded hold to flush, in days ahead we can vote for clams du jour, a choice of steamers cooked till they just start to open, or the bigger clams chopped into a chowder of canned milk with potatoes and onions and bacon, or baked on the half shell, oozing cheese. Phil has the deciding vote.
It's time for Steve and me to fill bait jars. Half frozen herring is dumped from boxes into a hydraulic powered rotary chopper hung over an empty trayco tub, a real step up from chopping it all by hand. Every empty bait jar gets filled, then snapped on to a line next to the launcher. Phil idles the Decorah across the inlet and up into the bay where he always starts, and he finds the spot he wants at the edge of the submerged gully, positioning us so the pots will land at a particular depth. The first pot is on the launcher, baited up and tied shut, two shots of buoy line and buoy at the ready. Phil slides down the wheelhouse window, checks his watch, then shouts down “Trap!” and puts her in gear as we tip the first pot over the side, heave over the first coil of buoy line so it flakes as it lands in the water and uncoils as the pot begins to sink, heave the next shot of line and pitch over the buoy, then immediately I move to hook into the next in the stack on deck, Steve with hands on hydraulic valve manifold vangs it onto the launcher, each of us snaps in a bait jar, tie its door shut,
and hear “trap!” from the wheelhouse and over it goes, Phil idles her along to space them evenly; we hook into the next one and do it again until the first 20 are set. We run over to the shallows where the next string of pots is ready, and we lift and stack another 20, run back out and begin to set this string of pots paralleling the first string. When the deck is clear, we do it again paralleling the string we just set so they’re in a grid pattern. Another 20 and Phil is satisfied with the grid he’s made. It’s gotten dark by now. We finish under floodlights glowing sodium orange from the top of the mast. The next 20 we set more widely spaced off the end of our grid heading out the bay along the edge of the gully where it narrows and deepens. Phil turns the Decorah around to run us back up into the bay while Steve gets going on making dinner and I head to the wheelhouse and take the wheel as Phil declares “cocktail hour” in a satisfied voice and heads down to the galley to sit down with a whiskey and a gab with Steve busy at the stove, while I lock in our course on the autopilot and, keeping an eye on the binnacle and radar, run past the buoys of the pots we set today showing in the floodlights. I throttle down and Phil reappears and disengages the autopilot, I climb down to the deck and head forward to the anchor winch, unlash the safety line, and on Phil’s signal disengage the pawl and tip the anchor so it drops from the hawsepipe, and chain rattles as the drum unwinds as Phil backs her down, then hum of cable feeding out slows as the anchor hits bottom. A few fathoms for scope until Phil calls down “that’s good,” and I dog the winch and head aft to see what Steve’s been preparing. After a quick meal, we head to our bunks for a few hours nap. I’m up first, to crank up the stove’s carburetor control and start a pot of fresh coffee and heat up the griddle to make hotcakes. Phil and Steve fill empty mugs left to warm on the stovetop. Breakfast is quick and then we start. The Decorah is a floodlit mote in the enclosing darkness, hydraulics are engaged and anchor winch valved on and turning, the anchor comes up shedding wedges of mud from its flukes, the shank rumbles over the roller, the drum is dogged and safety line tied off. Steve and I head aft for a few more swallows of coffee, then briefly savor warm dry gloves as we head back out on deck. The bow slices through the smooth sea and the first buoy appears at the edge of our sodium-orange halo. Phil throttles down and maneuvers close, we snag the buoy with a pike pole while Phil takes her out of gear and so we begin. I loop the buoyline into the sheave while Steve turns the rotary valve that starts the hauler to turning. Line peels from the sheave as I lay down a coil and set another on
that and then another and another, each coil a little askew as the pile builds, then a knot to slip through and Steve pulls the pile of nylon line out of the way and I coil down poly line coil by coil until the pot breaks the surface. I hook a cable into the bridle and Steve winches it aboard to set on the launcher. A glimpse through the meshes of orange carapaces and waving red eye stalks, scuddering segmented legs and flexing claws.
We each loosen a heavy rubber band that hooks the pot’s door closed, begin sorting out the legal males that get pitched into the flooded hold while smaller males and all the females we send back overboard, grasping their behinds to avoid their claws. We count out the keepers two at a time as Phil puts her into gear and idles toward the next buoy. Used bait jars are removed and dropped on deck, fresh bait jars snapped in. We each tie a corner of the door shut and launch the pot, heave over buoy line, sling out buoy, finger signal the number of keepers up to the wheelhouse. Then the next buoy is there to do the same routine, switching so Steve coils while I stand forward of the hauler with hand on the rotary valve controlling its speed. Good numbers, good start, reason to smile. Thrum of the engine and hydraulics moan as line drools from the sheave. We move from pot to pot; Steve and I trade off coiling, develop the familiar rhythm: coil and hoist, dump the pot’s contents, re-bait, tie shut the door, tip it off, flake the coils over and heave the buoy, signal the number of keepers up to Phil who pencils that into a bookkeeper’s ledger.
The southern horizon now is just beginning to lighten, gradually reddening as sun’s rising glare reveals a line of buoys receding on the reflecting sea leading out the bay towards a black line marking the horizon. We coil and hoist, sort and set, as the Decorah idles, slicing through the mirror surface of the sea streaked with tide. The black smudge of the horizon thickens; sun’s red disc rises barely ahead of the advancing front. Now a skirling breeze ripples the water’s surface, a moist kiss, a breath that at first caresses us then begins to puff up a rippling chop as the black horizon thickens more and overtakes the sun, blotting out its glow. Swells begin to nudge the bow; wind and rain breaks over us borne by the southeaster that hurls spray across the deck as the tide turns and wind begins to run against the sea. We plunge on into the building swells; we’re hunched over under the hoods of our raingear, coiling and hoisting, sorting and launching, buoy to buoy, pot to pot. We’re getting closer to the end of the string and numbers of keepers are falling. “Stack it” Phil calls down as he quickly slides open a window then
slams it shut. We begin to stack pots on the swaying deck, slip-tie coils of line, regiment and rank them with their buoys until the last pot swings aboard, and we hang on as Phil times the swells, guns the engine and brings her about. The stern yaws then settles as we turn to run before it back up into the bay. Phil shouts down, “mighty fine soup” or something like that as Steve and I head aft to the galley for a mug-up.
We’re back where the numbers were best and Phil calls down to us, and we set a pot, vang the next onto the launcher, slam it down. We hook into the next, set, then the next and again, timing our motions with the rock and sway of the deck as we swing the pots overhead until the deck is clear again. Phil calculating by depth and compass rose which way the crab might be moving as we start on the next string paralleling the first: coil, hoist, sort, bait, tie it shut, launch as the rail rolls down with the swell. Repeat and again, hand over hand coiling, nudging the pile of line with a boot, then lift, empty, bait, set, buoy to buoy, pot by pot, crab by crab we coil across the bay. A chug of coffee and a handful of grub if there’s time. The two of us on deck syncopating with the rotation of the sheave in almost a waltz but maybe more of a tango as we anticipate each other’s moves, bellowing stories and gossip or just silently focused on our own thoughts. When pots come up full there’s hoots and laughter, counting aloud between us as we pitch keepers into the hold 2-4-6-8 back and forth, then on to the next string as the wind falls and only echoes of swells linger. Daylight gone, we continue under the floodlights until we’ve turned over the whole 100.
The anchor splashes and dives pulling at the rattling chain then sigh of cable scoping out as flukes dig into the mud. Chain flexes with the tide as we drift tethered in our radius of floodlit sea that ripples swaying mast light around Polaris. In the bunk for a few hours, drifting off into coiling dreams uncoiling drifting while herring rise to the floodlights, schools contract, ball, spread flipping, attacked by the hungry who from slash and claw and beak and snap of jaw chunks and particles rain down from the sea’s surface. The detritus of life swirls in the current, cascading down on the way to the abyss, and the crab travel the slopes in herds following the trail of scent, raking in the bits, scurrying so the strong and swift survive, stalked by halibut sucking down the littlest ones, all in the depths of darkness, instinctual and soulless, of origin, of destiny.
Before dawn, the anchor breaks free as cable winds aboard clattering chain, anchor breaks the surface dropping mud from the flukes. We begin again to retrieve,
coil, lift, dump, set. A flotilla of gulls forms up alongside, keeping pace to dive after spent bait we dump over from each pot. We toss keepers into the hold and they spin slowly as they sink settling atop a building pile of moiling carapaces and flicking legs flushed through with seawater brimming over the coaming. Along the gully the numbers are good, the crab are big, “the size of dinner plates” Phil remarks, adjusting his grid of pots as daylight shows buoys arrayed around us. He hopscotches one string beyond another. At the beginning of the string the numbers build, then start to taper off, so we stack a few. At the next string parallel, the numbers rise and fall, and then the numbers are better, so Phil sets another string beyond. Then we stack a few and Phil uses landmarks, perhaps a rock lined up with a headland and a lone tree exposed on the beach, and with an eye on the flasher fathometer in the wheelhouse, he locates rills and potholes he’s found before. A pot here, a pot there, “prospectors” he calls them. Daylight’s fading and he uses the radar to find our way through a narrow pass into a small bay where we set what pots are left on deck under the floodlights. We drop the hook and strip off wet gloves and raingear to dry in the heat of the engine room, pull off damp boots and socks, and slip on a dry pair and deck slippers before dinner. With floodlights switched off, the darkness encloses us. Main engine is shut down and the auxiliary drones, keeping the pump running seawater through our building load. We swing beneath our anchor light, gibbous moon rises over jagged icy skyline looming over us. It washes out the stars and draws life billowing and rippling in the sea around us. Dinner is one of Steve’s specialties he’s developed over the years, clams on the half shell, which I don’t recall eating anywhere else besides at anchor in the inlet. We’re in a good mood. Phil’s on them, lots of full pots, hardly any with single digits or zeros that induce shrugs, so stack it and find them somewhere else. Next morning we haul the ones we set last, and the numbers are good enough that we reset them for a longer soak. At daylight we head through the narrow pass back into the bay where most of our pots are set. It’s obvious we’ve had company when Phil spies closely spaced green buoys with white trailers clustered amidst his grid. The vessel is nowhere in sight, but Phil knows whose they are, as do Steve and I, and we join in with our own expletives, but we don’t speak his name, which is not allowed under any circumstances lest we invite some sort of disaster. Phil has a term for that kind of crabbing where, rather than setting out a grid and working an area over succeeding days, instead seeks out the concentration and wipes it out as quickly
as possible then runs off to do the same somewhere else. What Phil calls this style alliterates with “clusterfouling.” We begin to haul our first string and the numbers are still pretty good, but when we get closer to the green buoys, set so close to ours that some buoylines intertangle, we waste time untangling them to get at our pot. When we hoist it up the numbers are disappointing, and Steve and I notice the doors are tied shut differently than our method we’ve repeated thousands of times. No surprise here. We continue with our string of pots, noticing which ones have obviously been hauled, probably in the middle of the night, and we set up an empty tote on deck. As we haul the rest of our pots, we measure keepers with a sort of caliper built to the legal minimum. We save all that are just a fraction undersized and pitch them into that tote until we’ve got well over a hundred, and towards the end of the day Phil runs to a spot he knows from long experience has no crab and we stuff one of our pots with the barely undersized ones and set it as if it’s one of Phil’s “prospectors.”
We’re back in our grid and begin to haul one where the buoyline comes up slack at first, we speculate that it must have been sailed by the tide when we set it, so it missed the edge and landed on the surrounding mud bank, it comes up full of starfish and snails so we release the load over the side and stack the pot. Then on to the next pot, retrieve and coil, hoist and, good, we’re back on them. Dumped on the deck, they sidle away flexing their claws as we measure and pitch into the hold or back over the side. We’ll see you next year when you’re grown up. From buoy to buoy, through change of tide and weather, ducking at times under flumes of spray, the sky dims and we’re under the floodlights again. The last pot of the day and the buoyline comes up slack till the pot pulls free. It wound up in the shallows up on the bank and it’s full of dungies. We look up for the word and Phil calls down, “stack it, but save some of those dungies for dinner, ok?” A knowing smile between Steve and me, sure, he planned that one. The biggest cookpot goes on the stovetop, the carburetor control’s cranked all the way up. On deck we butcher a good number of crab, breaking them over the rail. When the anchor drops from the bow and settles into the mud, the sections go into the boiling water while Steve slices through a loaf of French bread to make garlic bread in the oven. We sit at the galley table for our evening meal. Steve and I grab whole sections of crab, cracking and shelling, dipping the meat in bowls of melted butter, and scarfing down the meat while grunting and smacking our lips. Phil, in his accustomed place at the
table, patiently picks and cleans and, without taking a bite, meticulously assembles a mound of crabmeat which he eyes briefly, then devours with particular gusto. Leaning back content, he speculates, “I wonder what the King of Norway is having for dinner tonight?”
Next day the green buoys have thinned out from Phil’s grid. Phil calls us up to the wheelhouse and we see a mass of them across the bay, surrounding our lone “prospector.” We run across and haul our pot which, no surprise, is empty. There’s a calm forecast so we stack a few and shuffle them out of the bay, tie on additional 25-fathom shots of line and set them through a ravine that funnels off the end of the island. When we pull them tomorrow, we’ll see how many crab are out on the hard bottom, and it’s likely we’ll wind up with a few grey cod to be sliced and diced for hanging bait. Running between pots, Phil is now spreading them out, time is measured in fathoms and numbers of keepers, pots lifted and pots to go, hand over hand, coil by coil. A pot comes up with just a few empty shells, and, rattling the carapaces he’s cleaned out, an octopus slithers to the deck and melts through the scuppers and escapes. Another pot comes up carpeted with tiny hermit crabs backed into repurposed empty snail shells. They must have marched in through the meshes. We speculate that down there there’s perhaps a cityscape of hermit crabs. We joke we must have landed that pot right downtown, imagining an expanse of little crabs each sizing up the other’s claw and scheming on a bigger home. Another pot’s buoyline comes up tangled with ragged poly line covered with growth. We strap on to it and get it into the hauler and pull up a pot we lost who knows how long ago. Its meshes are covered with growth and barnacles have taken over the frame. The escape panel is folded open where the cotton twine rotted away and allowed anything that was in there a way out. The pot gets stacked on deck, we can pick at all the growth and hose it off when we need something to do, then we’ll have a spare pot. Between strings, Phil hobbles down to the galley for coffee, complains of joint pain, especially his toes, rattles around in the cupboard looking for ibuprofen. Back on our grid the numbers have fallen a bit, but its still pretty good fishing. As we haul, Phil adjusts and spreads out the pots a bit more. Adjusting the volume and squelch on the single sideband radio, he listens in on all the weather observations from around the gulf and on out to the chain, moderated on schedule by Peggy Dyson in Kodiak. Other times, signal skips send us traffic spoken in Russian and in Japanese. The weather forecast broadcast repeating on the VHF radio calls for colder
temperatures with not much wind. Yet. We haul in a string set a little further down the slope, a little deeper, and the Tanners thin out, and we pick up a few red king crab. It’s moulting season, so their shells are new and a little soft, we return them over the side so they can have a chance to fill out their new shells with meat. One particularly large one comes up with his shell crusted with barnacles. “It’s grandpa!” Phil calls down. “Be nice to grandpa, now!” as we carefully send the old skip-moult back over the side. We reset the pots a little shallower to get away from the king crab. They’ll all have full shells in the fall. We hope there’s a season then, but it’s doubtful. As darkness falls, the sky clears and we head up into the harbor, setting a couple of pots along the way, and anchor up off the pack ice at the river mouth. We’re enveloped by the night as northern lights swirl and ripple across the sky. Steve left a slab of corned beef to simmer on the stovetop all day, and we’ve just finished our tender portions with cabbage and potatoes and lots of butter when on the VHF in the galley, tuned to channel 16, we hear an unmistakable voice, two words, “you bastards!” We can’t stop laughing for several minutes. Phil gets up from the table wincing, the pain in his toes is unabated, one big toe is swollen red. He can barely make it up the wheelhouse ladder to his bunk.
In the still-dark morning sky, the northern lights are yet dancing when we raise the anchor, shattering the skim of ice that’s built around us, and the Decorah plows through out of the harbor ice peeling from her ironbark sheath. Another day begins, the pots are spread out now, and Phil has us stack a few. We run across the inlet and set in isolated spots and inside little coves, one here, a couple there. We spy our nemesis, a fiberglass Delta combination, through a pass at the top of the bay, no doubt setting clusters of pots wherever he thinks the crab might live. The light breeze shifts to southeast. Up on the chart table, a chart curls open showing a bay that’s a splotch of pale blue ink spilling across the paper, all stippled and spotted with a constellation of asterisks showing rock piles between yellow pincers of headlands. Phil plots our way through the cabbage patch of submerged, seaweedcovered rocks by lining up spike of rock with peak beyond to thread the channel on into the gully hidden there. We see off the bow where a rainbow ends, where for sure these pots will come up full. Those pots set, we run back out to the deeper ravine where we’d set a string for a long soak and hauling under the flood lights they come up with decent numbers. Phil speculates they’re on the march headed up into the bay. Phil runs us back up inside, and on the way into harbor, he has us set the three pots
stacked on deck close to a small rocky point. We anchor for another night as the sky clouds over.
In the morning, as we head out into the bay, the sound of the main is muffled as the breeze drops off. Snow begins to fall in thick flakes, and each buoy is capped with snow. First we haul the three we set last night, two come up empty, the third has a couple of blue king crab males, which we gently dump over. Phil is pleased to see them, this is his secret spot where he has found a tiny colony of this species which survive only near glaciers, but somehow, for some thousands of years, this population has survived long after the glacier has left them. He’s always refused to take any, and we are sworn to secrecy. We stack the pots and head back out to start in on the closest string of pots. The light breeze swings around northerly and falling flakes become a swirling powder. Buoyline stiffens, freezing as it peels from the sheave. The green buoys are gone, their removal I suspect encouraged by Phil’s musing with one of his VHF radio buddies that he figured he’d found some good targets for sighting in our rifles. Receding tide reveals deer grazing on seaweed exposed on the beach. Phil, binoculars in hand, calls down, let’s take a break, lock and load. Steve and I head to the beach in the skiff, land and follow the beach fringe upwind, each of us picks a young buck, ignoring the biggest buck with his fine rack. When they sense our presence, they stop grazing and lift their heads. We fire nearly simultaneously, the herd bounds into the brush and disappears, except two bucks who drop. We pull out our knives to gut them, then bring the skiff up the beach and load them to run back out to the Decorah. Gutted and skinned and hung in the rigging to cure in the chill breeze, we’ll have venison enough, but first we’ll have fried liver and heart. We finish out the day coiling from buoy to snow-capped buoy, the wriggling mass of crabs mounded in the hold spreads out into the corners, getting deeper with every pot we haul. The big cast iron skillet heats on the cranked-up stove, diced bacon and onion smell pervades as anchor drops and sets into the mud. I slide in on the bench behind the galley table as the platter touches down steaming with slices of liver and heart, and when we’re stuffed, there’s time for a couple of stories and a few good laughs before we head for our bunks.
There’s a bit of a northerly building the next day as we stack the string set off the island’s end. The rising wind kicks up spray that freezes on the rigging and the bulwarks. Between pots, we beat at the ice with aluminum baseball bats kept handy just for this. The Decorah begins to travel further over as she rolls, pauses before rolling
back. Spare shots of buoyline stacked on the foredeck are now encased in ice. Phil runs the string of stacked pots far up in the bay, and we set them in a protected bight where there might not be too many crab to catch, but at least we can haul them if the weather worsens. The northerly is building, snow squalls swirl around us. Phil runs us across the inlet to haul our pots scattered along that shore, then he hides the Decorah in a pocket of an anchorage, a lagoon reached through a narrow pass in the middle of an islet. From where we’re anchored, we barely glimpse whitecaps galloping past out front through the swaying spruce; we’re securely anchored here where the boat barely has room to swing. Phil takes to his bunk, groaning from the pain he feels in his joints.
We wait till daylight before venturing out. The northerly has abated but still sends gusts of spray across the deck as we begin to haul pots set in protected spots; its slow going. We’ve picked up a decent load by now, we’ve still got bait enough to keep us fishing, but the VHF crackles out a forecast for a stronger northerly on the way. The sky is clearing as daylight fades. Steve and I tie down the booms and batten the hatch cover. Phil points the bow towards home and we begin the run with the sea on our stern. In the galley, hung beneath the cabinet over the sink, a line of ivory coffee mugs, all with their openings oriented inboard, sway in their hooks. I take two and fill them from the pot of hot coffee secured to a corner of the stove, and reaching up set them at the top of the wheelhouse ladder. Climbing up, I see through the dark windows that we’re running with the chop, gusts of spray reflecting the floodlights. Phil’s face is underlit with pulsing raster glow from the radar and is marked by the orange glow of cigarette burning. He’s all creases and stubble; the mike for the VHF is at his lips as he takes a drag from the cigarette then continues his broadcast, in a perennial double-whiskey baritone, to whoever is listening. Call and response, conditions, outlook, forecast, sundry news from town. Call and response, he takes the mug from my extended hand and takes up the story he’d just been telling, glowing coal streaking light as he gestures and punctuates a tale I’ve likely heard before but why should I mind that the numbers of the catch seem to grow with each telling.
I take the helm, and Phil heads to his bunk aft of the wheelhouse where I can hear his groans of pain and muttered expletives. Our course is set around the cape following the far side of the sound to avoid the fresh water ebbing from the glacial bays on the mainland, a course marked by the lights on headlands and an island beyond,
navigation lights flash green and red. The wind settles and the sea begins to smooth as we make our way further into the sound. I switch off the floodlights. Someone outbound approaches, a blip on the radar, running lights moving through the darkness pivot to show the red and all is well as we pass then nod bows over each other’s wakes. Closer now, a glow of streetlights, then we make out darkened houses as we run through the harbor mouth.
We tie off to fender piles at the face of the buyer’s dock, the unloading crew boards as the hold gets pumped dry, then tote by tote, legs flexing and clawing, the dock crane lifts and weighs. Weights called down to us are scribbled on a pad; weight by weight, the crab are dumped into flooded tanks on the dock until the hold is empty.
After the fish ticket is passed down to us and weights are checked against our tally, we move the Decorah first to the cold storage for a pallet-load of boxed frozen bait herring, then to the fuel dock, then to tie up at the end of an idle cannery dock and we plug in to shore power. It’s time to hose out the hold, change oil in the engines, fill the fresh water tanks. And then there’s a few hours for town’s burden of apostrophes, possessing and possessed, jumbled pronouns, obligations, dues, bills and penance, taken, bought, paid for, temptations offered or denied, confessions, expiation but no forgiveness. But now our tanks are full of fuel, the bait locker is stuffed with frozen herring, and the grub order has been delivered, stacked in cardboard boxes, and we’re ready for another trip. I’m impatient, ready to roll and slip from a clutch of talons, out from enclosing walls. But the Northerly continues to blow, the forecast is small craft advisory and heavy freezing spray: a harbor day.
Phil’s wife Darlene has offered dinner at their house. I accept to avoid the frozen reception and toxic atmosphere that prevails where I call home, ironically. Steve and I eat well, but Phil has taken to his bed. Steve has already downed a few cocktails, but I’m obliged to head with him downtown to one of the bars which is busy, fueled by the influx of crab money. Other crews are assembled there to trade tales and numbers, shouted over the too loud jukebox. Steve has always fancied himself a ladies’ man, and I see he’s blearily eyeing a tossing head that laughs loudly as she sips from a tall chimney glass. He circles and then approaches her. I watch from where I’m seated sipping at a beer. I see her smile change to a questioning look, then to red-faced fury as she hurls her drink into Steve’s face. If her forefinger had been a dagger…but Steve is unharmed and staggers
back to his seat, signalling the bartender he’ll buy her another drink with a shrug and a sheepish smile, tequila sunrise dripping from his moustache. The bartender has a reputation for mixing particularly stiff cocktails. Who knows, once she finishes one, her attitude might change. I sense the rowdiness building; someone’s bound to ring the bell. I don’t need another drink. I need some sleep. I make excuses and leave as Steve begins to discordantly belt out lyrics along with Johnny Horton blaring from the juke box. If certain pot thieves dare show their faces here, I hope everyone’s too drunk to land any solid blows. I head down the darkened dock and climb down the ladder to the boat, and stretch out in my bunk. The auxiliary is shut down, so I lie for while in the quiet, unused to the lack of the thrum and vibration. The Decorah groans, her tie-up lines slipping on the pilings as the tide recedes.
In the morning we convene at Phil and Darlene’s for coffee. Steve looks particularly lumpy where he lays prone on the couch. Phil’s in his recliner with his feet up. One big toe stands out prominently swollen and red. A knock at the door and Dr. D.A. enters with his black bag, stethoscope around his neck, and a gruff exchange of conversation begins as I realize I’m witnessing a doctor making a house call. “It’s gout, Phil. You can’t eat any more crab. It’s called uric acid and it plays hell with your arthritis.” Phil is crestfallen, and I’m thinking the crab have taken some measure of revenge. There’s a scribbled prescription to fill. D.A. calls it in to the drug store, shares a few parting words including a suggestion to Steve that he needs less alcohol in his diet, and then he’s gone. Phil sighs and shakes his head, takes up the tidebook and listens to the weather forecast, sounds like the Northerly will lie down. He then announces when we’ll depart.
We untie in time to catch the ebb, headed towards the cape, timing the change so the flood sweeps us up into the inlet, again to chase an illusion of freedom. The first lift after the long soak should be pretty good, unless someone’s helped themselves in our absence. Coil follows coil as thought follows thought. I could’ve and should’ve and would’ve but for, if only, then and when, but where to begin, where will it end, coil to coil why didn’t you, why would you, how could you, coil by coil again and again, then launch and cast out coils, release regret, cast another query into the deep. We’ll haul back tomorrow for an answer, to discard or to keep. Setting sun reflects a rippling glare leading out the sound, fathom by fathom coiling down, we’ll soon enough be homeward bound, just show me the marks, chart me a course, grant me a way then set me on the edge and I will take that leap of
faith.
With wax and wane and flow and ebb, swinging with the tide and wind, night to night and dream by dream, to then begin another day, weigh anchor and in the lights the first buoy shows, then hand over hand, hours ordered by a tidebook’s columns, the cycle pot to pot, from season to season, generation before and now to generation next, compass and course, wheel and vector, from life to life, coil by coil until
The anchor drops, the flukes wedge in, We drift beneath the coiling stars, Tethered now to the surface of time, Existing at the margin of the past receding, On the cusp of the future unfurling, Until the dawning of that day, When each of us begins to sink, Into Memory.
Until that day, then, Until that day.
Bill SherwonitIn memory of Phil and Darlene, Steve, T.R., Colin, Nels…
I knew about Gary Holthaus, a celebrated poet and essayist and founding director of the Alaska Humanities Forum, long before I met him, though I didn’t know or appreciate how much he’d accomplished in his life— and the strong humanist values he held—until after we became friends.
I trace the start of our friendship to June 2009 and the final Sitka Symposium, a remarkable gathering that for 25 years explored the interconnections of story, place, and community. I was approaching my sixtieth birthday, Gary was in his mid-seventies. In other words, we were old-timers when our lives intersected, and I began the process of getting to know this widely respected person, rightly described in his obituary as “an exceptional man,” though Gary would have cringed at that description.
As one of the featured presenters at that 25th
symposium, Gary had some provocative things to say that immediately caught my attention. One of his main premises was that humans are part of nature—no surprise there—but so is everything that we build, invent, and create. Or destroy.
“We need language,” he urged us, “that honors all of it.” He further stated that “there is only one sacred place” and it encompasses the entire universe. Nature writers and others need to broaden their outlook, their perspectives, and “find nature in the marred and scarred…find beauty in the ugly and demeaned.” And we need to look upon and write about the “marred and scarred” without judgment.
In other words, we need to reshape our relationship with the entire Earth (and presumably all that lies beyond it). We need to see with fresh eyes and speak—or write— with a language that emphasizes reverence and respect for ALL of nature.
Being one who identifies as a nature writer, I at times felt as if Gary were speaking directly to me. And in a way he was, just as he was speaking directly to everyone in that room.
Among his other attributes, Gary Holthaus in my experience was an inclusive and welcoming guy, in a way that few other people are, someone truly willing to trade ideas. Or, even better, stories.
At his core, Gary was a storyteller. He “told” stories through his poems and essays and other writings and he told them through the spoken word. Thus the importance of language to him.
In his own understated way, he was also something of a provocateur, a trickster, willing—more than that, compelled—to say and write things that he knew were likely to spark strong and deep-felt responses in his audience, whether that audience be an individual or a room filled with people. He was also more than willing to present a minority opinion, even (and perhaps especially) among like-minded folks, to stir things up.
Again in my experience, he was also an exceptional listener, open and engaged.
While Gary spoke in Sitka, I jotted notes in my journal, food for further thought. There was a lot to take in and absorb. Some of it I agreed with, some I questioned, and parts I simply didn’t understand.
We talked afterward and traded perspectives, but there was too much ground to cover in those circumstances, so we agreed to continue the conversation here in Anchorage, where he’d be staying a while before returning home to Minnesota. It’s something I anticipated then. And I have deeply treasured in the years since.
We did meet a number of times at a favorite coffee shop and I began to learn more about his life and work, of many different kinds. We’d barely scratched the surface of each other’s lives when he headed south to be reunited with his wife and sweetheart and occasional artistic collaborator, Lauren Pelon, down in Minnesota.
Gary returned a couple of years later, after being “called” by the Anchorage Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, a ministerial calling he accepted though he was nearly 80 years old. It was, I suppose, something of a gamble for both Gary and the AUUF, one that paid great rewards.
It seems worth mentioning here that Gary was called to lead the Anchorage fellowship though he wasn’t an ordained UU minister, a very unusual thing. He had however once been a Methodist pastor in Montana, serving three small communities there, and apparently also helped to “co-pastor” a Methodist parish on the Kenai Peninsula for a bit.
What’s curious about those ministries is Gary’s long-time identification as a humanist (even his obituary emphasizes right up front that he was a “selfproclaimed humanist”).
When did that shift occur, I now wonder. Perhaps he wrote or spoke about those conflicting perspectives, but if so I missed it. Or have forgotten.
Because humanism became central to Gary’s life, a digression seems in order here. Some people reading this tribute might wonder what the heck a humanist is. I have sometimes wondered that myself. Because I identify as something of a pagan pantheist who knows just enough about humanism to be dangerous, I’ve done some online research to better inform myself.
It turns out that even the humanists themselves don’t exactly agree, but I like the definition provided by The Humanist Society of Western New York. In part it reads, “Humanism is: A joyous alternative to religions that believe in a supernatural god and life in a hereafter. Humanists believe that this is the only life of which we have certain knowledge and that we owe it to ourselves and others to make it the best life possible for ourselves and all with whom we share this fragile planet. A belief that when people are free to think for themselves (many
humanists therefore also identify as ‘freethinkers’), using reason and knowledge as their tools, they are best able to solve this world’s problems…" There’s more, but that’s plenty for my purposes.
What’s most pertinent here is that my friendship with Gary deepened after he became the AUUF’s minister in 2012. Up until that point, I hadn’t known anything about UUs. Part of what I’ve learned is that this tradition— like Gary Holthaus, which might explain why they were a good fit—is inclusive and welcoming of all beliefs, whether religious or humanist or somewhere in between. And rather than a single creed, there’s a shared “covenant” of seven principles that supports “the free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”
Again there’s a lot more, but you get the picture. This was right up Gary’s alley. His ministry at the AUUF lasted about 5½ years, ending in December 2017 when his failing health required Gary to step aside, earlier than he’d planned and members of the fellowship had hoped.
Gary’s days of adventuring in the mountains and other wild places had largely ended by the time he accepted the AUUF’s call, and we never got to spend time together exploring the backcountry, something essential to both of us for much of our lives. We did however meet many times for “coffee and conversation” and during this time I also read many of his poems and, most meaningful to me, his powerful and provocative collection of essays, “Wide Skies: Finding a Home in the West.”
Through those essays I came to better understand Gary’s wry and often self-deprecating humor, his humility and penchant for self-examination and reflection, and for telling things “like they are,” at times baring difficult truths about his own life, behaviors, and ways of being in the world—and also his love and compassion for people of all sorts, his desire to share diverse stories and perspectives and to give voice to underdogs and the oppressed, all while pursuing questions important to him, questions tied to home, community, and the challenges of being human.
Importantly for me, Gary’s essays also gave voice to the nonhuman beings with whom we share our planet, while recognizing their inherent value and our species’
complicated relationship with other life forms.
I also learned lots from Gary’s Sunday talks at the AUUF, each talk described in the order of service as that day’s “message.” I think he must have balked at even the suggestion that he was giving “sermons,” though the worship services he led—I suspect he had trouble with the idea of “worship,” too—did have a spiritual quality to them, at least to me, quite an accomplishment and perhaps something of a compromise for an avowed humanist.
Gary’s messages to the fellowship often touched on social injustices and other hard realities and not infrequently had a sobering, provocative quality to them that frustrated some attendees, who wanted to feel more uplifted and joyous when they left the sanctuary at service’s end.
At the same time, and more often than not I’d wager, Gary’s Sunday messages brought to light the important contributions of women and men who were not necessarily famous but deserved recognition for the social and environmental causes they championed. And you can be sure that the people whose stories he told, and whose lives he celebrated, included Alaska Natives and Blacks and other people of color.
I emphasize my experiences from Gary’s time with the AUUF because that’s when I got to know him best and gained the greatest insights into his larger calling as a devout humanist. But I’d like to mention a couple of additional sources that reveal other significant aspects of his life.
His son, Kevin Holthaus, contributed a delightful piece, “Dad’s Writing,” to the 49 Writers Blog following his father’s death. And his obituary showed the extraordinary breadth and depth of Gary’s contributions as “writer, minister, father, administrator of public humanities programs, teacher, social justice activist, outdoorsman and engaged public citizen. His territory crisscrossed half the continent, stretching from Alaska to Minnesota and Texas and through the American West. His capacity for endless cups of coffee allowed him to meet a spectrum of people—from academics to farmers, corporate executives to street people—and he sought wisdom from them all.”
I recommend both the blog posting and the obituary for those who desire a greater sense of Gary Holthaus’s life and legacy.
The obituary, I’ll add, importantly notes that besides his ministries, teaching, activism, “voracious reading habit” and his own writing, “Gary also loved music and collaborated with his wife and musician/composer Lauren
Pelon to create and perform compositions incorporating her music and his words, deepening the meaning and resonance of both for widespread audiences.”
The bond, the love, the creative passion that he and Lauren shared was central to Gary’s life as I’ve come to know it.
After Gary left Alaska for the last time at the end of 2017, he returned with Lauren to their Minnesota home. Gary’s physical health and cognitive abilities began a slow and painful decline as the body and mind of a once vibrant and life-embracing soul gradually and quietly slipped away with Lauren by his side for those last difficult days and months and years.
Now that he’s gone, this is how I’ll best remember Gary: the two of us are sharing stories, Gary recalling some incident from the previous day or years before, his remembrance ending in a chuckle, accompanied by a warm smile that brightens the moment, brightens the world.
I saw it out of the corner of my eye as my boat came around the bend in the river: a flash of brilliant white in a country filled with color, like seeing a patch of snow among the vibrant foliage smeared across the tundra. I cut the engine and glided in. As the boat nestled into the mud, I peered over the edge of the land and saw a sleek white neck standing out against the red and gold and green. A swan. The head darted left and right as if following the diminishing echo of the engine. I grabbed the anchor and my shotgun, quietly speared the anchor into the wet tundra, and crept on my belly toward the small lip of land that hid me from sight. I rested there for a moment to steady my breathing. The wake of my boat spread out across the river, quietly absorbed by the long grass at the river’s edge undulating as the wave worked its way through the stalks.
The red light on my answering machine was blinking as I walked into my new home, an old contractor’s cabin, up the hill from the school. It was my first year as a principal. Or at least it would be in a few weeks when classes started. I had spent the summer in Tununak, preparing. I was nervous.
I pushed the button on the machine. The miniature cassette tape rewound, and I heard a slight buzz before the voice echoed in the largely empty room: “Brett… stay in your house. Don’t go outside. Someone has a gun.”
I looked out my window but saw nothing. No one outside. No kids playing. Tununak is largely situated on a narrow spit of land between the Bering Sea and the river that runs parallel to the sea before doubling back and heading inland. No four wheelers moved from “downtown” up to housing. Looking down at the haphazard collection of houses strewn across the spit, I could tell something was wrong.
I was still looking out the window, admittedly not a good idea, about an hour later when the phone rang, startling me.
“You all right.”
“Yeah,” I said, not recognizing the voice on the phone.
“They got them.”
“Joe?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh… OK. Wait, they got who?”
“Couple of boys. Got drunk. Were shooting guns at houses. Guess they threatened someone,” my cook
explained.
The boys were eighteen and twenty. One was supposed to start his senior year in a couple of weeks. The two boys had imbibed a bunch of homebrew. Prepared in a bucket with raisins, sugar, and bread yeast, the mixture is alcoholic enough after twenty-four hours to get you drunk, but it’s a violent concoction often with a violent drunk. These two, for reasons unknown, had grabbed a couple of guns, a twelve-gauge shotgun and a .22 and fired a number of rounds at buildings in town.
I imagine they found some great entertainment in this turn of events at first. As the alcohol took its intended effect there was probably elation their plan had worked. Before long, teenage hubris, soured by drink, set them off on a rampage of terror. Gunshots echoed through town. Shotgun pellets thwacked into the sides of plywood houses. Doors normally propped open were slammed and locked until the pair, fueled by drink and demons and darkness lost sight of the lucid world, busted down a door and entered a home, the shotgun leveled to kill.
Two heads swiveled on long graceful necks. A pair of swans. I ducked back down, my breathing rapid. I positioned my knees under me. One shot. Focus on one shot. If I was lucky, I could get off one shot before they took flight. Once they were in the air, my chances of hitting either of them diminished exponentially.
I had been here before hunting swans on this river, a decade ago, in a different boat, with a different gun held by a different man. The birds had panicked and become tangled in the overhanging brush protruding from the muddy bank, hunks of tundra thawing and dropping off the solid earth. Trapped, they were easy targets. Two quick shots, dead bodies dropped in the bow, and we were back on the hunt.
The birds were close. I checked the safety on my shotgun and clicked it. One shot. I steadied myself. Get off one good shot. I paid attention to my breathing. Aim for the head. I visualized what I was about to do, pop to a knee, level the gun and fire. One shot. Breath. Ready? Go.
I pushed hard off the spongy ground, calf muscles straining in the rubber boots and planted a knee. The gun was rising even as I settled into position, my torso above the edge of the bank. I focused on the swan a couple dozen yards ahead of me. Both heads turned quickly, black eyes wide, wings feathered out, their white wingspan spreading brilliant across the crimson and gold leaves on blueberry shrubs and low bush cranberries. My finger tensed on the trigger, resting on the thinnest of
lines between life and death, the slightest pressure and the world would explode in thunder and feathers and blood.
“Good morning, Tununak School, this is Brett.” I answered the phone in my most cheerful voice which is never easy and I hope doesn’t sound fake or sarcastic.
“May I speak to the principal?”
“You’ve got him,” I said, still trying to sound both confident and cheerful but feeling neither. It was day four. On day two, a kindergartner bit one of my aides and ran out the front door after calling me a four-syllable word that rhymed with trucker. His enunciation was perfect.
“Mr. Stirling, this is Sergeant Reid with the Alaska State Troopers.”
“Yes sir, how can I help you?” Day three had left me covered in mud and wreaking of diesel as I tried to help with a fuel leak under the school.
“Do you have a Thomas Noah enrolled in your school?” Day four was not starting well.
“Ah…yes,” I said. Thomas had been one of the two boys arrested for shooting up town two weeks prior. Yet he had walked into the school on the first day as if nothing had happened, ready for his senior year. The court in Bethel had not called. The troopers had not contacted me until now. And the district office had no answers. So I greeted him at the door like every other student, plugged him into the schedule and handed him a book for Algebra two.
“We are coming to pick him up,” the officer said. “We are in Toksook.”
They had already flown the 120 miles from Bethel and were now waiting seven miles over the hill to make their snatch and grab.
“You need to pick us up at the airport.”
“OK,” I said, not knowing what else to say.
“Is he at school?”
“I haven’t seen him yet, hang on.” I opened my office door. “Is Thomas here?”
“Not yet,” my secretary replied.
I turned back to the phone and shut the door louder than I intended. “He’s not here.”
“Then you will need to take us to his house.”
“OK,” I said.
“Once we get off the ground, we will land in four minutes. We will not announce ourselves. You need to be there when we land.”
“OK,” I repeated for the third time, the conversation too surreal for any other response.
I hung up the phone, told my secretary I had to go to the airport and left. It might have been a four-minute flight from Toksook, but driving the three quarters of a mile to the airport took at least twice that. The road between the houses on the spit was a pothole strewn, puddle filled, axel-breaking mess.
As I turned away from the ocean to cross the tiny bridge spanning our river and connecting town to the runway, the nose of the Suburban pointed in the direction of Toksook Bay. The unmistakable blue taildragger of the Alaska State Troopers was flying in fast, maybe two hundred feet above the tundra, set up for a landing. The plane touched down, taxied in and hid behind the large building that housed the snowplow. Two troopers got into the Suburban. The pilot stayed with the plane to guard against vandalism. Trooper Reid shut the door and said, “Let’s go.”
A few minutes later I was idling in the middle of the road in front of Thomas’s father’s house as the two troopers walked him down the rickety steps of the arctic entry jutting from the house like an afterthought. He was handcuffed and looked like he had just woken up.
Again, trooper Reid sat shotgun and said “Let’s go.” As we made the teeth jarring drive up to the school where I had been told to go, I tried to focus on the road ahead. The vibrant tall grass lining the road rippled as we passed. The homes lining the street must have once been bright but were now pale memories of purple, blue, and red. The sky was clouded. Deep clouds hung over everything on the island as if a torrent of rain was about to fall. We lumbered through a particularly deep puddle, water splashing up to wet the mirrors. Thomas was looking out the window. He did not appear nervous or particularly concerned, perhaps because this was the second time in two weeks
he has been brought into custody, his recent freedom the result of a clerical error.
“Sorry, Brett,” Thomas said from the back seat.
I looked up into the mirror and saw him staring straight at me. Our eyes locked for a second, and then I had to turn back to the road as I tried to avoid more potholes.
“I left that Algebra book at my dad’s.”
I looked back to the mirror. He had dropped his gaze and was staring out the window again.
“It’s all right, Thomas,” I said, “I’m sure I can get it from your father.”
I don’t know what made me release my grip on the trigger. I just knew something was wrong. Like the smell emanating from the Labrador tea crunched under my boots, it was all around. I paused, finger still on the trigger, safety still off, eyes still trained down the barrel at the pair of swans frantically shuffling across the mossy ground, wings beating but earthbound.
I could see their wild eyes clearly. The panic was as clear as if it had been in the mirror. I lowered the shotgun and stared. The birds ran a few yards away. They had not risen on those massive wings into the sky dotted with fat clouds. I stood properly, and took the three steps up the remaining edge of the creek bank to the level ground. Before me, the birds paused and turned and continued again waddling across the tundra in the wake of my giant shadow.
They stopped. I walked. They paced in quick circles. I edged closer. Forty yards. They huddled together. Thirty. Necks twisting and bumping each other. Twenty five. They refused to take flight. Twenty. I raised the barrel again. I could see the individual feathers spread at the wing tips. I tensed my finger on the trigger and they stared at me with deep onyx eyes. Their heads bumped awkwardly, and they stopped moving, startled, as if waiting.
“I want to make myself very clear,” I said as I faced Thomas in my office. “You have one shot at this. You will work next door, and you will be done before Christmas. If you do not finish before Christmas then this opportunity is over. I will not have a twenty-one-year-old man coming to school.”
“I understand,” he said.
“And I’m not going to have any problems.”
“No sir.”
“OK, then let’s get to work.”
“Thanks, Brett.”
“You’re welcome,” I said and led Thomas down the
hallway to the office of my home school liaison who would be supervising Thomas as he worked independently on the last two classes he needed to graduate from our high school.
I had a feeling I was making the wrong decision. Two years had passed since the moment in the rearview mirror of the Suburban. I had received the call in the spring. Thomas was being released from prison and wanted to return to Tununak. I was asked what his options were. He had done well in their program. I tried to explain that there weren’t any good options. He only needed two classes. I wasn’t offering those classes in the fall. He could have finished school in jail, but wanted to graduate in Tununak. I reiterated: he was twenty.
Years ago, as a teacher I had a student who struggled. He made mistakes and as a new teacher, I did too. He did not earn a diploma, and I have always felt personally responsible despite the fact a majority of the blame rested with our principal at the time. My principal for those five years had no business being in charge of anything let alone a school. His decisions hurt kids’ futures. I was not going to be that principal.
Thomas made a bad decision: a bucket of booze and a shotgun. There were consequences, but there was hope too. The hope of mistakes made and lessons learned. The hope of an educator who wanted to see boys become men, girls become women. A simple hope for the future. Hope helps weather the days when kids or parents call you names that rhyme with trucker.
As my third year started, I was more experienced. The sewer had backed up into the kitchen my first fall. I shot the rabid fox on the front steps that same winter. And we survived the food shortage when planes couldn’t land for nineteen days the previous winter. The year started calmly enough, and Thomas, true to his word, worked in relative solitude near the office. And then October hit.
One Friday morning, a bunch of kids were late to school. Really late. And then the girl stumbled in after ten. She just walked in the front door, slunk into the office and plopped herself down on my floor. She had not slept. She was still drunk and couldn’t go home. She was scared and crying and then asleep. She slept for hours on the floor of my office.
Later that week, Thomas was gone. The troopers had come to town. Thomas and another man were taken back into custody for parole violations.
A few weeks later, I was sitting at a filthy plastic folding table in the suffocatingly hot community center briefing the city council on events at school including my
concern about our students’ access to drugs and alcohol in our supposedly dry community. One of the council members, an ornery man from Arkansas who had married into town, was questioning me. Earlier in the year, like my kindergartner, he had called me a four-syllable word that rhymed with trucker. In the front hallway of our school. At 8:30 in the morning. In front of dozens of students.
“I’d like to know what happened to one of your seniors, Thomas Noah,” he said. From his body language, the way he was leaning into the table, he was not happy with me and the interrogation was just beginning.
I mustered a polite response hoping the matter would drop.
“It is my understanding he violated the conditions of his parole,” I said.
“Really?” he said, sounding exasperated. “And just how come the troopers happened to come out here? Huh?”
I looked at him for a second, he was not going to let this go. His face was getting pink. There was no reason to avoid it now. “Because I told them too,” I said flatly.
“You… did what? Why?” he stuttered. His anger was visible to everyone in the room and his voice was rising in both volume and pitch.
“The other day a girl walked into school drunk,” I said, “A lot of our students were at the party, so I called the troopers to report it.”
“Now what?” he shouted. He was leaning on the rickety table. It slid across the peeling linoleum floor. “Is he going to graduate? Will he be welcomed back?”
“No,” I said, “He will not graduate from our school. Look, Thomas knew the expectations. I have one hundred and twenty-five other students to think about including four and five-year-olds, so if you think I made the wrong decision let me know right now, because you’ve got the wrong principal.”
The man, mouth open, looked ready to unload on me when the chairman turned to him and said, “You can shut up now.” I felt good. Vindicated. Still, despite what I said out loud, I wasn’t entirely sure I had made the right decision.
The swans stood still, staring at me with their dark eyes, a tiny speck of gold above the beak. Waiting. One shot. Nearly four years had passed since that meeting. Aim for the head. Since I had left Tununak. I was a father now and so, I had heard, was Thomas. The pair of swans were frozen in front of me; we stared at each other. My son was four and my daughter nearly two. Even flightless,
their grace, the flapping of the wide white wings, laid out so close, so perfect, gave the impression of flight arrested. My wife and kids were awaiting my return while I was here on this creek, staring down the barrel of a gun at another pair of swans. I took a step. My daughter was walking now, caterwauling steps everywhere, fearless. Another step forward, the barrel leveled. One shot. The two swans fled. They hopped and scrambled off-balance on the uneven ground. And I let them go, lowering the shotgun and flicking the safety back on. Say good-bye.
“Tununak man charged with killing his 2-year old son.” The words made a sentence. They conveyed meaning. And yet the meaning was unfathomable. The newspaper said Thomas used a shotgun. They found the body down the beach from town. I had read the article more than once hoping the words would be different. One shot. Say good-bye to your aunt. A father’s reassuring voice and then the trigger. I know that beach, I know the shot rang out loud and deep and echoed off the cliffside and out over the quiet waves of the Bering Sea and the blood ran between tiny stones to wash into the salty waters.
As I watched the two swans retreat across the speckled earth, I felt the earth spin hard and sat heavily on the spongy ground. I was out of breath. Tears came quickly. Another bucket of homebrew. Another shotgun. Two figures walking down a beach together, a father and son. Say goodbye. And then a decision never to be undone. One shot. I could find no answers in me or in the blue sky above, and I just sat there among the blueberries and hard little cranberries where nobody would see me cry. Over my shoulder, the two swans receded into the distance, their brilliant shapes so out of place in this world.
Midnight Birch Tami Phelps
Snow hangs in the air like fog and it’s minus ten: February 2022, maybe the waning days of COVID-19 in Alaska—if a new variant doesn’t appear. Emma and Fletcher have had two shots of vaccine, and boosters, but fresh snow fell overnight atop four feet of it, and Emma’s longing for heat, for sun—summer—and maybe a visit to New Mexico where their daughter Meg and three youngadult grandkids kids live, and where a dear friend died in January last year.
Emma longs for a phone chat with Joanne, whose death sometimes feels like an abstraction then suddenly devastating. It’s silly, she knows it, but she’s all at once seeing the lovely old Greyhound station in downtown Albuquerque—built in the early 1930s, around the time Joanne was born—just when New Mexico became a trendy travel spot: a tall, pastel Art Deco building fallen on hard times. Homeless people drift along the sidewalk in front, past stucco walls broken and crumbling, everything barely maintained, its once probably stately landscaped and curved driveway now a rutted trail leading to a huge, pillared entrance.
Inside, a magnificent ceiling rises thirty feet above passengers-to-be, but it’s chipped and worn, like the varnished wooden benches lining the walls. Near the front door sits a tiny office where you buy tickets. Emma sees it all vividly. On that side are restrooms and candy machines—and maybe a tiny lunch counter? Emma’s not certain about this detail. What would lunches be, anyway? Dried-out sandwiches in crackling cellophane? Hardboiled eggs?
Emma and Fletch visited Meg’s family the year she’s recalling, 2017, for the graduations of two grandkids: a grandson from UNM and a granddaughter a week later from high school. Fletch vowed this would be his last flight; he didn’t enjoy traveling anymore—flights last an exhausting night plus most of another day. Heading south, they found a day flight with a layover in Phoenix, a city he hates—impossible to navigate and hell-hot. But he needed time to recover.
They’d booked a room at a Motel 6 they knew, close to
the airport, in walking distance—but when they reached the place it felt like a waystation for the homeless, its TV set chained to the small desk in the room. They stayed anyway; it was dark, too late to hunt for another motel, and Fletcher was exhausted. He needed sleep to be fresh, rather than arrive dead tired to visit with Meg’s family. They’d rest up and fly to Albuquerque in the morning, then spend a few days in a motel they liked—it was too crowded and busy to stay with Meg and Rick and their grandkids, and Fletch liked having his own space. He’d fly home to Fairbanks after the first graduation: they’d told Meg they didn’t want to leave the house vacant; there’d been break-ins in their neighborhood. Which was true— but really, he just didn’t enjoy travel anymore.
Emma loves travel. It was a rare treat in her childhood to ride across town in a car, or take a bus into downtown Cleveland; her family didn’t own a car. She and Fletcher had married young, in their early twenties, during graduate school in Ohio for Fletch, where he held a scholarship. When the University of Alaska offered Fletch a job, teaching math, they’d leapt at the fantastic opportunity. They’d go for a year, a once-in-a-lifetime jaunt, real travel—“an adventure”—now stretching well beyond fifty years. The decision shaped their entire long marriage, and their lives.
Both their daughters were born in Fairbanks, though now Amy lives in Anchorage, and Meg, their traveler, in Albuquerque. When Emma travels again—if she travels— will it be alone? Yes. Probably yes, she decides, and never again from Albuquerque to Las Cruces by Greyhound. Though for years after the trip she’s recalling, Greyhound sent her enticing emails.
Meg’s work the week of the first graduation was impossibly busy—she had annual meetings, meaning long drives across New Mexico with colleagues. Rick and the grandkids were busy too. What would Emma do with four days alone? Joanne’s invitation was a godsend— come visit her and Dan in Las Cruces, where they’d retired. Emma could avoid renting a car—avoid the five-hour drive south on the insane, speed-crazed New Mexico freeway—she’d take Greyhound!
Meg and Emma dropped Fletch at the airport. Then, harried and tense, Meg drove Emma down the curved, weedy driveway at the Greyhound station and helped lift her heavy suitcase from the car—at Joanne’s suggestion, Emma carried copies of her new book of stories. Then Meg drove off in the dust, waving. They’d had an early meal at McDonald’s, it was late afternoon by now, and Emma entered the dark, high-ceilinged waiting room dragging her suitcase (one roller stuck). She felt stuffed with fries, burger, and a chocolate milkshake, flushed from the unfamiliar heat after Meg’s car’s air conditioning, and half blind with the loss of intense summery daylight to the waiting room’s oven-hot shadows—when she saw the woman.
She was small and perky, a gray-haired person sitting in the dusk of the room surrounded by lumpy bundles— pillows and quilts: you could tell even at a distance—and waving to Emma as if to an old friend. “Over here,” the woman called out in a high-pitched, girlish voice. “Come sit over here,” patting a spot on the bench next to her: “Keep me company!”
Emma couldn’t resist. The woman was her age, clean, middle-class and sane-looking—“old” maybe, but “youthful,” as Emma still saw herself—and smiling. She was bouncing up and down on the bench, waving an arm eagerly, gesturing to Emma to come and sit. Emma smiled back hopefully, then dragged the suitcase and sat. They exchanged pleasantries quickly: the woman—Maxine— was ticketed for Las Cruces too, like Emma, though she was actually going to Deming where she’d grown up, to stay with her brother. He’d meet her at ten when they arrived, just as Dan and Joanne would meet Emma. It was a regular monthly trip for Maxine, to visit her father—in his 90s—and she always carried her own bedding.
The bus was late: mechanical issues north of Albuquerque; they had to bring on another bus. Not a problem, the woman—Maxie, as she asked to be called—told Emma. Their driver was Bob: he was the best! He’d make up lost time and get them to Las Cruces by ten. Emma relaxed; no use phoning Joanne. She and Dan were never at home anyway and Maxie was good company.
When they boarded, forty minutes late, Maxie insisted that Emma climb on first and sit by the window—Maxie took her favorite seat, first on the aisle behind Bob. She cradled the big wad of bedding on her lap—as always, she said: to save time. Bob was plump, ordinary-looking, probably in his 60s, and clearly a pro at his job. He’d carefully stowed Emma’s huge suitcase in the belly of the bus. There were lots of other passengers on board, but they all sat in
back.
Emma hadn’t taken a Greyhound since college days, when she and a girlfriend made rare trips to Columbus for frat parties at Ohio State. Emma was dating a boy from high school, a boy she intended to marry. She wore his high school class ring on her wedding-band finger, filled with paraffin to make it fit, as you did then—but she’d not yet met Fletch. All that seemed a lifetime ago—and maybe it was—but Greyhound buses hadn’t changed much over the decades.
Maxie said she’d worked in Washington, DC after finishing high school. The job was a small sinecure, thanks to her dad. She worked as a typist—for the FBI! It was fun. Exciting! And she often rode the elevator with J. Edgar Hoover! They laughed, bumping elbows and giggling— sharing an image of J. Edgar wearing stockings and high heels: Emma knew Maxie saw this too.
Maxie said J. Edgar seemed like a strange guy, even to an inexperienced teen-aged girl. But who’d suspect all the actual quirks of the FBI chief? Maxie loved the job, but she came home to New Mexico after two years to marry and divorce: “the whole nine yards,” she said cryptically.
Emma was carrying Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood—she liked to read serious books when she traveled—and she now considered McCarthy’s life: her parents both dying of flu, days apart, in the 1918 pandemic. Her mother was 29, her father 39; they were happy, in love despite serious financial troubles. They left four young children: Mary was eldest, six—with three small brothers. A worldwide pandemic seemed unreal, though Emma had read—and loved—Katherine Anne Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” too. But she knew better than to talk books with a stranger, even a friendly one like Maxie. The Company She Kept—Emma had just finished McCarthy’s story collection about female sexual freedom—might be way off base.
Maxie brought homemade café au lait (Emma loved it too) in a big thermos tucked into her wad of bedding, and she shared it with Emma. (A traveler like Meg, Emma kept a collapsible cup stashed in her purse, and she’d risk evening caffeine—the day had been so full and tiring.)
Maxie next offered some to a woman sitting across the aisle. This woman was tall and slim, lanky-looking, with blonde hair going white, but clearly lively—and their age too. She carried a sturdy paper cup in her bag and sipped from it like a Greyhound pro.
This second woman was called Trudy—her real name was Gertrude: her mother loved old, regal names, she said. They passed a field filled with sleek horses grazing in
pastel evening light, and Trudy said she’d loved horses all her life—like Maxie, who nodded agreement. Trudy was proudly Hispanic (Maxie nodded again) with no Nordic heritage to speak of despite her name—but a fan of bratwurst!—and they all laughed. Trudy said her husband was Mexican; he lived in El Paso, she in Albuquerque with their daughter, though she visited El Paso often by Greyhound. Her husband was there only sometimes now: El Paso was too big. He preferred Mexico.
The three women sipped Maxie’s sweet brew— steady refills doled from her thermos—like giddy teenagers, laughing and sipping as gorgeous purple and pink bands of daylight dwindled.
“How do we know you haven’t spiked this stuff?” asked Trudy.
“You don’t!” answered Maxie, and they all laughed and sipped some more. It was good.
Both women were impressed by Alaska. Maxie hoped to visit someday, after she finished chemo: bi-weekly now, and why she remained in Albuquerque after retiring from years of office work at UNM. Maybe she’d really retire one day, who knows, in Deming!
It grew darker. They saw what looked like a woman—or a ghost—walking the highway alone, and Maxie told Emma about La Llorona, the ghost of a jilted woman who drowned her children in anguish. She haunts waterways, and maybe roads, forever looking for fresh children to steal. The tale brought silence. Emma couldn’t name the ghost she knew about: Chupacabra? Was that it? An awful hairy creature who sucked blood? What were the gruesome details? They both probably knew the silly
internet legend anyway. Best to keep the thought to herself. And the next: amazing how Hispanics know—and embrace—dark undercurrents of life! A racist thought?
They were passing through desert now. Emma watched darkness gather above pale red land and tried to stay awake. Trudy joked about the plastic water bottles people carry everywhere: “Alcohol is expressly prohibited on all buses.” She quoted a sign in the waiting area. Had they seen it? Emma hadn’t. Not a drop, supposedly, is allowed, Trudy said. But how could anybody know what was in all those bottles everybody carried? Maybe they were all full of vodka.
“Well, of course they are!” said Maxie. “Like, how do you know this coffee isn’t spiked?”
“Is it?” Emma—always the naïf, her most embarrassing failing, and unfortunately lifelong—bit, blurting it despite Trudy’s earlier joke. As always, she’d been unable to seal her lips.
“Of course,” said Maxie. “Couldn’t you tell?”
“You girls,” sighed Trudy. “Enough.” They went silent again. The coffee—spiked or not—was gone, and they’d used up all their jokes. Then a uniformed Border Patrol agent climbed aboard. They’d stopped at a tiny town; Emma couldn’t see its name through the dark window. A few people exited as he climbed on. There’d been a bit of minor trouble, the agent said: “I’ve got to check things out.” He announced this to the trio quietly, after joking a bit with Bob. Emma worried about Maxie’s huge misshapen bedroll, but the agent passed it with no interest then left the bus, tipping his Border Patrol hat to Trudy as he descended the bus.
Emma mulled the notion of killing your children in sheer madness, then recalled McCarthy’s cruel treatment as an orphan—by her own family! Joanne and Dan had lost their son—their only child—in a terrible rollover accident in Alaska years ago on the Parks Highway. Ethan was in his mid-twenties. The car wasn’t found for three days, hidden in brush. The Parks is a small highway by national standards—or international ones—but it’s one of Alaska’s busiest roads, linking populations in the state’s two largest cities, Anchorage and Fairbanks. What Emma admired most about Joanne and Dan was how sane they remained, after. She doubts she could’ve done that. She’d probably be like La Llorona. But she couldn’t talk about any of this to Maxie or Trudy—too tragic and depressing. And they were traversing a similar highway themselves, of course, narrow and well-used, sparsely populated but speed-ridden—and now completely dark.
What is it about horrific human tragedy that puts the subject off-limits? Yet makes it so enticing. Drowsy Emma wondered that now—something else she couldn’t speak of. Maybe she’d become a writer because she could not easily speak? Joanne said people telephoned her after the accident, clearly not to offer comfort but to wallow in sensationalism. Ethan was with a young woman he’d just met, who was killed too. Joanne tried for years afterward to build a relationship with the woman’s small son, being raised by his grandmother. Though the boy, of course, wasn’t Ethan’s child. That hadn’t worked out: the grandmother resented Joanne. It was all very hard.
Emma found another tale: once, in a snowstorm, as she and Fletcher and the girls drove back from a trip to Anchorage during spring break, a small plane landed in front of their car on the Parks Highway—and the pilot turned out to be their next-door neighbor! She told it, and all three laughed. Not typical, she assured Maxie and Trudy—pure chance, and he was OK. But amazing!
Emma had begun to hope Dan and Joanne wouldn’t pick her up in their new Smart Car. But no—surely it would be too small for three people. She’d seen rare versions of the tiny car in Fairbanks, but hadn’t been inside one. Fletch had warned her—repeatedly—against riding in the tiny extremely dangerous thing, but what could she do? Joanne would be so proud, so eager to cart her around. Emma knew it: she’d certainly have to accept at least one ride.
Did Maxie have children? Emma wondered that now, but she hesitated to ask. It might be a painful subject. Instead, she told Maxie about the Russian Far East. She and Fletcher had visited Siberia once—Yakutsk, a bustling
port city on the Lena River, a huge river, and the Sister City to Fairbanks. They’d gone with a group of Alaskans, arriving in late July—and Siberia was hot! Hot as the blistering summers in Cleveland when she was a child! Amazingly! Siberians were a lot like Americans—friendly, though not quite so spontaneous. But very innovative! Maybe they had to be creative, given their remoteness— and their repressive government? It was fascinating, Emma said. (And troubling—though she kept silent about that part too: how could former deadly enemies feel so at ease together, so comfortable, so alike and compatible as individual people?)
Maxie said heavy snowfalls in winter in D.C. were daunting—intimidating!—navigating big city traffic in wet snow. Emma said Maxie was brave, doing all that, and at such a young age! Then, critiquing herself as usual, she felt like a naïf again, spouting such stuff—even as she said it. Was it simply patronizing? Or just foolish? “Brave?” hooted Maxie. “You live in Alaska!”
Emma loved that compliment. Though she knew she was anything but brave—stubborn, yes, maybe. Possibly “smart,” whatever that meant. Headstrong. Dogged. Unwilling ever to give up.
Trudy was dozing despite the caffeine, but they’d compared ages. Emma, to her surprise, was oldest of the three—by three whole years! She told herself it wasn’t vain—not truly vain—to believe she appeared youngest. For instance, she wasn’t yet gray. All her adult life she’d looked kiddish—for decades she’d hated looking that way. Had it become an advantage? Trudy and Maxie seemed amazed. They’d both clearly thought she—76— was youngest.
Then a wondrous tale came to Emma in the dark: in a tiny museum on the UNM campus, during a long-ago visit with Meg’s family, she read a written description transcribed in English, telling of a young Navajo man’s walk west to the Pacific coast—and back, alone—in the 1600s. He’d seen the Big Water and many amazing fish— even carried bones of a few fish home! Emma loved every part of this wondrous tale, but she was too sleepy to find words to speak it aloud.
When the Greyhound arrived in Las Cruces, at their designated stop, it was a convenience store! Emma knew she’d be lost if she’d borrowed Meg’s car—or rented one to drive south in the dark on this speedway. Imagine finding Joanne and Dan’s house in the dark! Las Cruces was sprawling. Vast, beautiful lights spread in all directions in the darkness around and below them.
They were ten minutes late, just as Maxie said: Bob’s
triumph! Maxie patted Emma’s knee and leapt from her seat with her bundle. She was the first person off and Emma never saw her again. She’d vanished like La Llorona, probably driving away with her brother. Trudy stayed on, waving a slim tan hand sleepily in the darkness while Emma climbed down the Greyhound steps.
Bob was removing her suitcase. And there were Dan and Joanne! With Dan’s used Volvo—old, brown, sandblasted by wind, sturdy as a tank: not the bright-yellow Smart Car. Which she and Joanne would cruise around in for hours the next day—so happily! The four days of the visit would be pure fun, despite a sandstorm. Joanne’s asthma flared, keeping them away from the monthly writers’ gathering. Pointless for Emma to have lugged all those heavy books.
Joanne needed a walker to get around, or a cane. But her mind was first-rate—excellent—her talk full of poetry, books, anecdotes from the early days of marriage—living in China Town in San Francisco, which she and Dan could afford and enjoyed. She walked without a cane in the house, but needed one—or the walker—outdoors. But she drove the Smart Car herself!
Emma hadn’t seen the house before: on a pleasant street, very Southwest, cactus in the yard, cozy and full of books—with two yappy dogs, though only the Chihuahua truly yapped. It felt like their former longtime Anchorage home—on Cope Street, a literary tidbit Joanne always loved. Emma thought she could learn to like Las Cruces. Hadn’t Lucia Berlin lived here? An all-time favorite writer. Or was that Albuquerque only, when Berlin lived in New Mexico?
How blessed I’ve been all my life! Emma thinks now. In February in Fairbanks. She sets aside the Greyhound trip and its images, capped by the fine visit, a trip back on Greyhound, and a second wonderful graduation! Their granddaughter’s huge class ended the outdoor ceremony—in gorgeous dusk—with a surprise balloon launch. Hundreds of inflated colored balloons, hidden under the graduates’ chairs, pulled out suddenly and released! None of which there’d been time to tell Joanne, who’d have loved it. Blessed in family and friends—and, of course, in travel!
Yet how could anybody measure the gift of life itself? The real gift. Enormous and puzzling. Endless layers, and most of the truth hidden. Enriched—though sometimes made more baffling and difficult—by relationships. Joanne’s constant chatter (like Emma’s own?) irritated Emma. How could Joanne be so sensitive, such a fine poet, yet when you were with her, at times seem so completely
self-absorbed? So shallow? Then generous, patient, full of offhand wisdom. How many times had Emma sworn off Joanne, then gone back eagerly? How many decades were they friends? Forty years? Surely more. Sharing a passion for writing, for words—for family, travel, books, friendship—life itself—even chatter.
Joanne died not of COVID, but from a fall in the house in Las Cruces, causing bleeding on the brain. Her fine brain. At the best Southwest hospital specializing in such things, in El Paso, they’d tried surgery. It didn’t work. She fell in November during an awful surge in the pandemic in El Paso and died after Christmas—which she (like Emma) loved. Christmas. Secular Christmas. Though Joanne was Jewish—then Unitarian as an adult. So many ornaments on the tiny tree that Emma’s kept up in this horrible year— still up—are gifts from Joanne. Other things too, gifts of decades: bookends, potholders, teacups, even tropical dish towels! (“I got one for me and one for you!”) And books. Of course! So many small daily objects gifts from Joanne. Special things too: beautiful, unique—and silly trinkets— used often, placed throughout the house.
At least Joanne—a lifelong liberal—missed the terrible siege on the Capitol in Washington, D.C. last year, the insurrection. She died just a few days before it; Emma thinks that now. Maybe the worst political event in Emma’s adulthood, in an age of death and seemingly endless horrors.
Joanne was born in Boston, first of three children raised in a big house owned by her grandfather. He always found space for Holocaust refugees. Her father— depressed, unable to find work during the Great Depression—committed suicide when she was six. Her mother supported the family as a waitress. She wanted Joanne to become a nurse, and Joanne tried, earning a nursing degree.
But Joanne was always a writer: at seventeen she wrote a novel (her first and last)—which her mother (Joanne’s image in old photos) found and destroyed. Joanne wrote poems after that—small enough to hide. In her twenties, she fell in love with a young man—and married him. But he had undiagnosed brain cancer. A few months into their marriage, the cancer killed him.
Later, she met Dan: the most erudite man Emma knows—grounded in history, technology, science— despite only attending high school. Joanne went to college throughout her lifetime, in bits, during her long second marriage to Dan. (What Fletch and I both did, too! Emma thinks it suddenly—something else we shared! Of course! She’d forgotten.) Joanne slowly earned an MA, was
Poet Laureate of Alaska for two terms, taught university classes as an adjunct in Anchorage for years—also community classes in writing, always popular—which she offered for free!
In Anchorage, the roof of their home was crushed by a tree. It fell from the front yard and took months of repairs—just when Ethan had become a difficult teenager, no longer wanting to live at home. She and Dan couldn’t have children; they’d adopted Ethan in San Francisco and loved him dearly. A cute, red-haired toddler born on Emma’s birth date—oddly—many years before she and Joanne met. (Then maybe I was a gift to Joanne too, as she was to me?)
Joanne wrote some of her best poems in her eighties. She’d triumphed: remaining cheerful, positive, creative and happy—productive through a long lifetime. Happily married for decades to a fine man, winning many awards for her poems—editing poetry for a Las Cruces journal during the last summer of her life. What a gift to be her friend!
Yet so many subtexts. A horde of mostly unknown tales, shared only with a few friends. But maybe that’s always true? For everyone? Surface “reality” never the real story? Truth endlessly layered? Life a shell of random facts? Reality what you make it? So, is your supposed self in fact what life choses to make of you? An enduring fate? A human’s character is his/her abiding fate. That old quote—which Emma can never resist re-gendering— implies choice. We choose to be—whatever. Character is fate. An idea she’s cherished forever, but who said it? A Greek of course, but who? She can’t recall. Shameful not to recall. Ah, yes—Heraclitus. Though maybe Emma added “abiding”? According to the Internet. She can’t find it in books and has to google it now.
But—each of us cast into that odd, beautiful, tale-rich role called a life for only a brief timespan. Or granted the amazing thing—a life! And what ingrates we are! Emma thinks again of La Llorona. Choice or chance? There are still so many things she needs to talk about with Joanne. How blessed they were to be friends.
And how she’ll miss her—forever now.
Julian AppignaniWhen time just slips… Away
— NeilYoung, “Like a Hurricane”
You’re driving out of the mountains. There’s wind and there’s rain. The wind kicked up when you stepped out of the woods. You’d noticed the lack of light in the trees, a steady graying, but you hadn’t thought a storm was coming on. You’d had three days of perfect hiking. Dry heat, light breeze, sun—bright summer sun, in all the needles and leaves. So hot up the hills you’d stop to dip your face in the creeks. It cooled off in the evenings. At the lush, willow-rich campsites, strung about blue alpine lakes. When you came back to the trailhead all this had changed. A blanket of cloud lay over the land. A wind pushed from the far side of the fat mountain lake. By the time you unlocked the car the weather was there. The rain hailed slantwise, the wind pinned you down. You threw your pack in the back seat and ducked in under the roof. Rain hammered over your head. Wind tipped the car side to side. You’d made it out just in time.
You thank God the car starts. You breathe out. You turn on the lights, windshield wipers—even, after a second thought, the heat. You warm your hands up at the vents. Then you put the car in gear and start. Out past the lake, down out of the mountains. Leaving behind whitecaps, gale-force gusts, an angry gray sky. You wipe the rain from your face. The windshield wipers race, back and forth,
silly, spastic. You can just see if you drive slowly. It’s like there’s never been so much rain. The wind on the lake is something else, something terrific; in five minutes it’s gone from a flat sheet to a sea of peaks. It’s good you got out when you did.
At the park entrance you duck into a gas station. You fill up the tank, get a cup of coffee and a snack. Something to keep you going. You’ve got a long drive ahead. But the hiking was good; was great; was just what you’d needed. You don’t know how the next few months will turn out but you like the start that you’ve made. You wave goodbye to the trails, the serried forests, the scree slopes, the great bears. You wave fondly goodbye.
You’re back on the interstate. The road is big and broad but meanders through that landscape like the thinnest piece of string. Big country, burly country. Fields of green, streams, meadows ringed around by mountains. The rain enfolds it all like a curtain hung from the heavens. You try a sip of coffee. Harsh but good, warming. You’re not sure where you’re going, but at least you’re on your way.
After a while you give the radio a try. One station tunes in, a blast of static. You ease off the volume and shut the radio back down. You smile, recalling how, in a flash of foresight for a trip without much, you’d thought to pack a grabbag of CDs. In a shoebox to your right sits a treasured, badly scratched, comprehensive record collection. Folk, classical, rock, funk. The CDs lie among snacks, maps, an assortment of paperback books. You rummage around there with your hand. Keeping an eye on the road. You’re going well under the speed limit, but between the wind and the rain it’s no joke. Visibility’s limited; the surface may be slippery. You keep an eye on.
After leafing through a few CDs you pause. A treasure, for sure. A record you haven’t listened to in years—ages. It’s heavy going, in places. But what of what you love most isn’t? You’re doing good, right now. And you know there’s a long way to go. This will, at least, make you awake.
You reach out slow-handed, one-hand it and—deftly, hardly taking your eye off the road—slide the cd in the tray and hit play. That same old sound, soul sound. Keyboard, guitar, harmonica. You take a draught of that coffee again. It tastes even hotter, even better. You ease your hands around the steering wheel, peer out the windshield. The landscape looms like a living thing, breathing, one motion,
rolling green hills with gray, glinting dissections… And you think about how right it was to drive out here, even for just a few days, across such a vast distance, at such a preposterous cost, with all your lack of skills, and lack of knowledge, and lack of experience… And yet there you were, on the trail, in the mountains, through the forests, along the rivers, in the presence of grizzlies… Whatever comes next, you think, This was a good entrance.
You realize the highway is starting to climb. The trees grow smaller, are farther apart. The rain’s let up a bit, but the wind’s still wild. You think of driving a boat, and inadvertently accelerate… Meanwhile, you’re halfway through the cd. You haven’t listened to this record in forever, but you remember, remember just right, like knowing where your foot will go long before it falls, what piece comes next. Your favorite song on the album, if you had to name one. You tighten up. It shows in your face, your hands. You sense the tension in your chest. This vague apprehension…
You sit back in your seat. Shake it all out, shoulders, wrists, hips. You seal your hands to the wheel. You refit your butt to the shape of the seat. Pull once, twice on the seatbelt. You take a deep breath in, and breathe out.
And there it is…that perfect feeling, those falling five notes, all you’ll hear for the next ten minutes, or more, longer, forever. You gain the broad pass, gravid with rain. This enormous horizon. You drive on, into the wind. You’re being pulled slowly, steadily upward, away. The rain sprays sideways, the wind slams the tops of the trees. The sky shines like iron. The road winds in broad bends, winds and climbs. You’re going over it, the big pass. You’re going over it now.
If the aim of all playing is to make the instrument sing… No. It’s when the hawk cries; when the wolf howls; when the hands are raised and the cored-out body falls. The highway peels away. You check the speedometer and see you’re going ten over, your right foot like lead on the pedal. You ease off with an effort, squeezing. Your eyes are as tight as your hands are. There’s a light in them, at the sides. Bowls holding water, an old feeling brimming over.
Who knows what this is. You only see, against a tremendous gray sky, a hawk, diving; that unearthly cry; the earth’s surface, rushing upward, filling its eye. And in that moment you know that you’re driving with Death, what-
ever this is, and you are certain, so sure in this knowledge, you take the next bend at high speed—and make it, not reckless—and the next, the sanest motorist in all that roadway, though you’re driving with Death, and it’s because, in that moment, you want to, will, live, at all cost; you are the hawk, diving; you are the earth, rushing up; the sky is your stage, your accompaniment, dum, dum dum, dum dum, dum dum, and there’s only this cry, the hawk’s cry, far as a star, loud as the world, tilting across it.
Tears stream down your cheeks. It occurs to you to get off the road, to pull to the side. Your mind seems to be blown open. But the hand on the wheel, the foot on the pedal… are still in control. Tail, talon, wing. You will not stop, will not relinquish this feeling. That maybe comes once in a lifetime, and is yet the most precious… You wipe your eye, careful, place your hand back on the wheel and
From the right side, through the rain, pours the form of the deer. It springs higher than the height of the car; it comes like a bullet; it floats, frozen, hangs in the air. Against the weld where land and sky join its coat glimmers, shimmers with rain. Its eye gleams, black, enormous, voided like oil, like shining from shook foil. Where you see mirrored your wonder, your fear.
It hadn’t been surprising that he fell. Decades of work in the mine had left him battered and brittle. He spends his time in a reclining chair now, with the TV always on, murmuring false vitality through the house. This lifestyle doesn’t help with his health either.
I set him up with coffee before I leave in the morning and serve him dinner on a TV tray when I get home. He is still capable enough to shuffle around though. This is evident in the objects surrounding his chair—outdated newspapers, pulp western novels, empty bowls and cups, half-eaten bags of junk food, a flyswatter, and a spaceheater. When I see his chair without him in it, I usually think of an object moved after snowfall. An absence revealed in the disparate space amidst a blanket of debris. I know I should clean more often, but I’m always exhausted when I get home.
When I was first hired, I’d expected to be working in the pit. I’d set up cameras that look beyond the rock face, ensure we were still following the vein, tell others where
to drill and tamp explosives. Then, they’d muck it out. Productive work that results in valuable extraction.
Instead, I find myself moving listlessly through a forest that seems to endlessly duplicate itself. A long, flat drive down a gravel road. When the road ends, I walk further still—to the damp musk of disturbed soil in the spring thaw, and the herbal-sweet scent of fresh-cut conifers. There, I spend my days doing deadwork.
Deadwork consists of hopeful preparations: an access line is cut through the bush to a site where trees and topsoil are peeled off the bedrock, revealing a raw, telling wound. If this bare scar looks promising, you probe a little more, carving out trenches or pits, needling deeper and deeper, until eventually, if all goes well, you have considerable stopes or tunnels that finally expose something of value to extract. But that’s a big if.
Coming to live with dad again after school was the inevitable choice. There was work nearby to put my degree to use, and, more prudently, there was no one else willing to take care of this stubborn man. Upon my return, I was amazed to see just how diminished he had become after only a few years of seclusion.
It hadn’t been surprising that he fell, but it had been surprising how visceral his reaction had been to the mere mention of her. Hadn’t I prepared him better for this? These last few months might’ve been worthless after all. The risk is too high. We live alone—it’s a delicate environment. Although I’m trying to stay positive. He might come around still.
My mother disappeared when I was quite young. I haven’t spoken to her since she left. I wouldn’t even know how to get a hold of her. As far as I know, he hasn’t spoken to her either.
Her departure seemed to hit dad without warning.
‘It’s insane! Not a single word of explanation,’ he’d said as he paced the kitchen with what, I’d assumed, was an explanatory letter in his hand.
He wasn’t particularly capable of offering emotional support to a child, so I learned what I could by listening to him talk to himself. For a few months, he repeated synonyms for ‘deserted,’ as if anger should be enough to quell any grief. He’d mutter to the mirror while he shaved, or complain over the drone of the radio when we ran errands.
Whenever I found the courage to ask him directly what had happened, he’d kneel down, put both hands firmly on my shoulders and say something like, ‘left like an old pair of boots kiddo—that’s all there is to it. No point in dredging up the past now, okay? Got to get our chins up
and keep moving forward.’ He’d look straight at me as he said it, but it felt like he was still talking to himself.
Eventually he got tired of having to repeat these platitudes. I arrived home from school one afternoon to find him rushing between his bedroom and the rusted 55-gallon burn-barrel he kept in the backyard. He was frantic, perhaps wishing he had finished before I’d gotten home. I kept my head down and pretended to start on homework at the kitchen table. While he was outside, I snuck a look out the back window and saw a plume of deep, black smoke. Dad tossed in a garbage bag and sprayed it down with lighter fluid. The noxious pyre hissed. When he turned toward the house, I bolted back to the table, pretending not to notice that something was going on as he walked down the hallway for another haul. When he was outside again, I snuck to his bedroom and saw shoes, books, and trinkets—a scattered mess. Mom’s things. The closet door was open, thinned of her clothes.
When I heard the backdoor open again, I ran and locked myself in the bathroom. I sat on the floor listening to dad’s frenetic movement through the house, a manic fervour to empty it of mom’s presence. I emerged when it finally sounded calm. He served me pasta and sauce for dinner and we didn’t talk about it. After this, he stopped talking to himself too.
Silence was key to moving forward. It became his way of life, and it went beyond just us: he cut out everyone else too. Driven perhaps by shame, regret, emasculation— who knows? It was never a topic that could be discussed. We have a large extended family spread between Sudbury and North Bay, though he never so much as calls. Our eremitic bungalow sits about an hour's drive north in a threadbare town. I offer them quiet, infrequent updates. This is about as connected as we get.
Since moving back, I’ve spent much of my time driving to various sites that have promising indicators: an iron-stained gossan jumping out of the green boreal with a telling change of colour, or a subtle spine of quartz breaking through the topsoil before diving back down. Once the underbrush is cleared, I conduct geophysical surveys, and then wait. Wait to see if more is possible. Wait for the go-ahead to expose the bare rock, carve into it, see if it reveals a larger discovery.
When dad was still talking to himself, he often repeated a rough theory for her departure: ‘She finally went off the deep end…completely lost it.’ It was an easy enough explanation for a child to internalize, and
once dad’s silence solidified, I must have subconsciously decided this would have to do. I went through my adolescence simply believing she had ‘gone crazy.’ Far from tactful, but it did fit with the oddity that she’d left so much of her stuff behind, and that she hadn’t reached out, even to me, since she left.
Of course, this isn’t the kind of explanation that provides much lasting comfort, and driving to these remote locations out in the bush left me with a lot of time to think. I considered the enormity of what was still left unsaid. I wondered if those early, bitter ramblings were just dad’s insensitive way of avoiding a larger issue. Or— if she was truly unwell, why hadn’t anything been done to help? More and more in my idle moments, questions began to arise.
So: open dad up. Dig through the withdrawn, grumbling exterior bit by bit.
First, I forced him back into the world. Got him to come along on errands. Anything to get him out, move him beyond his cloistered life.
‘Come to Timmins with me, I’m going to get groceries,’ I’d said, trying to sound nonchalant, as if this were a normal request. When he muttered a complaint, I had to be more forceful. ‘You don’t have to get out of the truck, okay? Just sit and look around.’
Next, I started bringing up family memories whenever I could. Casually.
‘Didn’t Uncle Terry used to play for Owen Sound?’ I asked, when he had a hockey game on. Or, knowing he’d visited with mom before I was born, ‘you’ve been to Florida, haven’t you?’ when the Everglades appeared in a movie he was watching.
In the beginning, he simply ignored these inquiries. Stared straight ahead, stoic. Eventually he began allowing himself quick sideways glances my way. He’d grunt before returning his attention forward.
Finally, there were prickly acknowledgements.
‘Hey, didn’t we almost hit a moose there once?’ I asked when the news reported highway 144 was temporarily closed north of Cartier. He grumbled, and I continued, ‘When was that?
Were we on our way to Aunt Sheila’s for some reason?’
‘Uh-huh. Thanksgiving, I think.’
‘Right, right. I remember mom being terrified afterwards, and to calm her down you drove really slow the rest of the trip. Everyone shooting dirty looks and honking as they passed us.’
Dad swiped a dismissive hand through the air to end the conversation. But it was a good indicator—he had briefly permitted a discussion about that prior life.
Months of oblique exploration and then, after he’d finished with dinner last night, I came at him directly.
‘Dad, I want to ask you something.’
‘Hmm?’ He grunted, nodding his head toward me.
‘About mom.’
He stiffened, suddenly alert. The room seemed to momentarily hum with silence. He took a quick look at me and turned back to the TV.
‘Thomas, I really don’t—’ He paused and scratched at the fabric of the chair as if to calm himself. Then, in a measured tone, he continued, ‘I don’t think this is a good time for that.’
‘I just want to know more about what happened, or if you’ve talked to her since. If there’s a way I might reach out to her…’ my voice came out crackling and soft.
He kept his eyes at the TV, but I saw his eyelids twitch.
‘I’m not—’ he coughed and cleared his throat. ‘I’m not going to discuss this right now.’
‘Dad, we need to talk about it eventually. Did she say something in the letter she left?’
‘What letter? What are you talking about?’
‘The day she left, I remember you were holding a letter.’
He didn’t respond. Instead he fumbled for the remote and turned the volume up to a piercing roar.
‘…SERVICES HAS ANNOUNCED IT IS HOPING TO ATTRACT UPWARDS OF…’
‘Dad!’ I raised my voice.
‘…TO THE REGION WITHIN THE NEXT COUPLE YEARS…’
‘A little loud don’t you think?’
‘…A SIGNIFICANT INCREASE IN THIS SECTOR SAID….’
‘Dad!’
‘…WHO PROMISES IT WILL GO TOWARDS…’
‘Dad!’
‘Thomas please!’ he shouted, his voice momentarily filled with strength. ‘Let it be!’
He turned off the TV and cranked his reclining chair forward.
‘Dad, listen, I’m not trying to trap you or blame you, okay? I just want to talk about it.’
He wasn’t listening anymore.
‘No, no, no, no, no, no…’ he repeated as he stood up, where his legs abruptly crumpled beneath him. He fell forward, glancing off the coffee table before landing hard and awkward on the floor.
I rushed to him, tried to stop him from moving, afraid he might hurt himself more, but he ignored me and continued to flail and mutter franticly, weakly trying to prop himself up. So, I helped him to his feet, and tried to guide him back to his chair.
‘No, no! The bedroom, please, just my bedroom,’ he was looking past me, grabbing my wrist so tight I grimaced and let out an involuntary cry.
By the time we reached the hallway, he was already pushing me off, clutching his arm forward and angling away from me.
‘I’m fine, I’m fine. Let me go from here.’
‘Dad, I can help you to bed. Are you okay? Does anything feel sprained or broken?’ I reached for him again, but he swung his elbow back at me.
‘I said I’m fine!'
He continued on in short, frenzied steps until he reached his room and shut the door.
This morning, I could hear him wheezing and hacking. He’d call out for coffee as soon as he cleared enough phlegm from his throat to yell. Last night I’d waited for his quiet sobs to diffuse before I went to check on him, hoping that if I gave him the space to sit in that sorrow, he might come around. He didn’t. When I stood at his bedside, he looked up at me with tired, trembling eyes.
‘I can’t, Thomas, I just can’t.’
I saw him, desperate and frail, and it frightened me.
‘I know, I’m sorry.’
Still, I hoped he might feel differently today after that initial shock. While waiting for him to call for coffee, I considered cleaning the junk scattered around his chair, but I stopped myself. Driving into Timmins now, I’m glad I had. I didn’t ask him to join me on this grocery run, either. I’ll let him return to that isolated life— turn on the TV, the space-heater, and reach into the stale bag of chips. Fall back into untroubled silence.
The highway repeats itself through the forest. I slump in my seat and crack the window for cool air. The bush here is smothering. Incessantly flat and stretching on, dense and persistent.
There is, though, a deviation every now and then: a turnoff, where a gravel road cuts in and presses surely toward a decided spot. And there, the trees have been cleared and dozer scrapes mark exposed rock. There might be something to find.
All the materials removed during deadwork, those that conceal and wrap themselves around your desired ambition— the trees, the soil, the extraneous rock— are known collectively as overburden. You keep it nearby, in case you fail to find something productive.
Maybe sometime soon, dad will feel the need to talk to me about everything. Until then, remediate. Pretend like it didn’t happen. The disturbed overburden must be contoured back into repose.
Jesse Nee-Vogelman
Though my girlfriend knew about Uncle Earl for years, I met him first. He ran a distillery and wolf sanctuary out in Bonner, past the abandoned bitcoin mine. Electricity had been cheap, once, but nothing was cheap anymore, the gas station attendant told me, with all these out-of-staters moving in. I was alright, though. I had a Montana license and Montana plates. I showed him pictures on my phone of myself holding a fish.
I stopped at Uncle Earl’s on the way to a wedding. Coco Brusseau was getting married, and what’s more, she was finally clean. My girlfriend was the maid of honor, so she went out early to convince the bride not to call her exboyfriend. I did the drive with Marv, a seven-foot graffiti artist and former Mariners pitching prospect with a tattoo of a giant nail gun on his chest. He said it was better not to
show up empty handed. He said we’d best stop at Uncle Earl’s.
We pulled off the highway and crossed a handmade bridge over a narrow creek. The forest enclosed us. I curved through the pine and past a slanted A-frame to the top of a hill. It was dusty and dry. The moment I killed the engine we sweat through our suits. We stepped from the truck and Marv dropped his pants and pissed into a pile of rusted scrap metal. He pointed at a chain link enclosure down the hill.
Wolves, he said.
A small hut stood behind us on the hill. A cardboard sign rested in the window. Uncle Earl’s it said. An open sign hung on the door. Marv shook off and knocked.
Yo, Uncle Earl, he said, and went inside.
I followed. The door opened to a small wood-paneled room. Dozens of rough knives hung by iron hooks from the ceiling. A man stood behind the bar. He was tall and lean, tattooed across the neck and arms by thick, blue veins. Scars covered his forearms. His fingers twitched in recognition as we opened the door.
Hey, Earl, said Marv. How about a taste?
Uncle Earl set two clear plastic shot glasses on the bar.
No tea for sale, he said. His voice was low, stoneground, like dirty water seeping through rocks. But you can try a bit of everything.
We stood at the bar as Earl poured the shots and told us the history of liquor. He told us about charred oak and the Whiskey Rebellion. He told us about barley versus corn versus cereal mash and how when you drink Scotch, all you’re getting is whatever’s filtered down over centuries of sheep farming through the bogs into the peat.
All that smoke is nothing but sheep shit, he said.
He pushed the shot glasses toward us.
But this, he said, is the smoothest 120 proof this side of the divide.
We took the shots. The whiskey was clean and it was strong. I looked at Marv, who gripped the bar and doubled over at his enormous waist.
Wooooo, he said.
Uncle Earl poured himself a shot.
That’s a flask whiskey, he said. You get out into these hills, 80 proof is barely strong enough to get your buzz on. But eight ounces of this will get the job done.
He took our glasses and drew several bottles out from back of the bar. He poured us his Settler’s Tea, made with black tea, mint and rose hips. He poured us his gin, but not your grandma’s gin, he told us, that English crap,
an entire country of inbred hicks, who made the worst food on earth, so why would we trust them with liquor, but a real gin, a tasting gin, made with juniper, sure, but also cinnamon, cassia, Java pepper, grains of paradise, and licorice root. He poured us vodka, which disgusted him to make, but your generation, he said, pointing at me and Marv, fucking loves vodka, and then he poured us the Huckleberry vodka, because it’s Montana and everything’s gotta be fucking huckleberry, and the Italian lemon vodka, which was delicious.
By then the drinks were working. We were laughing and joking and sweating and talking about things that weren’t alcohol like we were old friends. Then Marv wiped his forehead and asked about the wolves.
Uncle Earl poured.
Down to one, he said. Daisy. Sweet girl. Sick, he said, and drank. Old, like me.
He pointed behind the bar, where there hung a picture of a younger Earl surrounded by a pack of snow white wolves. He looked somehow even more wild, even more thin. A patchy beard covered his cheeks, his bright eyes withdrawn into his skull.
Used to have thirteen pure plus ten hybrids, he said. And a wolverine too. One day, swear to god, she was just left in a basket at my door, like baby Moses. That was a hell of a morning.
He cleared our glasses and replaced the bottles behind the bar.
But I’m sixty-five, now, he said. Wolves live fifteen, sixteen years. Can’t be running wolves when I’m eighty. He gestured around us at the small tasting room. This used to be the gift shop, he said. Closed to the public, now. Wasn’t helping anyone anymore. Wolves are political, these days. You want them alive or you want them dead. No on cares about the facts either way.
That’s sad, I said, hoping to show who’s side I was on, but Uncle Earl shook his head.
No, he said. That’s just how it is. No way to make everyone happy. Out here, you tell someone what to do, and it’s going to cause trouble, one way or the other.
Then he placed his hands on the counter and leaned across the bar.
I’ll tell you one thing, though, he said. Those goddam wolves saved my life. He pointed at the marks on his arms. I knew if I was gonna take care of these things, I had to take care of myself. Shit, I even got the flu vaccine this year. I told my doctor I don’t want that government bullshit in my body. He said, shit, Earl, sixty years you don’t care what you put in your body. Why start now?
We all laughed and I paid for a couple bottles. When Uncle Earl heard they were for a wedding, he tied a limp ribbon around each one and poured us another shot in celebration. We collected the bottles and thanked Earl and just as we were about to leave, I got it together to ask him about all the hanging knives.
Oh, that, he said. Got a forge out back. Fire it up every year at first snow.
Fuck me, said Marv. You’re a smithy too?
Uncle Earl shrugged.
Winter’s long, he said. What else am I going to do? Work?
By the time we left, we were tired and drunk. Marv folded himself into my truck, tucking his knees up against his chest. We still had a few hours to go, so about halfway, I pulled over and we napped on the shoulder, leaving the truck running. When I woke up, Marv was out cold. I drove for a while and tried the radio, but the music made me feel lonely, so I shut it off and listened to Marv snore. The noise comforted me. If I needed him, well, there he was. A little while later, I turned onto a dirt road off the highway and then a dirt road off that until we came to a driveway that ended in a Lincoln log cabin the size of an airport hangar. A multi-peaked gazebo draped itself across the lawn, its many legs crawling like like octopus tentacles into the earth.
Jesus, said Marv, coming to as we parked the truck. My girlfriend appeared in the driveway. She had a drink in her hand and she was happy to see me. Her cheeks were flushed and she was covered in sweat from dancing. Though it had been just a few days, I felt suddenly that I was a man coming home from war to find his wife had thrown him a surprise party. Who are all these people, I wanted to ask. All these people when what I want is you.
Guests milled around the gazebo as my girlfriend showed me the property. Coco’s parents were in construction and had built the cabin themselves. An enormous earthmover idled behind the house. Her parents had leveled a hill for the ceremony, my girlfriend explained. I was confused.
Wasn’t Coco, like, a meth head? I said.
My girlfriend crossed her arms.
You don’t have to be poor to be fucked up, she said.
I got myself a drink and filed slowly into the audience. The ceremony was short. The bride’s grandfather officiated in a ministerial neck tie of black satin ribbon. He spoke into a microphone clipped to his lapel, which he periodically caressed with his hands. Behind the crowd, a man in cargo shorts piloted a drone camera from a digital
tablet. Halfway through the ceremony, the speaker died and the grandfather’s voice disappeared, his prayer from Ecclesiastes consumed by the drone’s buzz. Before kissing, the couple braided a knot from three ropes attached to a wooden cross. Everyone cheered.
At the reception, I drank and introduced myself to my girlfriend’s old friends. At dinner, I sat near Coco’s grandfather, who had raced pigeons as a young man. There was a vodka cocktail named for the bride and a whiskey cocktail named for the groom. There were flies and salt rifles to kill the flies. For dinner, everyone chose steak.
The entire wedding I talked about Uncle Earl. I told the grandpa about the whiskey and the wolves and the forge. I told the groom’s mother about wolverine baby Moses. The more I drank, the more enthusiastic I became. A knife-forging whiskey distiller and wolf savior? I said. You couldn’t make this stuff up. What a place this was, I said, where you could just stumble into an Uncle Earl.
During dinner, my girlfriend listened and drank. She was unusually silent, but weddings were, I thought, one of those things that made some people loud and some people quiet. Then, over dessert, she gave her speech. Almost immediately she began to cry. She talked about how much life had changed for them. How they had been girls together, and it seemed, for a time, that maybe that would be all for them. That they wouldn’t make it out, that they would be stuck in that time and that town forever, but now look at them. At her wedding. And she said how everything they had ever dreamed of had actually come true, love, of course, but also living, being alive, and that was itself a miracle, which they were there to celebrate as much as anything else.
We all raised our glasses.
Then it was time for dancing. Across the gazebo, a band swung onto the stage. They played wedding classics: Whitney and Michael and Queen. Only instead of jumping and shouting, the couples linked hands and whirled in country swing. All around us, men spun their women, stepped and kicked and dipped. I shuffled limply with my girlfriend on the edge of the crowd. Marv took an elderly
aunt by the hand and twisted her onto the floor. He was enormous and handsome and polite, a boy built for aunts. An older man in a cowboy hat tapped my shoulder and asked if he could borrow the young lady.
Sure, I said, in surrender.
I watched the man twirl my girlfriend, her cheeks pink and her eyes bright with laughter. I’d bought a bolo tie, but it didn’t matter. Nothing could replace a childhood learning the moves.
So I lurked at the bar. I told the bartenders about Uncle Earl and his whiskey. They too were from elsewhere and together we marveled at the impossibility of this strange, wonderful place. Then my girlfriend appeared behind us. She ordered a drink and I could tell from her face that something was wrong.
Hey, I yelled, chasing after her. What is it? Did that fucking cowboy—
You don’t get to just tell people about him, she said, spinning around.
What are you talking about? I said.
Uncle Earl, she said. He’s not yours.
What do you mean?
You’re here telling every single person you see about him, and what is he to you?
I stopped and looked at her.
You haven’t even met him, I said.
But I knew about him, she said. He was a special thing, and you come in here and talk about him like he’s yours. Nothing means anything to you. Nothing is secret. You see something special and you want the whole world to know you saw it. To know that you’re having some real authentic experience. You guys are all the same. You show up and say it’s so beautiful, so strange, so fucking rejuvenating. The mountains, the people, fucking wow. But the truth is you don’t belong to any of it, and whenever you want to leave, you get to do that. And all those people you you’re talking about, they don’t get that. They’re just here. So no, you don’t just get to show up and have Uncle Earl, she said. He isn’t yours.
I didn’t have much to say to that. It was like my mind was a white wall on which nothing could be written, so
that I’d get halfway through a thought only to realize the beginning had disappeared. When I finally came to, my girlfriend had gone. I finished my drink and found Marv sitting at the back of the gazebo. His enormous body spilled over the chair as he stared out into the dance floor. Without looking, he patted the seat beside him. Marv was so in love with Coco he could hardly speak. I followed his gaze out onto the dance floor, where she spun with her husband, her white train painted black with the carefree steps of dancers. For a moment, at least, she was more than beautiful—she was happy, a state even more difficult and rare.
So I asked him about his bullshit, things that had nothing to do with all those reasons we were there, joy and love and living. We talked about wild fires. We talked about baseball. We talked about how rich we would be in just a few years with just a few more good breaks.
I’ve got new hustle, Marv told me, pointing at his shirt. Vintage wear.
Oh yeah? I said.
Flip it from thrift stores, he said. Even the frontier isn’t immune to style.
How do you know what’s good? I asked.
Check the sleeve, he said. Double stitching means double dollars.
He pulled a flask from his suit jacket, barleycorn tweed, exactly the wrong material for summer, so large he must have tailored it himself.
Uncle Earl, he said, passing me the flask.
I took a pull. We looked out toward the crowd, where my girlfriend was dancing with Coco Brusseau, their cheeks pressed together, girls again, and every man watching and in love.
The whiskey went down, but Uncle Earl was wrong. Even this would could not get the job done.
Then a new song started and everyone screamed and rushed to the dance floor.
Fuck, said Marv, taking a sip. Let’s get the fuck up.
I stood as the dancers formed a line, stepping left and right in unison. Marv ran forward and grabbed a woman, who laughed as he pulled her onto the floor. I finished the flask and joined, but it was really no fun. Within moments, it was clear that everyone knew the steps but me.
Mary Fogarty George
(and Part One translation into Yugcetun (Yup'ik)
by Julia Jimmie)After you latched the cabin door and placed the grass-woven knapsack over your shoulders, it sealed to your skin like a melting garment and created a seamlessness between you and your body. Attachment, you thought, where duality obscures and you become one.
You wanted to have a homebirth, but when you told your husband, he reacted quietly. And you couldn’t stand that. You wanted an answer in the form of words, but he was unable to formulate them, so you left and took a long walk. You hiked along the tundra lakes because you needed to get away, not only from him, but from the village. You needed time alone, to get ready for the final stages of your pregnancy. You wanted to feel a spiritual connection with the land. You were changing and needed freedom outside in the fresh air before the birth. You went for a walk in marsh country without telling him. It was early summer on the Bering Sea and the mushy ground sucked at you like quicksand. Your boots filled up with moss and water. Your feet were cold because your socks were wet enough to wring out. The geese flew and cackled while you walked.
You decided to shed your clothing and dip your toes into the lake. Plants scratched at your feet and ankles. You were shy about your nakedness because the sun hadn’t touched your body all winter. The wide-open space was fresh. It smelled like Labrador tea. It teased your nostrils. It smelled as old as the earth itself. You looked up to the sight of lake after lake, thinking there must be a million of them.
You dipped your body into the cold water. The mosses rose, and bubbles surfaced from the sandy bottom. Alongside, the loons swam, sitting on top of the water. Then they plunged down and swam under the water. You guessed where they would surface, but always miscalculated, and you played a game with them. They were unaware of your participation in their wild dance. As they ducked for food, and fluctuated up and down,
their feathers sparkled as the water glistened off their oily backs. Seeing you, they flew off, not far, to another lake, to be alone. Not with you. The dance ended and you sat there, with child in your belly, in the middle of the lake.
The loon called eerily. You listened carefully and you heard one calling and her lover answer. They called back and forth to each other. It made you think about love.
You walked so far that you found yourself at the old village of Calitmute, way across the lakes, where tundra hummocks of grasses and tunnels abounded. The old sod houses were overgrown and robbed by red fox families. The mice tunnels ran like highways. Little mice families lived there now, nibbling and foraging for food. Their caches were empty, after just awakening from their winter hibernation. That one mouse, he had a large family. His wife had so many children. He was a good mouse provider, diligently digging out tunnels and carving out houses to assure all his children had space with rooms of their own.
When you walked, the little godwits tried to lure you away, “Follow me, follow me over here.” They kept you from finding their nests. Hungry, you looked harder and when you found them you greedily cracked three eggs and drank them; they were so small in your hands.
Your long hair was wet. Wringing it dry, you sat on your clothing while the breeze dried your skin. You imagined the old village. Kayat were stored along the tundra streams. White fish swam and released their eggs, and women cut, hung, and smoked them in their smoke houses. The men were together in their men’s house making community baths for themselves while the women washed themselves in their children's urine. You were wondering about their lives and their sicknesses.
One time, you told an old woman, I wish I could have lived like that, and that woman giggled and shook her head, “No good-no good.”
And that’s exactly what she said when you tried to explain to her about your decision to have a homebirth. “No. No good.” She didn’t give any lengthy explanations. She didn’t describe the losses and deaths of babies in the womb of the many others before you, or of a father holding his new-born child and watching it die in his arms; eyes closing, lips opening, the little body turning purple and its limbs limp.
While you napped in the sun, you dreamt of wolves. They gathered around you in the cold snow, their paws making prints like tangling webs. You fell in the snow on your back; and black hair everywhere covered your face, long enough to reach your hands. Your hair was waving and covered you into a cloud of darkness. As you
disappeared into the cloud, the wolves couldn’t see you, but the cloud couldn’t disguise your smell. They hovered around you. It confused them and they sniffed into the air. One howled loud enough to awaken you.
You couldn’t forget the dream. It haunted you throughout the afternoon. You noticed that the marsh marigolds were ready to pick. The geese flew over-head and a couple of ducks swam together looking for a place to mate. A south breeze blew while you looked around at the blue sky. When you bent over, you could feel the baby jabbing at your pelvis. You pushed the little foot back to make room for yourself. You began to sing the Tulukaraq (Raven) song.
He flies above the world and looks down, spreading his wings over all he sees.
He caws and glides and slides aroundTulukaraq. The Raven-maker, oh, Raven-maker; he’s made you; he’s made me.
After you picked enough marigolds to fill your knapsack, you turned back, but you had hiked so far, and there were so many lakes, you became tired. You lay down to rest and dreamed again. You dreamed you were falling through the sky. The weightlessness confused you and your body detached itself and you kept falling, spiraling downward like a magical bird until you almost hit the ground, but the earth opened up and you passed through mouse houses, and mastodon fossils, and salmon-berry patches until you were swooped up by Raven with his huge dark wings. You slept in his feathers. He didn’t return you to the tundra. Instead he flew up to river country where the willows and cottonwoods grew taller and stronger than reed grasses used for basket-weaving. You could smell wood smoke from the smoke houses.
When you awoke you were worried that your husband wouldn’t find you. You called out his name two then three times. You were crying. Your tears became stream-like, gurgling around you. You were wet. Water engulfed you and you struggled to keep afloat, treading water with your tremendous legs. You gasped for air, and a King salmon pulled you to him. You became a fish.
You swam up the river together. Deeper and deeper, through colder and darker water, you swam against the currents for miles until Raven swooped down and with a deep dive spun up with you on his back. While riding him you fell asleep. When you awoke, you were cramping. Abject, you called out to Raven to release you. “I’m pregnant, Raven. This is not suitable.”
The pangs in your abdomen fluctuated like the waves under a little boat at sea. In a modulated movement, the baby stretched out and kicked, pounding inside of you.
Raven let you rest. You pillowed your hair around you, drying off the water droplets from your skin. Softly, you patted your breasts; the rings around your nipples were growing larger and darker. Liquid oozed out of each nipple. You touched your opening checking for the goo, but it was dry. Relieved with swelling, you sank to sleep. You dreamed of your husband. He was reaching for you and paddling his qayaq up the Mukqluktuli slough during salmon-berry season, but his reed baskets were empty. Wearing his seal-gut rain jacket, he was handsomely tall and strong. His brown fingers were tying and untying sinew. Western sandpipers began their migration, flying in circular patterns above the berries. A snowy owl landed near him. He spoke softly with anguish, “Where’s my wife?” The owl’s claws stretched open. Grabbing a mouse, they flew off, ignoring him.
He scanned the horizon for black and green, the colors of your hair and jacket. But he could not see you. Then he faded from your vision.
When you woke up, you gathered your knapsack, arranged your hair, pulled up your boots, untangled your dress, and held your stomach. The tightness alarmed you.
Before arriving at the cabin you stopped a few times to rest. The baby inside of you began to talk to you. He was big and round and sliding into your groin, punching at your opening. He felt heavy and you lifted him with both hands but he sunk back down and stayed there.
When you opened the latched door to your cabin, Kali was hammering nails into the paneling of new walls.
“Ugh, I feel like I’m about to pop.”
“I’d better call the clinic,” he said.
“No, I’ll be O.K.”
Kali placed his hands on your belly and massaged your skin. Sweaty and with a moan, you reacted to his massage. You moved in and out of consciousness and the contractions heightened and tightened. Your water broke.
You thought about your girlfriend’s birthing experience. She pushed so hard the blood vessels around her eyes broke and she looked like she had two black eyes. You thought that baby beat up my friend when he was ready to be born
You remember your mother saying, not all babies are meant to be born.
Your delirium lasted all night. You struggled in and out of consciousness. Your husband watched over you and soaked your face with warm water. Then he picked up his drum. He tapped slowly with his thumb and babyfinger. It was an old song he remembered his grandfather sang.
This poor one here Aa-rraa-raa- a- nga- li- yaa
One who keeps me warm Ii-rrii-rrii-nga-li-yaa
She lies here ill Yaa-a-nga-raa-aa-aa
He closed his eyes as his mind raced backwards and he saw a light and followed it down through the ice. He paddled from ice flow to ice flow. He saw the baby seals on an ice flow, and they resembled ghosts.
He opened his eyes and kept beating the drum and lured the child. He looked out the window at the river and saw a skiff with a family riding by, and then another.
You moaned. He checked your opening and massaged your stomach and vagina with Crisco grease.
Two days passed this way. He lay on the floor next to you. When you made your final push, he cupped his arms to catch the baby. The little pinkish-purple baby came into his hands. He cut the cord and bathed him from the kettlewarmed water. He laid the baby on your engorged breast.
“A’gaa,” you cried out, “A’gaa. It hurts.” His suckling was so weak that your breasts were sore from trying to help him suckle. You touched his face with your fingers. Checked his fingers and toes many times. His body was so little. Black hair, like yours, covered his head. His eyes opened and he looked at you. You stared into him. He closed his eyes. In your arms he stopped breathing. His body went limp. You held him closer to your bosom, until your husband pried him away from you.
You buried him on the tundra in a white box your husband built. He painted it and you placed his infant gowns and a small blue rosary inside. Then you tucked
your and his father’s pictures inside a sealskin beaded pouch and hid it near his fingers. Reverend Jimmy Dock came to bless you. Your husband shared a meal of dry fish and seal soup with him, while you rested.
When you wept, you crawled inside of a dark tunnel. You held yourself for many days, willing the tunnel to house you. The darkness felt comforting.
When your husband saw you on the bed, you were covered in blankets. They disguised your features. Your black eyes darkened and then they reddened as though they were withdrawn into their sockets. He knew he had to break you free. He built a fire and made tea. He sat crossed legged on the floor where feathers were strewn, and he picked one up and swept and tidied the room. He boiled plants in a pot of water. They simmered and smelled like the tundra. He poured a cup for you, but you didn’t drink it. He tried to brush your hair, but you jerked away.
“How long does it take, Min? How long are you willing to live like this?”
He told you a story about Yuuyaraq or Living Well. There was a lady with a husband. She loved him very much, but one day he went hunting and never returned. Her heart was broken, and she felt like a discarded tea kettle. Every day she expected him to return. She watched her door, cleaned her house, cooked his meals. But she always ate alone. Even though she had begun to neglect herself, she always thought about him. She burned ayuq to add aroma to the air in her house, and she waited for him. One day he knocked on the door, but he couldn’t go in although she wanted him to come home. She was holding his spirit back. Finally, she let him go and he never returned.
He told you, “Min, you have to let our baby go. You can’t hold on to him. He belongs somewhere else.”
He picked up his mask and drum and began to play a song that eased you into a new world. He wore his Raven mask with a King Salmon on the side and as he did, he changed shapes and his drumming beat out the spirits that inhabited your eyes. He played until he grew tired. Laying down next to you he held you; and his arms melted into your bosom and attached themselves.
You hoped he would not leave you now, or ever.
Amiik paturraarluku ellillruan tupigaq issran tusgegpenun, kemegpenun neputuq urulriatun aturatun nepulluni temevnun. Ilaulluni, umyuartequten, malrullra nallunariluni atauciurrlutek-llu.
Irniyullruuten enevni, taugam uin qanrutlerpeni, nepaitellruuq. Cali tuaten pillra assiikellrunritan.
Kiusqumallruuten qanerluku, taugam qanerciigatellruuq, tua-i-llu anluten piyualuten.
Piyuallruuten nunapigmi nanvat avataitgun ayagyuavet, kiingan uin unitevkenaku, taugam nunat.
Kiimecullruuten, upcugluten irnillerkarpenun. Nuna ilakliucullruan. Cimillruuten umyugiuryugluten-llu ellaaciryugluten irnivailegpet. Piyuallruuten carangllugni qanrutevkenaku.
Kiak ayagnillruuq Bering Sea-mi imarpigmi mecaulriim-llu nunam melugaqluten kitnarqelriatun qaugyatun. Sap’ akigken imanguk urunek mermek-llu. Itgagken kumlatellruuk suukiigken mecungagnek ciurnaqlutek. Lagit tengaullruut qalrialuteng-llu piyuallerpeni.
Akluten yuullruaten putukuten-llu akurrluki nanvamun. Caranglluut cetugmiallruagket itgagken cingillregken-llu. Takaryullruuten matangqallerpenek akertem temen agtuqsailaku uksurpak. Nuna ellacugninarqellruuq. Ayurninarqellruuq. Qengagken ilangciarallruak. Tepengqellruuq akallaulriatun nunatun. Ciuggluten tangellruaten nanvat yaaqliquuralriit, umyuarteqluten miilicaaruyugnarqut.
Nuyaten akurtaten kumlalngurmun mermun. Urut puglellruut, ler’arrluni-llu quletmun qaugyamek acianek. Avatiini, tunutellget kuimallruut, aqumgaluteng mer’em qaingani. Angllurluteng kuimaraqluteng mer’em aciakun. Tuaggun pugnayuuksaaqaqavteng,
Allaakun pugaqluteng, naanguarluten-llu tuaten. Nallullruat ilautellren yurallermeggni. Angllurluteng nerrlermeggni, mayuqetaarluteng, melquit qevlercenaateng meq elluraqan tunumeggnek uqulilriamek. Tangramegteggen, tengellruut, yaaqvanun pivkenateng, allaamun nanvamun, kiimetnaluteng. Elpet pillgucirpeknak. Yuranrillruut tuani aqumgallerpeni, mikelngurmek qumigluten aqsavni, nanvam qukaani. Tunutellek qalriallruuq qungvagnaqluni. Niicugninqegcaarallruuten niilluku-llu atauciq qalriallrani nuliran-llu kiuluku. Qalriallruuk kiutaagulluutek. Umyuarteqevkallruaten kenkamek.
Yaaqvanun piyuallruuten maaten piuten uitaluten nunallerni Calitmiuni, ak’aki akiatni nanvat, nunapigmi qamiqungualilriami canegnek igtenek-llu. Ak’allaat enellret naurpagluki
teglegumaluki-llu kaviaret ilakellriit. Uugnaraat tumait nunam avciani tumyarat-gun ayagluteng.
Uugnarayagaat uitaviksaguulluki, neramkuarluteng neqkarcurluteng-llu. Igtait imaunateng, uitnerarluteng uksurpak qavallermeggnek. Atauciq uugnar ilalirluni. Nulirra irnialipiarluni.
Uugnar taum assirluki aulukellrui neqkangqertelluuki, elagluni tumyariluni eneliluni-llu irniani
tamalkuita uitavigkangqertelluuki allaakaita.
Piyuallerpeni, yaquliyagaat maligcetaarluteng, “Maligesnga, maligesnga wavet.” Ungluteng nataqevkallrunritait. Kaigavet, cumigtekanirluten yuallruuten nalaqutlerpeni-llu ciiciluten
pingayunek kayangunek merluki-llu; mikellruut unategpeni.
Nuyaten takellriit mecungellruut. Ciurluki, aqumellruuten aturarpet qaingatnun anuqsaaraam kinercetellraku qain. Umyuaqellruan nunalleq. Qayat nekeggiingallruut nunapiit avataitni qurrlulriani, Neqyagaat kuimallruut qurrluteng-llu, arnat neqlillruut, agarrluki, puyuqluki-llu puyurcivimeggni. Anguutet quyungqallruut qasgimi maqililuteng ellmeggnek arnat-wa ervuqalriit irniameng tequritni. Umyuangcautekellruat yuullrat naulluutait-llu.
Ataucirqumek arnassaagaq qanrutellruan, Tuaten yuullruyugyaaqua, tauna-llu arnaq temciyugluni ungaulugluni-llu, “Assinrituq – assinrituq.”
Tuaten-llu qanellruuq nalqiguutessaallerpeni enevni irniyuullerpenek. “Qanga. Assinrituq.” Nalqigutellrunritaaten. Qalarutkellrunritai cagmaumallret yuunrillrat-llu mikelnguut neliaritni amlleret arnat ciuvni yuullret, wa’llu aatamek tegumialriamek anqiyaarmek tangvagluku-llu anernerillrani tegumiaqnginaanermini; iik cikemlutek, qerrluk ikirrlutek, temyagii qiungluni ipii-llu unaqserrluteng.
Qavaqacillerpeni akertemi, qavangurtullruuten keglunernek. Avatevnun quyurtellruut kumlalngurmi nengelmi qanikcarmi, tumlialuteng itgait negait negaicetun ilarqutellriatun. Igtellruuten tunutmun qanikcarmun; tungulriit-wa nuyat avatevni keggiinan tuaten patuluku, unategken-llu tekillukuk. Nuyaten pekluteng patuluten-llu amirlutun tungulriatun, keglunret tangerciigatellruatgen, taugam amirlum patullrunritaa tepen. Avatevni uitallruut. Ayuquciitellruut naruurluku-llu ella. Ilit qastuluni maruarallruuq tupaggluten.
Nalluyaguutesciigatellruan qavangun. Nayurturallruaten tuani ernermi. Maaten-llu piaten allngiguat avurnarillinilriit. Lagit qulaillruatgen malruk-llu uqsuqak kuimarlutek nani nuliqvigkameggnek yuarlutek. Ungalamek anuqsaarallruuq kiartellerpeni qiugliq qilak. Putellerpeni, qumiin elpekellruan kucuqun akngirtellrani.
Cingellruan itgacuarii. Atuqcaarangellruan Tulukaruum yuarutii.
Tengaulartuq qulini nunam acitmun kiarrluni, yaqugni nengllukek kiartellermini.
Qalrialartuq tengaullermini elluurtaqluni-lluTulukaruk, Tulukaruk- pilista, Tulukaruuk-pilistaa; piliaqellruaten;piliaqellruanga. Allngiguanek issraten imiirraarluku, utertellruuten, taugaam yaaqvapianun ayallrulliiniuten, amllepiarluteng-llu nanvat, taqsuqngellruuten. Inarlluten mernuinercirluten cali-llu qavangurturluten. Qavangurtullruuten iggnguarluten pagaken ellakun. Ayuuquciicetellruaten temvet uqgetellran igtellerpeni temevnek-llu
Avvluten igqurluten-llu, acitmun allayugtun yaqulegtun arulairluten-llu nuna tekiteqatarluku, taugam nuna ikirrluni ayagluten-llu uugnaraat enait kiturluki, quugaarpiit-llu enellrit ak’allaat, atsat-llu naumaviit tengutnatkaanun Tulukaruum tungulriignegun yaqurpalraagmikun. Qavallruuten melqurriini. Utrutellrunritaaten nunapigmun. Taugam tenguutellruaten kiatmun kuigem nuniinun kavirliyagaat naucit-llu nauviatnun sugtunruluuteng asvaillruluteng-llu iitarni yualuktukaitni issracilriit. Naryugngallruuten muragnek aruvilriamek puyurcivignek. Uitellerpeni penggartellruuten uivnun nataqenritnayukluten. Qayagaullruan atra malrurqugnek tua-i-llu pingayurqunek. Qiallruuten. Aluviten carvalriatun ayuqlirillruut, ller’arrluteng avatevni. Mecungellruuten. Mer’em qaingillruaten pugtangnaqluten-llu, kitngiarluten irugpegun angelriignegun. Yuurrmiurluten aneryaallruuten, Taryaqviim-llu nuqluten tungminun. Neqngurtellruuten.
Maliklutek kuimellruutek kiatmun kuigkun. Et’uriinarluni cali et’uriinarluni, kumlariinalriakun tan’gerinalriakun merkun, kuimallruuten asgurluten amllernek agnernek Tulukaruum elluurrvikluten angllurluni tunumigluten-llu qulmuruulluten. Ayausnginanrani qavaqallruuten. Uitellerpeni, qeluallruuten. Ciunerkairulluuten, qayagpallruan Tulukaruk ayagcetesqelluuten.
“Qingartua, Tulukaruuk. Waten piyunaituq.
Akngiallren aqsavni ayalallruuq qairtun angyacuaraam aciani imarpigmi. Cakneq pivkenani pektaallruuq, mikelnguq nengqurluni kitngigluni-llu, nutngarluni iluvni.
Tulukaruum mernuinercircetellruaten. Putuskaqellruaten nuyaten avatevni, kinercirluki mecungelriit temevni. Mulngakluten, patgullruagken evsaigken; uivenqellriit avatiigni nuukenka angliriinallruut tunguuriinarluteng-llu. Mermek maqellruuk. Miklenguum anvigkaa yuvrillruan anyukluku kakegglugngalnguq, taugaam kinertellruuq. Qacigarrluten qavaqallruuten.
Qavanguqellruan uin. Yaggvikellruaten ayaurluku-llu qayani mayurluku Mukqluktuli kuiggaar
iqvam nallini, taugam assigtai iitarnek piliaqumalriit imaitellruut. Aturluku imarnitni mecungniurcuun, tangssunaqluni sugtuluni
Pinirluni-llu. Nunapigngalnguut unatain qillertaqluku angiitaqluku-llu yualu. Iisuraaraat upaangellruut, tengaurluteng uivaarluteng atsat qulaitni. Anipa mit’ellruuq canianun.
Qalartellruuq qaskunani cakviurluni, “Nanta nuliaqa?” Anipa-m cetui nengluteng ikirtellruut.
Tegutellruuq uugnarmek, tenglutek-llu, nalluunguarluku.
Kiartellruuq avatmini tungulriamek cungaglimek-llu, tuaten ayuqngata n uyaten paltucuaraan-llu.
Taugam tangerciigatellruaten. Tua-i-llu tangerqengarpenek catairulluuni.
Uitellerpeni, tegullruan issraten, kituggluki nuyaten, nuqlukek sap’akigken, taqmiin kituggluku, aqsan-llu tegumiaqluku. Cagnillranek alangaallruuten.
Tekipailegpet enevnun arulaillruuten qavcirqunek mernuinercirluten. Qumigpet mikelnguum qalarutngellruaten. Angellruuq uivenqeggluni akuurarpenun elluurrluni, tenglugluku callanren.
Uqamailngatellruuq elpet-llu kevegluku unategpegun taugam aciqsigikanirluni tuantaurluni-llu.
Ikirtellerpeni amiiga ikircailkuciumalria enevet, Kali mulutuullruuq ussukcanek nutaranun qacarneriinun enem.
“Ak’, tuar qagqatalrianga.”
“Qayagaurlaurlaku clinic-aaq,” qanellruuq
“Qanga, assirciqua.”
Kali-m unategni ellillruak aqsavnun ellaigarluku-llu kemgen. Serluten cungiitellruuten agtullrani. Ellaangeqtaallruuten cagniallra-llu aqsavet teggiallra tuknirillruuq cagniriluni. Mer’a qumigpet maqertellruuq.
Neqakellruan yugnikngarpet irnillra. Tenguuqaallruuq cakneq taqret-llu iigken avategkeni navgaluteng tuar iik qiulriik. Umyuarteqellruuten taum piipim nangtellrua yugnikngaqa
yuurrnariillermini.
Tuaten-llu-qaa piipin piqatartuq?
Umyuaqan aanan qanellra, tamarmeng mikelnguut yuurtarkauluteng pinritut. Unugpak ellangqellrunrituuten. Ellaangeqtaarluten pillruuten. Uivet murilkellruaten keggiinan mertaqluku puqlanilriamek. Tua-i-llu cauyani teguluku. Cauyallruuq cukaunani kumlumiikun cali iqelqumikun. Akallarmek yuarutmek umyuaqekminek apaurlumi atullranek.
Usuurluuq Aa-rraa-a-nga-li-yaa
Urumavkartemaa Ii-rrii-rrii-nga-li-yaa
Wani cali inangqauq Yaa-a-nga-raa-aa-aa
Cikmellruuq umyuarteqlermini kingunermek tangerrluni-llu tanqigmek maliggluku-llu acitmun cikukun. Ayaullruuq cikut ullagtaarluki. Tangellruuq ul’utvagnek ugiingalrianek cikumi, alangrutun ayuqellruut.
Ligni uitellruak cauyarturluni-llu mikelnguq taisqelluuku. Qinertellruuq egalerkun kuigem tunginun tangerrluni-llu angyamek ilakellrianek uciluni kitulriit, calill’ allamek.
Yuuniallruuten. Yuvrillrua mkkelnguum anvigkaa minguglukek-llu aqsiigken ucun-llu saalamek. Maruk erenrek pellullruuk tuaten. Inartaqluni natermun canivnun. Nangnermek tenguuqellerpeni cingluten, talligni quyurrlukek piipiq teguyuumallrua. Kavirrlugcetellria-qesurlircenaani piipiq anellruuq unategkenun. Kepellrua qallacia erurluku-llu saaniigkun puqlaciumalriamek mermek. Elillrua piipiq imartulriamun evsairpenun.
“A’gaa,” qiallruuten, “A’gaa. Akngirnarquq.” Melullra tukniatellruuq evsaigken-llu mernurlutek ikayungnaqlerpeni aamallrani. Keggiinaa agtullruan yuararpegun. Yuvrirluki yuarai putukui-llu amllerqunek. Temii mikpiallruuq. Tunguluteng nuyai, nuyavtun, qamiqrua patumaluku. Uilluki tangellruaten. Tangvallruan. Cikmellruuq. Talligpeni aruulaillruuq
Aneryaallra. Temii unaqseqertellruuq. Tegukanillruan, uivet tegunatkaanun elpenek. Tungmagtellruan nunapigmi qatellriim yaassiigem iluani uivet piliarani. Mingullrua elpet-llu iluanun elliiluki anqiyagaam aklui cali qiugliq piicak iluanun ekluku. Agayulirta Henry Dock-aq taillruuq piicaucarturluten. Uivet nerutellrua kinertarnek neqnek maklaarmek-llu suupamek, mernuinercillerpeni.
Qiallerpeni, aurrluten itellruuten tan’gercetellriamun kalvagyaramun. Elpenek tuantellruuten amllerni ernerni kalvagyaramun talisngasqumaluten. Tan’geq elgangqanarqellruuq.
Uivet tangellraten inglermi, ulignek patumallruuten. Iirumallruat ayuqucin. Iigken tungulriik tan’gerillruuk tua-i-llu kavirilutek itrumalriatun ukinermeggnun. Nallunritellruuq angiitarkaucirminek. Keneq kumartellrua yuurqaliluni-llu. Aqumellruuq irugni navrulluukeknatermun melqut sagingaviatnun, iliitnek tegutellruuq kagiluni-llu kituggluku uitaviin. Qallaucecillruuq naunrarnek egatmi mermek imalegmi. Qallaatellruut nunapigninaqluteng. Imiiritellruaten saskamek, taugam mellrunritan. Nuyiuryugyaaqellruaten, taugam unitkanillruan.
“Qaillun pitalriamek pituat, Min?” Qaillun pitalriamek waten yuyugcit?”
Qanrutelruaten qanemcimek Yuuyaramek. Arnartangqellruuq uilegmek. Kenkellrua cakneq, taugam ernret iliitni pissuryallruuq utertevkenani-llu. Ircaqua navgumallruuq, ciqitartun saaniigtun ayuuqellruuq ellmini. Unuaquaqan neryuniulallruuq uterrnayukluku. Amiini kellutelallrua, eneni carriirarluku, keniutaqluku. Taugam kiimki neruraraqluni. Ellmkinek murilkenringermi, umyuaquraaraqluku uini. Ayunek legciaqluni eneni aruvirluku, utaqaluku-llu uini. Erenret iliitni tukriallruuq amiigmi, taugam iterciiganani itresqumangraani utercesqumangraani. Nuqiingallrua tarnera. Piyaqlirluni, pegtellrua ayagtelluuku utertenqigtevkenani-llu.
Qanrutellruaten “Min, ayagcetarkaugan piipipuk. Teguumiaqurciigatan. Wangkuk pikenritaapuk. Tegullrua kegginaquni cauyani-llu aturluni-llu yuarutmek elkarrluten-llu nutaramun ellaamun. Atullrua Tulukaruk kegginaquq Taryaqvagmek pingqellria menglemini atuullermini-llu elucilinqigtaarluni cauyallran-llu anlluki anerneret iigpet tangerciigaluutait. Cauyallruuq taqsuqengnatkaminun. Inarrluni canivnun tegumiaqellruaten; tallik-llu uruullutek manuvnun nepullutek.
Unitesqumallrunrituuten elliinun waniwa, wa’llu watqapik.
Emeritus Professor of English T. Roland Wibbles will always remember where he was standing and what he was doing when the call came. He had just returned from his annual visit to the Camperdown Elm at the university arboretum, the exorbitant cost of which tree he had underwritten in memory of his dear Florence, now two years deceased. He made it his custom on the date of their wedding anniversary, May 15th, “the Ides of May,” to visit the tree with its small plaque bearing her name, dates of her existence, and platitudinous note reading “Devoted Wife & Mother.” Upon his return home,
although he felt their domicile of some forty-five years to be now something other than a “home,” it was his custom or hallowed tradition to pour himself a double shot of an excellent single malt scotch he liked to think he could not afford.
“Well,” he said, addressing their wedding photo on the fireplace mantel, “you deserved a better man.” In this sentiment the professor was quoting Florence’s sister. He was glad she lived two thousand or so miles away in eastern Ohio. In the black-and-white photograph, Flo smiles happily and TR, as he prefers to be called, looks stunned,
his mouth slightly parted as if he is about to say “oh,” as in “oh, what just happened?”
Just as he raises his glass, the phone rings. He sets his un-sipped scotch on the mantel and answers with the curt, testy “hello” he has created for an array of phone solicitations and robocalls owing to Flo’s decades of contributions to a plethora of worthy causes, both political and charitable. Over their decades together, Wibbles reckons somewhere between eighty and ninety percent of all calls to their residence have been intended for her ears, and the years since her passing have not significantly altered that range albeit Flo’s ears are no longer extant.
This call, however, is aimed at his ears. “Hellooo,” a feminine voice he barely recognizes purrs. “Doc-tor Wibbles,” the voice over-pronounces, “how are you doing these days?” Briefest pause, not permitting his response, then, “This is Jenny Brooks!”
TR endows Professor Brooks’s pronouncement with an exclamation mark. The woman who once occupied the office across from his in Bartlett Hall ascended to the second floor and the position of department chair during his last year “in the trenches,” as he likes to put it. In his fifty years of college professoring, he has always regarded himself as a field officer, while all those occupying administrative positions, with reserved parking spaces and bloated salaries, he considers “staff officers,” who serve safely behind the lines. Colonels and generals they; lieutenants, captains, or majors he and his comrades. Among the manifold reasons for his retirement at age seventy-three—early retirement, as he saw it, having set his sights on another three years at least, to include one final sabbatical—was the election of Jennifer Brooks as chair. Not that he had any interest in the post himself, but that she represented every misdirection he had witnessed in the field of literary studies in recent years, from the celebration of the always popular creative writing emphasis and the apotheosis of critical theory to, well, to put it succinctly, “Postmodernism.”
What hurts worst, he thinks as he assures Jenny he is doing very well these days, has been what he laments as The Death of the Canon. When he began teaching at Podunk U, as he likes to call it—quite openly since his retirement—his classes on 17th-century British Poetry & Prose, or on Milton, or in later years on the Romantic Poets, would fill easily, perhaps never to overflowing, but sufficiently to “make” without question. By the time he retired two years ago Shakespeare himself was in jeopardy. Led by the likes of Jenny Brooks and her co-chair, and who else would that be but Sandra McGint of the CW emphasis,
the department had blithely voted with near unanimity to drop the Shakespeare requirement for English majors, even for those in the increasingly less popular “literature emphasis” among the five degree options, where the Bard was now merely “recommended.” By the time he “stepped down,” as Jenny Brooks euphemized on the announcement of his retirement at the last department meeting of the academic year (scattered applause, indiscreet whispers of “fi-nal-ly”) his teaching load had been limited mostly to lower division survey courses. His offering of a graduate seminar on The Literature of The Great War, to correspond with the 2018 centennial, had failed to attract sufficient numbers. Well.
“I’ve a proposition for you,” Jenny Brooks announces with what TR takes to be an assumed lilt of confidence to her voice. “You’ll be surprised,” she adds.
In the proverbial nutshell, Professor Brooks’s proposition is a year’s teaching “gig,” as she so eloquently puts it, at his full salary plus honorarium because they, the department, “need” him. A totally unpredictable combination of events—including two profs on sabbatical, one sudden departure for presumably better pastures, and a pregnancy leave—has left them with courses to be covered, one at the advanced undergraduate level and one graduate seminar. His choice as to the subjects. The surprise is that Professor Wibbles accepts.
“Unthinkingly,” he reprimands himself as he sips his scotch, savoring each taste. What was he thinking? He wasn’t. He was taken off guard. Jenny Brooks must’ve been amazed to witness his prompt acquiescence to her request which was only lightly seasoned with flattery. “We’ve missed you,” she said, and “many of your colleagues have wondered what you were up to,” or perhaps it was only “some of your colleagues.” The clincher, he supposes, is the “need” line: “We need you.” The university had suffered declining enrollments for some years before the pandemic, and like all such institutions, it had taken a beating during those couple of years, and now, two years out, it struggled still.
The very conservative state legislature of the crimson red state has never gone all in when it comes to higher ed, many legislators in both the House and the Senate suspecting post-secondary education amounts to little more than a luxury, a frill. So far as dear old Podunk is concerned, Prof Wibbles well remembers the occasion early in his tenure when a member of the state board lashed out against tenure and sabbaticals even as he proclaimed his pride in “the fact that we get plenty bang for our buck out of that place.” The point of that august
spokesman being that additional “bucks” in that year’s budget allocation were not necessary.
More recently, a groundswell has built in the statehouse in opposition to courses that do not educate but “indoctrinate our children in liberal socialist ideologies.” The representative of one rural district has proposed that the Pledge of Allegiance “needs to ring out daily in the classrooms across our fair state, not merely in private schools, but in every single public school, and yes, in every community college and university as well!” She is in the process of proposing legislation that will ban any courses dealing with “social justice issues.” So much for high school courses in government, Wibbles suspects, or for the university’s departments of political science and sociology. And what might this good lady have to say of “the liberal arts”? She is also leading the campaign against “sex ed” in the public schools, as it “offers nothing less than a gateway to abortion clinics, rampant homosexuality, transsexualism, and permissiveness.”
TR wonders whether he would have been wise to leave the state upon retirement, but between the last months of the pandemic and Florence’s yearlong struggle with cancer, he found himself unable to act. Inertia? He recalls a scholarly essay on Hamlet in which the psychological term “apraxia” is employed—the inability to act. “What’ve you been doing with yourself?” his son Mark asked on the phone a week ago. “Marking time,” the professor said.
“You need to get away. Travel. Come on over for a few days. You haven’t seen your grandkids since Mom passed.”
He would think about that, Wibbles said. Of course, he would. And he’d consider driving down to Santa Fe to stay with Susan and her third husband, who owns an art gallery and is probably the best of the lot. But he hasn’t really thought about or considered doing anything of the sort. Between the pandemic and the loss of his wife, TR hasn’t gone much of anywhere. In fact, he has not even gone fishing to speak of in the past two or three years. It has been all he can manage to propel himself out the door to catch opening day on the streams, especially since his favorite stream has been compromised by RV encroachments and posted signs. “Damned Texans and Californicators buyin’ up the West,” swears the bartender in Carnell, his favorite post-angling waterhole. He sighs.
Wibbles recalls boasting to Flo after he retired about not missing the classroom and not even missing his beloved research. “Thought I’d miss all that,” he said, “but I don’t. I really don’t at all.” Florence had simply laughed. “You do too!”
He hadn’t pursued the argument. He rarely did, and on those rare occasions when he did stumble into debate with her, he almost always lost. She knew him too well. So, given what he has just agreed to do, TR concludes, point for Florence. Game, set, match, come to think of it. And he does play the tennis metaphor, which reminds him of their first date, arranged by Flo’s roommate at IU, a sultry June morning in Bloomington, 6-1, 6-4. Odd that he’d remember the scores. She’d eased up on him after that first set. They had played only two or three other times after that embarrassment.
A few nights later, having signed the one-year contract, the professor considers the possibilities for his courses the coming academic year, the opportunity to teach that one last graduate seminar, that one last advanced undergrad course in his beloved 17th century— Donne and Milton. He might divide the term evenly between them, maybe throw in a dash of Francis Bacon and Andrew Marvell, but what about good old Izaak Walton? One final shot at The Compleat Angler? Maybe he’ll toss in Walton’s little biographical sketch of Donne. But what about Sir Thomas Browne’s remarkable essay, Hydriotapahia, or Urn Burial, the finest piece of prose in that century and the grandest meditation on death ever penned in English? Well.
The professor, his mind on fire, finds himself leaving his bed at midnight and slipping into his office, where he has spent precious little time these past couple of years. First, that graduate seminar. He will spend the summer months cobbling together a course on the Faust theme that tempted him often over the years but that he felt “risky.” Will it fly? Are even the graduate students at good old Podunk up to the challenge? Well, he will assemble a reading list that will tempt even students in the struggling MFA program who over the years have elicited great reluctance to enlist in serious literature courses other than those devoted to contemporary writers. The seminar will start with Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and include the entirety of Goethe’s Faust, yes, even the second part, rarely if ever performed even in Germany these days, and yes, they will inquire into the libretto of Gounod’s opera. And Marie Corelli’s 1895 thriller, The Sorrows of Satan. Also, Mikhail Bulgakov’s darkly satiric Master and Margarita and Klaus Mann’s Nazi-era novel Mephisto, which deals with the actor Gustaf Gründgens, and he must bring in the 1981 movie. Yes! And the Irish novelist John Banville’s intricate little Mephisto, and for a surprise how about Louisa May Alcott’s 1877 novel, A Modern Mephistopheles? Well, no one will expect that! Maybe Sherman Alexie’s Reservation
Blues? Not too much of a stretch.
For what price might we barter our souls, he asks himself, as he will ask his seminarians? Certainly, politicians of the past few years have provided ample fodder. He prefers not to go there, but if vigorous class discussions take the seminarians in the direction of “social justice issues,” so be it. Given the one-and-done nature of the beast, he will feel free to take chances with this course, even though he is not a “chancy kind of guy.” His own self-descriptor. Professor Wibbles will enjoy this foray into controversy as much as he will delight in his indulgence of the poetry and prose of four centuries past, The Great Tradition. The ghosts of F.R. Leavis and Harold Bloom would applaud. From what he can tell, no one at Podunk U has taught British writers of any century earlier than the 19th, excepting Shakespeare, for more than seven years, when he offered a meagerly enrolled class on Milton he came to call “the Milton class from Hell.” No need to go there.
TR spends the summer months devoting himself to the construction of these two courses he will offer in the fall. During the spring semester, he will teach a survey course on British writers from 1750 to the present, “the present” in this case being Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, maybe Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, toss in a couple of poems by Seamus Heaney. He will also get a last chance to teach his Hemingway course, an apt second ending to his career in the trenches. He considers his first last chance fell flat, a whimper of an ending rather than a triumphal bang. But for the courses he will present in the fall, he is erecting an “edifice,” as he sees it. An edifying edifice.
The professor recalls an incident early in his career when he was teaching Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which he considers, without apology, to be a nearly perfect novel. “Doctor Wibbles,” a dark-haired girl (aka “young woman”) interrupted, “why are we reading this book?”
Taken off-guard, he had fumbled for les mots justes but with slight success. “It is almost universally regarded as one of the most important and best-written novels in the world,” he said with what he hoped was indisputable authority. “All-time,” he added emphatically.
“Well, I certainly don’t see why.” The young woman was adamant.
“To what do you object?” he asked, gritting his teeth and annoyed with himself for having forgotten the student’s name at this critical moment. He would like to have said, “To what, Miss _________, do you object.” Mumblings and mutterings from the class, suddenly
transformed from passive indulgence or active disinterest to a committed if not enthusiastic state of revolt. Why indeed had they been compelled to read this book to which one of their kind, one of their own classmates, had so vociferously objected?
“I find this book to be utterly unedifying,” the complainant declared.
How had he responded? Oddly, while he can recall the event all too vividly, up to a point, he cannot bring back to mind what he said, but he thinks he may simply, lamely, have responded, “I’m sorry to hear that.” He knows he did not launch into a spirited defense of the novel, and now, all these years later, he regrets not having done so. Flaubert deserved better of him. And so, for that matter, did the recalcitrant Miss whatever-her-name-was.
“Spots of time,” he reflects, thinking back to a notable passage in Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem, The Prelude:
There are in our existence spots of time, That with distinct pre-eminence retain A renovating virtue …
He once had more of that passage by heart. It has to do with the “healing powers of nature,” the capacity of such moments to cure confusion, indecision, apraxia (?), frustrating uncertainty, even depression. Depression. All his life Professor Wibbles has refused to yield to that condition. Not so Florence who, on occasion, would confess to feeling depressed and in the same instant simply shrug it off. “I don’t know,” she might say, “I was just feeling depressed yesterday.”
“I never feel depressed,” TR would foolishly aver.
“Of course, you do,” Flo would say. “But you’re a man, and when men feel depressed, they hide it by getting angry.”
This would open another subject for debate the professor knew he would have no chance of winning.
But this summer, buoyed by his excitement over the course preparations, TR experiences no hint of depression, so far as he can tell. Or anger, for that matter. And he goes fishing several times, even though he had on a few prior occasions declared to Florence and to himself that this fishing trip was going to be his last.
“This is it for me, Flo. Last time on the Logjam, or any other river.”
“Oh, Rollie, you’re such a liar.”
The fishing is not great, even when he drives the extra miles to hit the North Fork, but as he tells his friend
and former colleague Walter Bagley, who retired three years before TR, “it soothes the soul.” Thinking here of the “renovating virtue” of fly fishing, whether one experiences much success or not. Walter casually mentions having gotten a call from Jenny Brooks a while back offering him a “gig” for the coming year, which he laughed off. “I told her ‘No way!’” Bagley says. “There’s no turning back.” TR confesses he has accepted the offer, “with mixed emotions,” he claims disingenuously. Walter laughs and tells him he’s crazy.
“Do you even know anyone in that department anymore? Anyone you actually like, that is?”
Wibbles explains his desire for a “last chance,” a second one, with the incentive of “doing it right this time,” and he outlines his plans for the Faust seminar.
“Hell,” Walter says, “that sounds like a great course. I think I’ll sign up.”
“Really?” TR says.
“No. I mean hell no! I think you’re nuts. Remember what Wolfe said.”
“Yeah, yeah—‘you can’t go home again.’”
“Guy knew whereof he writ.”
By the first of August, Wibbles has prepared syllabi (aka “syllabuses”) for both the 17th-century course and the Faust seminar. By the middle of that month, three weeks before the fall term is to begin, he is informed neither class has made. Jenny is sorry. The seminar very nearly enrolled the minimum ten now dictated by the administration, but the time slot he requested runs concurrent with a fiction writing workshop, and that likely explains why his seminar has attracted only seven, and that is truly regrettable, as the Faust course does sound very “enticing.” That’s Jenny’s word. “Enticing.” As to the 17th-century course, well, it, too, has fallen short of the minimum fifteen for a 400-level undergraduate course. It came down to a decision between his 17th-century course with ten enrolled or Tom Trask’s course on Postmodern Fiction, which has enrolled the maximum twenty. So.
The ostensibly “good” news is that Roland might split the overenrolled section of British lit survey, Beowulf to 1750. Jenny knows that course will be “old hat” to him. He can surely teach it with his metaphorical eyes shut tight. As to the seminar, well, that is “problematic,” but she has a ready solution if Roland is amenable. Since he retired, the English department has thrown in with “the folks at Comm and Journalism” to offer an emphasis in film-and-lit, and they “desperately need” someone to pick up the 400-level course in documentary film. He can do that, can’t he? She knows it’ll be a challenge, but she also knows Professor
Wibbles, or does he prefer “Doctor,” has always embraced a good challenge. He is renowned for his adaptability. She can line him up with the woman in Comm, Joan Trask (yes, Tom’s wife), who taught the course before but is now chairing that department and is teaching the popular film history course.
Wibbles congratulates himself for resisting the temptation to express outrage, instead opting for disappointment, and for agreeing to think about it, instead of agreeing to reject the challenge forthwith. But he cannot congratulate himself for deciding, after all, to “give it a shot.” Why? Why would he agree to such a preposterous proposition, or “alternative proposition,” as the case presents itself? Over drinks at the Quiet Place with Walter Bagley, TR expostulates: “Why shouldn’t they ask me to teach plant physiology or vertebrate anatomy? At least I’ve taken courses in botany and zoology.” This declaration leads them to a grousing session over the declining academic standards in all disciplines at Podunk U. The state legislature has recently announced another round of corporate tax cuts and of tax cuts for individuals, which will prove substantial for the well-to-do, mere pennies for hoi polloi, and which will require additional “belt tightening” at the state’s three universities.
The next day, preposterously enough, Prof Wibbles agrees to his revised teaching schedule, which includes assurances his courses for the spring term will remain as advertised along with the possibility he might try again to offer his Faust seminar in place of the survey course “if all goes well.” Jenny expresses her delight and hands him a key to a vacant office. His former office, situated on the first floor with corner windows, has been inherited by his old nemesis, Wilhelm Schiff, the department’s critical theory guru. TR commends himself for stifling a sigh at that news and resolves to spend minimal time on campus during the ensuing months. The new office is located on the third floor and the single window looks out over the rooftops of the wing that houses the departments of sociology and poli-sci.
Over the next three weeks, TR previews four or five dozen documentary films of every variety and reads through a pair of books on documentary films, including the third edition of Bill Nichols’s Introduction to Documentary, which he takes to be the standard text, and Patricia Aufderheide’s handy little volume, Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction. He watches Nova on three available public television channels devotedly and enjoys the docs more than he supposed he would. But he hasn’t the luxury of his customary preparation in depth.
Superficiality must sometimes suffice, he tells himself, not feeling good about it.
Lining up films from Nanook of the North to Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and the 2010 documentary on the war in Afghanistan, Restrepo, he feels only marginally like the phony he knows he will be. He has always enjoyed documentary films, but he has never studied them or thought of them as an academic discipline. His hurried inquiries into that field have been sufficient to prove to him without a doubt how little he knows about it. Nor can he celebrate the presumed wisdom of Socrates in knowing that he does not know. Knowledge of his ignorance, in the present circumstances, is not comforting, but daunting.
As the days slip past and the opening day of classes approaches, Professor Wibbles, despite his intense preparations, experiences the peculiar sensation, quite unusual for him, of not being up for it. If his dreams over the years have occasionally reflected incidents of classroom anxiety, his performances therein have been quite otherwise. Indeed, although his students often complain on his evaluations that he expects too much of them “readingwise,” as one student wrote several years back, and that his exams are “to hard,” they have always commended his Knowledge of the Subject (4.0 almost invariably).
The week before the term starts, he receives a roster for his Documentary Films class. Of the 28 enrolled, nine are public relations majors (PR), all but one of those being of the ostensibly gentler sex. Seven of the remaining eight will prove to be quite attractive and will array themselves in a clutch of desks to the upper right center from where his podium is fixed at the bottom of the small amphitheater intended for a population of ninety or so. The other students include only a couple in journalism, sad testimony to the decline and fall of the print newspaper in the United States (Podunk’s student paper among the recently fallen), and such diverse emphases as broadcasting & digital media, advertising, and film & television studies. Only two of his students are majoring in English with emphasis on film as lit.
Wibbles has prepared a two-page list of terms, most of them new to him, appropriate for the more-or-less technical discussion of film. He plans to examine eight or ten films in some detail, showing all or parts of them in class, thereby minimizing exposure of his ignorance. Squeeze two mid-length papers from each student, add a midterm and a final exam, and voila! He hopes. And “Hope,” after all, as Alexander Pope asserts in his Essay on Man of 1734, “springs eternal in the human breast: / Man
never is, but always to be blest.” Wibbles plans to dwell on that poem when appropriate in the Brit lit survey in the spring, but when it comes to doc films, he feels confident he will not be “blest.” More likely, “curst.”
Only three days before that initial class meeting, after two nearly sleepless nights and one irksome teacherfrustration dream, does TR come up with what some mathematicians might call an “elegant solution” to the knotty and apparently unsolvable problem of doc films. So elegant is his solution, in fact, that most of the students are four weeks into the course before one of them asks why they have been assigned Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and how the 1967 film starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor can legitimately be described as a “documentary.”
The mountains rising behind the town of Stanley brought him to a stop. They looked like the open teeth of a bear trap. Tourist season was over and half the businesses had closed for the year. The sign said only forty-seven people lived there and with the mountains and river, the place was what he was looking for. Ketchum was fifty miles to the south.
He scouted around until dark then went into one of the town's two saloons, the shabbiest of the two, Casanova Jack's Rod and Gun Club. A few cowboys stood at the bar and paid him no attention when he walked in. He ordered a Budweiser.
The building was made out of logs. It was a big place
and people didn't go there to act bored. The tables and chairs looked as if they had been in more than one brawl. Someone went out and left the door open. The warm air escaped like wild horses from a corral but everybody in the saloon ignored the cold air that replaced it, everybody but John. He started to shiver inside where nobody could see. The chill had hit him several times since a wreck on an autobahn in Germany in which he had almost died. He told himself it was the change in climate, the winter coming early to the high mountains, but he knew it was fear.
His eyes caught those of another man standing down at the end of the bar. They looked at one another for a moment then turned away. John found the man looking at him again a few moments later. Ever since that wreck. That fucking wreck. He told himself to relax, that there was nothing to worry about, but he couldn't help wonder if he was a coward and what he would do in war. That was more academic now than it had been while on maneuver with joint NATO forces. He was out of the Army. He was never going to war, and that also tormented him because he had been trained to lead men in battle and deep down he still wanted the chance to find out if he could do it. He wondered if he had gotten out of the Army too soon.
The girl working behind the bar finally closed the door. Then she started to lay a fire in the river rock fireplace. John was glad to see someone else was cold. The wood was stacked next to the fireplace and she had to split a piece for kindling. John went over to help her, not because he felt gallant but because he needed something to do. She was attacking the log as if she enjoyed splitting wood but would rather have been outside where she could take a full swing, and she gave up the axe when John asked if he could help. The log was part of an old fence post and had several knots but he worked on it and the bartender wadded up newspaper and covered it with the kindling as it fell off. For a moment, the saloon was transformed into a woodshed.
"That's enough," she said when John stood another log on the floor and wound up to whack it with the axe. "It'll burn."
"It better."
"The wood is pretty dry." She lit the paper and they stood there a moment watching the flames spread under the kindling. Then she went back to the bar. John listened to the flames hiss and waited for it to ignite the wood. The guy who had been watching him walked over but John knew he could handle it now. He was starting to feel warmer.
"Is it going to burn?" the man asked.
"I hope so. I'm cold as hell."
"You up here hunting?"
"No. I plan to do some fishing though. I just got here."
"I'm up here hunting. I haven't managed to get out yet," he laughed. He was big and drunk. "I haven't taken a vacation in two years. Where you from?"
"Seattle."
"Not much need for air conditioners there. I sell air conditioners in Boise."
John could hear the wood burning now, which made him feel even better. Just as he was about to do so, the bartender hurried over and threw on a couple of logs.
"Did you have any doubt?" she said triumphantly. John laughed. He liked her. He liked the big drunk guy he was talking to. He could feel the heat from the fire. As they talked about solar energy and air conditioners, John felt the tension start to unwind. The place was no longer so threatening. A hip looking dude and a young cowgirl walked in, ordered drinks and began playing pool. They were dirty, as if they had been out in the field, and they were having a good time. The girl was taller than her boyfriend, had thick blonde hair, and was most likely very striking when cleaned up. Hell, she already was. Another woman came in and joined them. She had dark hair and was also good looking but John could not tell if she was fat or pregnant. She stood at the bar and watched her friends shoot. John bought a Wild Turkey on the rocks. The first sip was always hard to swallow but got smoother with each successive taste.
"Do you play pool?" he asked his friend.
"Naw. Go ahead."
John walked over and asked the dark-haired woman if she wanted to play pool. There was another table but they teamed up and played the blonde and her boyfriend.
"My name's John."
"I'm Cindy," the dark haired woman said.
"My name is Sue," said the blonde. "How do you do?" she giggled drunkenly. John never did get her boyfriend's name but he shot good pool and John later learned that he was a musician. "We've been out hiking for a week," the blonde added.
"What are you doing up here?" Cindy asked.
"Fishing."
"Another fisherman.” She made it sound as if she had had her fill of them.
"I also plan on doing some writing."
"Oh really? What about?"
"The Army."
"Did you go to Vietnam?"
"No."
"The father of the child I'm carrying is a Vet."
Damn, John thought. She's got a man. And how can a man write about the Army if he has never been to war?
"Can I buy you a drink, Bruce?” Cindy asked. "John."
"I'm sorry. You won't remember my name in the morning. What are you drinking?"
They began to concentrate on the game.
"Yes, the six ball," Cindy said as John lined it up. Her tone of voice was intimate yet also bitchy enough to make him look at her before he shot. Their eyes met and they laughed silently. Then John drilled the shot, a difficult one into the side pocket.
"Nice," she said.
While lining up the next one, he laughed to himself how one moment he could feel so cold inside and the next moment so hot, then hit this shot too hard and scratched the cue ball. "Damn," he cussed, looking forward to watching her shoot. She handled herself well and was sensuous in a quiet, confident sort of way. Being pregnant also had something to do with it. When it was her turn, John wanted to come up behind her and run a hand through her long dark hair as it swung down and lay on the table.
"Are you still in the Army?" she asked when she was done.
"No. I just got out."
"Where were you stationed?"
"Germany mostly. I was over there for four years."
"That's a long time."
"Really. Coming back to the states is strange. I feel like an expatriate in my own country."
"Don't we all."
"So did you give up drinking for your baby?" he asked after a pause.
"Yes. I want to take care of it even though I'm not going to keep it."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm going to give it up for adoption. There is a couple that wants it and are welling to pay my expenses."
"What does the father think?"
"He doesn't like it. He wants to get married but I don't want my baby to suffer for my mistake. I figure the least I can do is take care of it while it's in me. That's what I'm doing up here."
After a few games, Sue and her boyfriend got tired of playing and started dancing to the jukebox. John and Cindy kept shooting.
"Why don't you just give it to the father?"
"Hell no! If I'm not going to keep it then I'm not going to let him have it either.” They both laughed. "He's been good about it though. He sends me money. That's how I can stay here."
"It sounds like he loves you."
"He does and I love him, but as a friend, not a husband. I can't see ruining all three of our lives by marrying him just because I made a dumb mistake. The baby will never know."
"Doesn't it bother you that you'll never know your child?"
"That's what I have to work out. That's why I have to talk about it."
John was impressed.
"What about you? What did you do in the Army?"
"I was a Company Commander."
"Sounds prestigious."
"If you consider being everything from a baby sitter to a marriage counselor prestigious," he laughed.
"Did you like it?"
"I liked my men. I liked the responsibility. We had a good unit and I liked watching it work. But I didn't care for the rest of the bullshit."
"What made you want to join the Army?"
"I went to West Point."
"Why?'"
It frustrated him she had gotten into him so easily, and since she had been honest about herself he decided to try and be equally as candid. "I wanted to go there. It was a challenge. There was a lot about it I didn't like but I couldn't leave once I was in. I didn't want to be a quitter. Now I don't know if it was worth it or not."
“But you miss it, don't you?"
"I guess so."
"Can you go back?"
"Sure, but I don't want to run back to the Army because I can't make it on the outside."
Cindy had to leave with her friends.
"Where are you staying?” John asked before she left.
"Sue and I are camped out in a tepee up Iron Creek."
"Doesn't that get cold?"
"It's starting to."
"I hope I see you again."
"If you hang around Stanley long enough, I'm sure you will."
They left and John finished getting drunk. Letting her slip away so easily like that made him want to see her again. It was more like a need to see her again. He drove up river to a campground and slept on the ground in his down sleeping bag. The following day he rented a cabin next to the river.
From where he sat and wrote he could raise his head, look out he window, and gaze at the mountains. He also watched the cattle on the other side of the river. Across the range on which they fed, pine forest skirted the granite mountains rising into the air like teeth. Fall was a good time to be up there. The locals relaxed and feasted on the refreshing bite in the air. There was the thrill of game to be had. In preparation for winter, windows had to be boarded and cattle trucked to lower ground. Everybody watched the first snows blanket the peaks, then melt, leaving the perennial snowfields bigger each time. Those who were going to stay got their firewood in. Winter was cold and lonely.
John found out right away that writing was going to be more difficult than he thought it would be. What he had to say was buried deep. He knew he had a story inside but clearing the debris away was going to take a long time. He had had this idea that writing was going to make him happy but that wasn’t the case. Perhaps he had read A Farewell To Arms too many times. He couldn’t get Hemingway’s voice out of his own, and neither did he know that most other males attempting to learn the craft had the same problem. Also, a book about West Point had just come out, a sensational book but one John did not like because he knew it was a cheap shot. He knew he had to dig deeper but then would anybody want to read about the Army the way he knew it? More than anything he wanted to be successful but success was supposed to make him feel happy. You really did have to be a heavyweight, he laughed early in the afternoon after sitting at the table all morning. The Salmon River had been flowing past his cabin all day, sounding like a big
wave pulling back into the sea. It was time to go fishing. Because he covered a lot of river when he fished and would finish several miles up or downstream from where he had parked, he always hoped that Cindy would pick him up when he hitchhiked back, but she never did. The fishing was good though and John's father had taught him how to cast flies long before he had read the stories about Nick Adams.
In the first week there, he covered the Salmon twenty miles in both directions. The trips up and down river appeased his frustration about writing. By the time he got back to his cabin his brain was calm. If he didn’t buy dinner, he’d cook it then read the Boise paper. After that was over, he could no longer ignore the fact that sitting in the cabin was boring so he went to either the Rod and Gun or the Mountain Village. Fishing and trying to write did make the beer and whiskey taste good. Usually, he just sat in one of the two saloons alone as he listened to the cowboys and hoped Cindy would come in, again with no luck. That made him feel like an idiot because he knew he could damn well drive up to her tepee and ask her out.
One night while Casanova Jack was jamming solely for the half dozen men lining the bar, a drunk cowboy staggered up to John and accused him of being an FBI agent.
"What," John laughed? "You got to be kidding?"
"No, I'm not, and let me tell you something, partner, you’re gonna have a rough time in this town. My name is Paul Wyatt and nobody tells me what to do."
John suddenly got that cold feeling again. "I'm not an FBI agent," he said.
"We think you are. We're getting investigated, see, and we don't like federal agents poking around in our business."
"I’m just up here fishing."
"Just in case you are an undercover agent, let this be a warning to you. I'm pretty tough. I used to be a middleweight contender. Look at these hands, I love to tee off on people."
John looked at the man's hands. They were a mass of scar tissue from countless fights or encounters with barbed wire fences. Then he looked in the cowboy's eyes. They were mean eyes and John saw that Wyatt might be tough to beat but John held his look and made Wyatt stare into his eyes so he could tell Wyatt with them that Wyatt was the one who had better be careful.
"I'm telling you one last time, I'm no FBI agent.” He had to concentrate to speak slow. He was feeling paranoid and there was no telling what he might do.
"Don't get upset," Wyatt retreated. "I'm just warning you. I don't like nobody poking in my business."
John turned away. His adrenalin was flowing.
"Don't be sore. Let's shake and be friends.” There was as much play in Wyatt's voice as there was malice. John shook his hand and squeezed hard enough to let Wyatt feel some of the steel in him. At least the shaking was so deep it couldn't be seen or felt on the surface.
"Now that we're friends," Wyatt rebounded, "I don't like my friends betraying me. You better not betray me."
"Don't worry about it," John said and turned away again for good. When Wyatt wandered off to bullshit other people, John had another drink then left the saloon. The cowboy had hit a raw nerve. Going to West Point during the end of the Vietnam War had alienated him from the rest of society. He was a symbol of the establishment whether he wanted to be or not. West Point had drilled something into him that he would never be able to cover with long hair and a beard and John understood how he could be mistaken for an FBI agent. And what if something was going down? If all the cowboys thought the same as Wyatt, he probably was in for a rough time there in Stanley. His imagination got carried away. In the Army, he had been part of a machine, and being an officer insulated him even more. That is why he got out of the Army, to test himself with the rest of life and now that it was happening he realized he was alone. There was no unit in reserve. Even an FBI agent would be in touch with the greater organization. All John had were his own legs. He could run but knew he'd hate himself for doing that. He had to hold his ground. When he made that decision, he felt better and was able to go to sleep that night. No way was he going to get run out of town.
The next day he talked to the girl who worked in Jerry's Country Store and found out the town was getting investigated for not turning traffic fines over to the county. Was that just the tip of the iceberg, John wondered, and how did a drunken cowboy like Wyatt fit into it? Maybe he was a thug. Probably not though. Probably just a joker with nothing else to do. It was actually funny, John realized.
The next week, a few nights before the Hunter's Ball, Wyatt hassled John again as John was leaving the Mountain Village. The Mountain Village was completely different that the Rod and Gun. At the Mountain Village, gas burned in the fireplace instead of wood. The bar was a beautiful antique from a demolished hotel back east and record elk antlers hung on the walls. The regulars floated between the two saloons. Casanova Jack's had live
music. Big Dick, the guy who ran the Mountain Village, had champagne Sundays, Monday Night Football, and videotaped movies. The Hunter's Ball was going to be at the Mountain Village and everybody was getting pumped for that.
John usually went home before the saloons closed but that night he had stayed after the movie. Wyatt was there too, sitting at one end of the bar with his cowboy buddies. After their first encounter, John realized that he was the stranger in town. As he had been watching them, they had been watching him.
When he left the saloon to go home, he took a piss on the wheel of his car before getting in. Wyatt came out and starting relieving himself next to his own ride, then he called John over. This time Wyatt accused him of being a narc, John was getting fed up with Wyatt. He stood there with his arms crossed on his chest and listened to Wyatt's bullshit. It wasn't much different than the other night. Paul Wyatt was tough and afraid of nothing. The poor fool had to be insecure to carry on like that and John resolved not to throw the first punch and reveal his own insecurity. When Wyatt took off his cowboy hat and unbuttoned his jacket as if he was getting down to business, John stood nonchalantly, hoping Wyatt would swing at him, but the cowboy never did. He told John it was Paul Wyatt's town and that nobody told Paul Wyatt what to do because Paul Wyatt did anything he wanted. Afterwards, when John sat in his jeep shivering, waiting for it to warm up, he knew he was not going to be able to turn his cheek again.
On the day of the Hunter's Ball, he wrote and went fishing as usual. Before showering and shaving, he did one hundred push-ups, fifty sit-ups, and cooked and ate a trout omelette. He dressed afterwards in his cleanest jeans and a Pendleton shirt an ex-girlfriend had given him for Christmas. He figured Cindy would be at the ball and he felt like a scoundrel for wearing the shirt but it was his favorite one. He felt good when he walked into the Mountain Village.
All the locals and every hunter within fifty miles was there, plus people from Boise, Twin Falls, and Ketchum. He found a place at the bar and ordered a shot of tequila. Big Dick bought him the first one. John drank it straight. The band sounded good and he recognized the drummer as the guy who had been with the blonde. He looked around and saw Cindy sitting with the blonde at a table across the room. Unable to take his eyes off Cindy for long, he managed to swallow another shot of tequila then ordered a beer. As he picked his way through the crowd, he had to pass a table full of the local cowboys. Wyatt was among
them. Their eyes met but John wanted no part of Wyatt just then, and when he was just about to leave him behind, he heard Wyatt call out, "Now there goes the Lone Ranger."
John stopped. He was halfway to Cindy. He looked at her for a moment then turned around. All five of the cowboys were kicked back in their chairs looking at him. There was no smile on Wyatt's face or in his voice.
"What did you say?"
"I called you the Lone Ranger. I don't like strangers and I especially don't like FBI agents and narcs."
"Listen Wyatt, I'm tired of your bullshit."
"What are you going to do about it?"
"Come outside with me and I'll kick your ass."
There was a silence between the men that drowned out the band. Maybe it was the tequila but John was sick of Wyatt. Wyatt couldn't back out either. When the other four men stood up and followed him and Wyatt out, John knew he was in trouble. Could the lone wolf beat the pack of coyotes, he wondered, laughing dreadfully to himself.
In the parking lot, when he turned to face Wyatt, he immediately had to avoid a looping right. He had never been in a street fight but because of the condition of his body, the adrenalin in his blood and all the boxing he had done at West Point, he was able to step in and deliver a three-punch combination that knocked Wyatt out. Watching Wyatt buckle over made him feel good, but he wasn't able to admire his work for long. As soon as they recovered from their surprise, the other men started pounding on him.
He fought back with an anger he did not know he had, punching, kicking, butting wildly, always striking something since there were so many targets. Finally, they got organized and beat the hell out of him, and they didn’t stop until he slumped to the ground. At least he was able to watch them pick Wyatt up and carry him away.
Although it was well below freezing his insides were on fire and he sat on the ground with a dumb smile on his face as the blood trickled from his nose and lips. He felt awakened, not beaten, and it had taken four of them to do it. People going in and out of the saloon looked at him uneasily. Someone asked him if he was okay and he said he was fine. He felt better than he had in a long time. When he tried standing, the pain in his ribs forced him to lean against the front of a pickup. He stayed there looking at the moon. The stars were so bright and numerous that entire patterns of them were blinking in unison. The mountains glowed in the dark. He couldn't remember feeling more alive. Cindy came out of the saloon. He realized he had
been waiting for her and he laughed quietly.
"What happened to you?" she asked.
"I got into a fight. They thought I was a narc."
"Aren't you?"
"Hell no."
"I thought you were. That's what everybody was saying. After telling you that I might sell my baby I thought you might bust me."
"You didn’t really say that but you were avoiding me?"
"I'm sorry. Can I help you?"
John caught himself before he said no.
That night he got to be the hero in the novel he wanted to write. He told her about himself as she cleaned his cuts and iced his bruises, and then he sat up, ran his fingers through her hair, and kissed her. She kissed him back then pulled her face away and looked at him long enough for John to think she was going to reject him. Next she smiled in a way that suggested that might not be the case.
"You know," said Cindy, "My midwife has been telling me I should find a lover, and I think it is time I follow her advice."
He had never made love to a pregnant woman and it suited his mood and condition. He followed her lead and went slow. When she fell asleep and he lay holding her, listening to the river hiss past the cabin, she turned in such a way that he could feel the baby kick. As he followed its movements with his hands on the outside of her belly, she murmured in her sleep. It made him wish that the child she carried was his.
Midnight Sun Kay Haneline
they say think of gravity it’s there how can you think of beautiful fields of dried wheat stop think of the palisades of the enchantments
enchanting erratics
water they say think of bald eagle eggs of truckers driving that way on purpose of nets in the columbia think of leahy junction coming from grand coulee the deer the coyotes the foxes think of random wetlands doing everything they can to stay green marking roads missing signs bracketing the long way white caps & waves so many blues now they are pausing at the casino somebody won
Constance Bacchus the sweet blue sky has smudges forming up highway 2 & all eyes are on the hills they ownTim Barnes
1.
Ancestoring back salmon spawned long before the people came. Coyote knows their names but he won’t say them now.
The river never wonders of what it is made, a body the blood of the salmon—sockeye, coho, chum, we say—silvers in its veins.
A memory deep as birth draws them like a tide through their ancestors’ will.
2.
Dead bodies nourish the unknown and bones swirl like ghosts above the spawn. Father, I feel you in my hands as I write, as I swim through the air with the breath I pull from the streams of the wind.
3.
Coyote sniffs and knows in ways that puzzle the people— the salmon have come tracing the scent of their source.
We all go back to the place of our birth to be born again in someone else.
Gabrielle BarnettIn the season of dwindling light, sweet gale astonishes, russet, against swath of willow shoot, yellow, once the eye accepts all loss of leaf and the mind stops resenting dull, damp, drab, dreary, done. Here elaborate assemblages of tuft, panicle, and spike line wedge and riffle of tide impressed mud. Now swans fly like no other: weighted white startles as grey piles on grey.
To be a Flower, is profound Responsibility
Emily DickinsonI sit at the dining room table, appetite waning, mesmerized by a single yellow lily. Symmetrical petals, stamen reminiscent of the loving eyes of my late grandmother, Elfrieda.
On the arm of my reading chair rests a literary touchstone of my childhood, My Mother is the Most Beautiful Woman in the World.
On the cover, peasants dance in colorful, flowing clothes with embroidered, bell-jar sleeves. The men wear boots with turned up toes; the women, woven sandals under wide skirts, flower wreaths on their heads, flowing ribbons in their hair.
Once upon a time, long, long, ago, when the harvest season had come again in Ukraine, the villagers were all busy cutting and gathering the wheat. For this is the land from which most Russians get the flour for their bread.
I can’t imagine much flour from Ukraine these days, as her people stand their ground, holding one fifth of the world’s calories against relentless obliteration.
I think of Elfrieda, at sixteen sent alone by her mother across the Atlantic from Latvia, one of three Baltic states north of Ukraine.
My grandmother grew up under the thumb of the Russian Empire. She did not question Ronald Reagan’s mutuallyassured destruction policy on nuclear weapons. During the Gulf War, she greeted a headline with a newspaper-quaking flourish. “George BOOSH” she announced, “is fighting for our FREEEEDOM.” An anti-war, International Relations minor, I shuddered at her simplified stance on a complicated crisis. A generation later, on the edge of a third world war, I get where she was coming from. And I wonder if our president should heed the Ukrainian president’s plea to truly “lead the world.”
After raising six children as a single mother in the forests of the Adirondacks, Elfrieda began painting evocative sunsets, crisp mountain lakes, and bright flowers. She spent long summer hours in her beloved garden, tending lilies.
On my way back from a college year in Europe, I stayed with my grandmother for Christmas. She called me a beautiful, blooming flower. One day I was a rose. The next a morning glory.
On NPR, the voices of women artists in Ukrainian bomb shelters speak to me in my kitchen. Inspired by a video of a woman offering seeds to invading soldiers, one artist paints the skulls of Russian troops as the roots of sunflowers, the unwavering national flower of Ukraine. Another sketches mothers holding children to their chests, surrounded by liminal images reaching for the sky. “Somehow,” she says, “we must find ways to bring our attention to ‘those tiny sun lights.’"
A girl walks into a bar
The bouncer stops her checks her ID and asks you’re a guy?
No, she says, I’m a woman
It says you’re a guy
I'm not. Can I please have my card back?
Why’s your name Christine?
Because I changed it, she says, Can I please have my card back?
Just a minute, he says
She searches for aid but receives only stares
He returns her card
She flees shaken
A trans girl walks into a bar and discovers she’s the punchline
Kristina BoratinoIt’s a still morning— all the world is asleep except for a few talkative birds and a slight breeze. I listen for awhile, trying to imagine what kind of praises they are offering up.
The coffee and dishes can wait.
A delicate drizzle begins, faintly blurring the swaying branches that bow down in reverence. I realize what I’ve known all along— Nature is His unmatched art-form.
Lands drained by rivers tripping downhill slow off the mark, quick to tire, unfit for distance country of ranges keeping what must be frozen frozen steady as that old faithful freezer atop the basement fridge rimed abode of years-old peas, a plenitude of overripe fruit or so we thought
Empire of frigid air, whirlpools and white water water hiding with every trick in the desert’s repertoire where snow squalls slam lowly Sutton Pass, late April slowing Highway 4 to twenty miles an hour and who was Sutton anyway lumberman, phrenologist, grave robber your basic nineteenth-century nightmare
Bed of atmospheric rivers, cradle of heat domes and seared towns hungry bison, viral wolf-stalkers, blister rust, crisped trees lodgepole pine, whitebark pine, even slide alder is torched
To name is to praise them more poetry in trees than poems, in jigsaw bark and serotinous cones
Have I gone soft? What’s true is true in the West everything is old, or new
Jeffrey Brady
Late July sun over Tickle Toe Mountain awakens shimmering Lake Bennett, calms all her inhabitants: trout, eagles, squirrels, and our tent, glowing under dwarf pine shadows.
Five days we hiked these 33 miles to trail’s end— the old Chilkoot of first peoples, gold rush dreamers, and now those like us, new visitors to the land. We held hands through forests of devil’s club and alpine lichen, climbed granite boulders on the high pass, lightly danced over stepping stones across glacier-fed streams. Then, with the end in sight, ran wildly down the last sandy hill to the blue lake.
Sleep a little longer in this light, my love: You are the salve to my soreness.
Alight fully, she rolls over, eyes trying to focus, then exhales, “Dad, is that you?” And my 10-year-old knows my smile, my nod, my tears, my regret.
We stick our blistered stocking feet outside the tent next to our dusty boots, lace them up carefully, one more time before packing up and catching our train ride— not long now till she’ll head south to her mom, and me, to my lonely northern home.
It was like entering a movie Rebel Without A Cause The Wild One Blackboard Jungle ten blocks of Greenwood shut down 300 cars lined up like prizes a row of Corvettes a Henry J with a big block Chrysler Hemi slicks and a jacked up rear end dozens of hot rods rat rods all steel ‘32 Fords rebuilt GTOs and Mustangs a ‘56 Olds Convertible and a dark blue lowered and leaded two-door ‘51 Merc like the one my brother had in 1957 ancient Harleys Indians BSAs Triumphs Moto Guzzis but Stan had asked me to tend bar at the Pig & Whistle for an hour or so knowing they’d be slammed so there I was pouring pints of Guinness and Mac & Jack a couple of martinis careful don’t bruise the gin shots of Jager with PBR chasers for a loud quartet of frat boys who should have known better bar bourbon and water from an old guy who paid with nickels and dimes and left a quarter tip one single malt 18 year old Macallan for a man who looked like a banker tequila shooters Long Island Iced Tea gin rocks and somehow a glass of Chardonnay for a woman wearing a tiara dressed like a prom queen more pints and pitchers and please don’t blow a keg not while I’m pouring Irish Car Bombs for a trio of lawyers who threw their ties in the trash by three when Liza relieved me and I walked out into the glare of the summer day surrounded by middle aged women in Poodle Skirts and Pink Satin jackets, husbands and boyfriends in white t shirts with packs of Luckies rolled in the sleeves DAs with what little hair was left while from loud speakers a DJ played Elvis crooning Heartbreak Hotel when for an instant the world stopped spinning for a couple who had to be in their 70s slow dancing in the middle of the street as if only love mattered oblivious to the throngs of people smiling and drifting around them clinging to each other moving to their hearts’ rhythms and for a moment I was with them stepping into time’s graceful song
She descends three steps into the garden
A wide wooden bench invites her to sit
Soak in sunshine like the parsnips
Like the pink hydrangeas the nearby chard and kale
Twists of gray dreadlocks escape beneath the brim
of her wilted straw hat, her clouded eyes rise above the red plaid mask
Wander past bloom-filled rows in raised beds
They linger on bent backs a family pulling weeds
She sees herself once more in yesteryear gardens
Baskets heaped with bounty she planted, tended and picked
Today in this garden her withered fingers pluck
Air flowers, pick imagined lint until one of the children
Places a yellow bouquet in her chestnut hands
every day I would take note of myself in my bathroom mirror with amazement. How craggy I am, I would surmise, just look at that steely glint in my eyes. My leathery hand fondles a coyote pup a jigger of whisky chills by my laptop. There might be a stranger bound-up in my closet, gagged with a sock and panty hose.
After my breakfast of oats and grain, out front of my doublewide, dust devils swirl on the featureless plain. I wonder if I’ll ever act again. I tug on my Stetson and rev up my Harley. There’s miles to travel before I unravel. I roar past the crossing with inches to spare—I conjure a western beauty— wild roses twined in her hair.
High desert music rises around me, against background rumble of motor and train, mourning doves hoot a sorrowful refrain. In the borrow ditch a diamondback shakes his maraca. Close-by a bullet ricochets with a whine. Whisk-broom sagebrush sweeps the asphalt, high above a redtail screams his warning, a crack! lighting smacks the hard pack.
A semi pulls up beside me, snorts like a bull, and bellows its horn. “Fuck off,”
I give the long-hauler the finger. If I had my six-shooter I’d blow out his tires. But I left my revolver back in the Rover, so I reflect on my mountain-cat nine lives. Time to head home, time for my lunch, I’ll finish that play, beat death to the punch.
In a few flaps and flutters on that sultry Costa del Sol evening two azure-winged magpies might have krrr-krrred their way to the crest of the hill where locals promised cooling wind and a view worth blisters, bites, broken ankles.
But wingless and unable to intuit a trail we zigzagged a bottle of tempranillo and two pink plastic cups through a stone pine forest of vesper-thrumming cicadas, stumbled and scrambled past talus towers atwitch with scorpions, a squadron of ants transporting a millipede, and one six-inch rhinoceros beetle wobbling atop scree on his back.
Up and up we scrabbled over rock shards and rubble, cobble and clay to an abandoned ermita, an ancient chapel in the clouds. We sat in her shade on steps painted the color of our wine sipping above cascades of white casas plummeting down the Sierra like cubist waterfalls into a valley of violet marguerite ranging toward the great shark fin of Gibraltar glowing in the same mauve Mediterranean sunset as across water the parched mountains of Morocco.
Michael ChristensonIt’s 85 degrees in Juneau and I’m out on Zerelda’s porch, drinking hot coffee and somebody just lit a candle at my little cast-iron table. I understand the underlying reasoningit’s citronella and it’s s’ppose ta keep the bugs off but really this isn’t helping.
The coffee has a pinch of chili powder in itapparently they don’t use cayenne at this establishmentwhy not double down?
as the heat rises off the street in a shimmering mirage of waves.
Inside the restaurant is a painting of a woman, a model, and an artist, and I start to wonder if the line between art and artist isn’t wholly imaginary… Isn’t art just circling back to the same few obsessions we’ve always had, a process of expressing our preoccupations, recording the strange activities of the brain and depositing the results in the laps of strangers?
Looked at the right way, everything is a hallucination — I mean, it’s all just 3 lbs. of braided dough in a black box making it’s best guess as to what’s going on out here.
We’re all our own inventions, stories we make up trying to fashion the random shit the universe throws at us into outfits, until our clothes, already soaked in sweat, coated in the lamina of experience, like the layers of a painting, built up, stage by stage, begin to take on the resemblance of intention.
Look up in the sky and see three small lights flickering in the void, avoiding colliding, every man and every woman a star, and we can’t help but try to tie them together in some Grand Unified Narrative, it’s a miracle there’s only 88 constellations, Apophänia, pareidolia, synaesthesia, Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response rubbing up against Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus, mysterious innuendos and maroon roses enthusiastically stomp the chic chronicles. I love the noises that come out of her face.
Art, roughly, has three parts, anagrammatically, the Activity, the Realization, & the Testimony and an artist can love one phase and hate the rest, or make things alone in their room, at a desk or even at the table of an outdoor cafe, beads of sweat dripping onto notebook pages, partially blotting out sleazy emotions that will never be shared with anyone other than the ghost of Emily Dickinson.
I don’t go into the bistro to gaze upon the painting, to cool myself in soothing blues that breeze across an imaginary landscape, that’s not how this works. I’ve got my own imaginary landscapes to create, out here in this oppressive heat, where the words are threatening to burst into flames…
We all do.
Ducking under the barbed wire where it hung mangled by many crossings, dotted with coarse hair tufts snagged above limestone slabs; looking out across the high plateau toward Bitter Springs, toward Mt. Humphreys into the narrow rift below me and back at the dried stalks of grama grass patches. My hunger for freedom and the bliss of strength in my legs, some fine boots, the tungsten grip of sticks, striking sparks in the rock rubble under tread. The condor who flew over me, low, I felt the hush of air displaced, those long heavy wings spread wide, twice my height, the bird big as a hang glider, wingtip flight feathers manipulating the air one slight adjustment at a time as I said hello condor, and felt the fierce, spring wind slap against my face as the sun shone down again, and I traveled on wondering if I’d make it back out alive.
You would have loved it, darling, water roiling through the Gap of Dunloe, curtains plunged down ancient rocks, sheets of rain slapping in the mist. Bent sideways to the wind a maelstrom whipped a lash and sting against our cheeks.
Yet the burning red of mountain ash and hawthorn, flash of fuchsia and montbretia pierced the green and gray, the sheep serene. Exhilarated, our faces opened toward the unrelenting storm.
Drenched through our skins, soaked to the bone, ravenous for tea and scone.
None of their traits spared them from the powerful storm surge— those quarter-ton bodies insulated by thick qiviut, standing in a circle of defense.
Muskox, old, young, thirty-two in all, perished on that windswept landscape killed by the ocean as foreign to them as the tundra is to whales.
Surprised, soaked, the animals succumbed, some still standing, some toppled, frozen in sea water strewn over a quarter mile, on this mid-winter day.
Here is the fuzzy bottom, shy blush of peach, the ripe sunrise flesh of nectarine, apricot! my first peace-making with the color orange the healthy bruise of plum, and seedy blackberries staining my fingers down to the nail beds crimson purple this morning, cutting them into the deep blue bowl, the sun cutting triangles on the Chinese rug,
Old beaters with bald tires, uncertain headlights, one rusted enough I could see the road beneath the clutch The one I totaled, the first new one, a grey step-sided Chevy belonging to the man known as my first husband— I should have seen it as an omencrash begetting crash
The little dinged up Datsun, door handles so loose, one fell off into the hand of the valet
opening night of the symphony, stolen later that night—a ridiculous choice The work-horse Ford, sky blue paint faded to aqua, the bench seat frozen so far back I sat on the very edge to depress the clutch, my head sinking below the steering wheel every time
I used to drive trucks
in August to pick fruit windows down, down dirt roads blowing clouds of dust into orchards murmuring their click and buzz and whisper on the baking hillsides Heading home, juicy up to my elbows, bee-bait sticky, sweat drying in little trails, down my gritty neck, all those pits rattling on the floorboards.
for Rigging Slinger Leo Garcia who saved my life
No longer a forest at all, ripped earth, shattered stumps, logs and slash raise musky, winey scents in this morning’s sun.
Split some wood start the landing’s burn-barrel fire, sawgas and diesel swirl in the woodsmoke.
The yarder and tower savage sundial above this assaulted hillside, guylines hold the spar tree, cloud measuring pie chart.
The symmetry of industry hydraulic rams shining silver drive wheels, ratchets and pawls. A harvest really; a forest felled, yarded, loaded, trucked away.
Polished in gravel and dirt, cat tracks or chokers dull luster of metal, work worn beauty,
sheen of that raw steel.
The last cold coffee flies Into the slash, screw the cup on the thermos. Ease into it. Corks and hobnails crunch across the landing’s shale.
Bird song, morning talk or silence until a chainsaw choked, coughs once then cuts up the morning quiet, other machines snort, belch smoke, spin and join in.
Now it begins, dented hard hat and grimy gloves on, this odd dance, first steps tentative
an easy path on downed logs but check for balance, get the rhythm, as muscles wake moving downhill toward dangling chokers.
I miss those mornings now, muscles flexing, focused on a task defined. It seems so long ago and we’ve forgot, this all comes from somewhere.
Rain forests migrate as a group—Gary Snyder
The Sitka Spruce butt block, ten feet long carved for a temple guardian, fierce eyes bulging.
Carved with clever blades, metallurgy of ancient conflict, steel sliding through spruce cells, sighing like cherry petals blown down a fresh swept path.
Roughed-in gestures violent, mudras for frightening demons for protecting tranquility.
A spruce butt in Japan, unnatural trick of entrepreneurs, carved to preserve tranquility.
Saw snarling, toppling the spruce, pulling the clouds-down, and tearing the heart out.
The twelve-foot splinters
left on the stump.
When the clouds are gone, bear, raven, and eagle will leave. salmon will swim in circles offshore. and on the ragged rocks that are left
even Kusch-te-kaaw, dread, drowning Land-Otter Man, will have no place to go.
Gravity matters.
A pulled tail-hold tree falling toward you is enormous!
Enough adrenaline you fly!
Foolish or just ignorant, where you stand can save your life. Being alert is no waste of time.
Just tired or sleepy nicking your boot with a chainsaw snaps you awake!
Love in your lunch-bucket always makes it better.
Beyond the tides' high reach where the old firs and cedars grew, where their stumps rot under huckleberries where salmon have spawned up creeks. In simple cabins under sheltering trees loggers lived till the timber was gone. Small cabins with woodsheds, split alder, maple or old fir stacked like stonework fitted together plumb and tight.
Well honed axes with hand polished handles rest ready for winter as the eaves drip
Field gone to alders, dreams busted, feeder steers butchered, cow sheds lean into the soggy loam, blown log trucks under blackberries never start. A stock trailer slowly dies as tires rot
berry sprouts and saplings through the slats.
The kids never came back, they never wanted to work that hard, wet and dirty. Now moss covers the roofs, paint fades and fails. Barnyards empty and silent, the stock all gone farm tractors seized or useless disappear.
Rust eats fading yellow iron, skidders, cats or yarders in the brush.
Old choker setters limp to their mailbox musing, "Grannie was slow, but she was old!" Rigging slingers or hook tenders have their own tales, snapped cables, toppling machines, barber chairs, close ones, widow makers.
Crushing logs drop, pivot or roll.
"A miss is as good as a mile!"
On wood front steps an old pair of “corks” full of garden soil flower pots for purple violets or yellow marigolds, On wet hills above, trees grow.
On the close cropped hills above planted seedlings stretch for low sodden clouds.
I live in the Cave of the Darkness of Sleep though I do not sleep. Colors of light visit me, teach me, feed me, enlighten me.
Claws hold my pen, an eternal feather brought by Crow. I write symbols across the leaf. I do not stop until all are drawn, colored, completed.
I go to the mouth of the Cave, thank the colors of day, the colors of night, the colors of wisdom, and blow my breath across the symbols.
They ignite, burn, send messages, wisdoms, through the heavens, through forest, across meadows, until they reach the intended who, alone, will hear, decipher, understand.
I live in the Cave of the Darkness of Sleep though I do not sleep. I contemplate ways of existence, I ask the sky beings, earth beings, water beings, the anchored beings. I ask. I listen. They respond. I write on a new leaf.
Sometimes the symbols are for me, always they are for you, the being who asks through your dreams, your tears, your pain. Always I, or one of my kind, hear. Always I, or one of my kind, answer. Nothing gives us such pleasure as the joy you radiate when you hear, understand, accept, when you act on the knowledge so freely given.
I live in the Cave of the Darkness of Sleep though I do not sleep. I dance in unabashed joy at the light of your being.
(Mahto, Lakota for bear)
this path through basalt looks deceptively gentle but we feel its volcanic underpinnings here above the Columbia River which we can’t hear from up here our perch of mud and rock
on this gray March day we stare at the dark water, all blues and greens we overlook, take it all in breath going out towards the far hills going in with cries of crows and air propelled by wings of hawks and eagles
we feel bigger now like the cliffs more liquid like the hypnotic wavelets not completely skin and bone
when they need it most, I left the feeder empty one day, chose spite instead, clasped vengeance tight behind me while junco and finch perched on the fence, fading dark shadows watching my straight back will against them—that day when I, too, moved along the fence line, waiting for your change of heart.
Stepping onto the shore looking across the shifting tides I find my peace with her again. I let myself go a traveler after a long journey finding the comfort of an ancient past and a place befitting of my ashes.
But gazing out again to where the sea meets the sky I find a longing for more.
Is this the mystery of the unknown whispering through the mist?
Or the silhouetted memory of a shipwreck long ago, carrying my cargo of dreams like crates of tea and opium and spices to the bottom of the Pacific.
Memories move in waves, rushing towards me for a time then receding away.
Running to the foamy water golden hair flying behind her feet slapping the wet sand. Green seaweed that sticks to the skin, digging for treasure that does not exist. The grasp of a daughter’s tiny hand in mine walking to the car at the end of the day. These moments are merely shells I know— bleached by the sun edges rounded by time… but I will hold them in my pocket for safe keeping.
My heart pings in unnatural rhythms clinging to what I wanted for her or what I thought she could be. But the wind in its motion and the sea in its depth remind me these are illusions. The statues of imagined triumphs are nothing more than brown kelp strewn across the beach, heads sunken down like corpses on the battlefield of low tide.
I sense the sheets of rain falling in the distance, the grayness of my beard, the slowing of my step. A poetic voice inside rolls and echoes like thunder bringing Maggie and the ocean together so that I cannot tell where one ends and the other begins…
My complete acceptance of her, A gentle wave released. My longing for her safe harbor, A foghorn, unseen, emanating forever.
My love for her travels beyond the horizon. Her love for me speaks without saying a word.
Marc JanssenFrivolous patina-ed concrete imposed on natural curves Empty and echoing above the nature trail
The hunting slit of the control tower is blind Wind scarred pines have advanced to shield the sea.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire that on the ashes of his youth doth lie.
—ShakespeareI lie absently on the ashes of everything, and any fire remaining heads toward cooling like the Universe itself, the Cosmos aging, Space/Time, as engaging as it is, fueling its own demise by expanding into blackness, blankness, and cold, dying by slow degrees in illimitable skies, human technologies at last truly forecasting where eternity lies.
Ashes of my youth are like ashes of dreams: it’s in my memory, your memory, that they exist at all, and since nothing past will be once more, it’s best to go on repeating love, unseating a law, needing a win, kneading a sin, greeting sex’s succor that will never be again.
We are not there when ice seals the lake We are not there when snow hushes the ice In spring, sediment will begin to churn. sediment begins to heat imperceptibly fish swivel through the roofed water again
We will not feel the shallows heat beneath the ice We will not witness the length of crystals shearing evolving into another kind of candle and these candles collecting in a parade.
Until, wind comes strong to unmoor the candles and drives them up onto the shore where they tinkle against each other, and melt under the sun.
Somewhere a coyote slinks through scablands of the inland west, might be a trickster, might wreak havoc, might be the one who stole fire from the house of pain, might make changes, shake things up. Might be just a plain coyote who trots down a summer road, looks back at you, shrugs you off, leads you to gravel path in a forest of pines and scrubs where blackberries thrive.
There. A raven croaks above a northern lake, just a bird, or Raven, the trickster, sometimes walks around looking human, sexy; he'll steal your wife, maybe she'll like him better. He watches, flies over mountains, knows how to dance.
Once children marked out paths between houses, or through wild places that are no more. Their footprints tamped down the land, kept the paths alive. Sometimes tracings show in uneven tarmac, or a break in concrete. The earth remembers more than surface wrecked by machines that tore up the paths. When asphalt bolts, tree roots are speaking.
Last night a shadow as large as a wolf moved like an arrow under the moon down the middle of an icy street. Something haunting, something wild drew me to it. I watched it pass under a streetlight and saw the hump of huge racoon. When it was gone, I felt the void. I feel it still.
The gray dress of the sky flutters, stutters, lifts in the bleak dawn. In winter, we weigh our respite in sunsets, moments of gold
tracing November, as if to say, “here lies the yellow bursts of morning.” It feels like we’ll never find our way back,
but this winter is merely a biding of time, busy-work for God and his off-duty angels. I call this pale season the year’s
annual funeral, and spring the earth’s resurrection. I get more religious in the dark of it all. It’s always the poet’s job to provide the eulogy. I say: may the color of the world sleep gently beneath this gray riot.
What moves downriver catechizes us: desire is written in the human heart.
Our births migrating without a compass, we shipwreck here, bide only to depart, our fruitful waste compounding, our upstart cadavers salting this once fertile land.
Somewhere I read of rain. Could we withstand the flood and on this bank revive our root, we might a better husbandry command, arriving home bare soul, barefoot.
You don’t ever let go of the thread
—William StaffordAll these years I’ve been wondering what to do with this box of pears.
Cool them with warm winds from a Japanese fan?
Shine on them softest lights from a red winged Tiffany lamp?
Strike them with pins from a pin cushion and watch them dive down like arrows hitting their mark?
Or cover them with all of my body my body a paperweight a blanket of blue night and stars a landing point that says hold on— whatever you do don’t let go.
As dusk comes beneath Torment, Forbidden, and Boston Peak, a pair of scarce black bears forage upper slopes for berries. Shadows also fall on marmots, who whistle epilogues among rocks. We witness the last of the innocent sun bleed through a haze of smoke to the west. We realize celestial objects are blameless as fire and martyred ice. Dozens of waterfalls drop from receding glaciers, with voices that won't be silenced, while headlamps of climbers inch down those glaciers in descents that suggest their lights were cut off from the stars.
Sherri LevineA walk in the woods, whiff of spring damp dirt and pine. Ice still on the ground but in the sun
I feel like I am walking on a giant sponge.
Mushrooms sprout, clustering white caps blue ink trumpets, slit gills, fleshy spores, beautiful ugly fungus flowers.
I crouch underfoot and lift last year’s leaves— lying crisp and brittle, still intact
I don’t have to dig deep to feel the rich dark earth in my fist
home of worms, bugs, and slugs, Isn’t it a comfort to be part of something seemingly whole?
Walking through last year’s leaves, through darkness of illness, loss, and grief
I arise as a tightly wound fiddlehead now unfurled, a space
alien plant, shooting toward the sky.
With a line from Barry Lopez
When sparks light fires in the cylinders’ stumpy tangle you feel it in your pants. You push the throttles up. Take off roll, noise and power, and the yoke vibrates like a humming bird in your hand. You bless the oil pumps juicing the main bearings that everything turns on.
Bernoulli’s Principle is working as it should. Here comes lift off and gear coming up. Over the bay, sunny April day. Air, earth, water, and fire behaving. We might be guillemots building speed to climb a cliff. We might be angels beating hard for home and the sweet here-after.
My copilot, call him Jim, damn it, because I can’t recall his name. He might be Frank or Joe, never Joyce, never Lloyd. Jim, let’s say, is flying, I’m on the gauges, the ones that say, “Damn, Kid, you’re lucky, or not.”
The right engine--call it typhoid—quit. Heart attack or busted aorta. The oil pump fails, and the shaft welds its bearing. Everything out there stops dead. The propeller’s three flat boards won’t feather, won’t streamline to the wind. Drag and weight force us down.
We skim the bay, slow in a whoosh. The wash of fear, the cockpit filling with the North Pacific. Fast unbuckle, we don’t feel the cold. No hatch doors, we kick and kick windows like horses in a burning barn. No luck. Standing on the gauges, heads under water, we reach up into air in the cabin exit, worthless air for the rapture of hands to die for.
A hard push of the legs and clawing through the bulkhead over boxes of freight, I am somehow out the back door and swimming up the blue-green gloom. And then there is air, air everywhere. Trees bending in a breeze over on shore, boats coming, and time is singing Bach, a skinny violin climbing woodwinds and brass.
Forgive me, Jim, I can’t recall--not Joyce, never Lloyd—you were slow then still and breech beneath the big blue world. Forgive me Jim, for not pulling you along. But thank me Jim, it turns out I was born without thought, words, or will to reach a hand down like a forceps and pull you up, birthing your big blue bundle.
A man and a boy in a boat fish you out, flop you in over the gunnel like a loose limbed squid. I can’t recall their names either, not Frank or Joe, Melvin maybe, maybe Curt. Air from nameless lungs blows color back into your face, dazed but bright and looking right at forever. Your name, sorry, I don’t recall.
But I remember trees, birches bending in wind on shore. And I remember Dale Thorsbakken’s field of hay by the creek that day I skipped school. My head in the clouds, mind full of deep water, I was young and light on my feet. And I remember before we could talk we knew how to sing. I shrugged it off, and all day I swam the creek then left for home to figure out forever later.
Thomas MitchellHerodotus said that rain was an afterthought of late summer’s imagination, that every raindrop represents a potential sea of creativity.
I don’t know any words soft as rain falling on the beach as today’s heron lifts her wings, flutters across the jetty, gradually disappearing in the mist. I don’t know any words soft as rain falling on the trees while massive rocks simply glow in the afterlight. The rain silences, absolves all that is wrong in the universe, softens the comings and goings, the war, the pestilence, brother against brother, the pain of childbirth, in preservation, like a woman lifting her arms.
The land is a being who remembers everything.
—Joy HarjoBorn of a craggy place, scaling Camel’s Hump and Mt. Mansfield, I thought my footing firm. I climbed trail-scars, skirting cliffs and larger-than-life boulders, my pack filled with the ancestors’ blessings and sins. I learned to go around, not through. Earth steady, rock solid.
Frozen still, despite thawed ice, these Green Mountains carry my contrived story like a lingering scent, pungent, musty, humid. Roots anchor in stony soil barely inches deep. Weighted by oppressive hills, breathing labored, I struggle to break free.
In the Alaska Range, sentient presence lives— exhaling through fault lines, Denali stretching higher with each seismic shift. Land pulses with the hoofbeat of roaming bison and ancient mammoth. Ground quivers. Steadied by old souls, a miniscule part of their knowing awakens inside me—
a temporal pause, contained within crystals of ice fog and spirals of the sun’s highest circuit. At the thin edge of the earth’s crust, redressing wounds, I move through toward center. Choruses of blessings rise, scuttle through tundra, following the way of water, braiding over the flats.
Anne G MurphyI used to toss rocks from garden beds; now I leave some to collect water beads, to hold moss, plumped under a rhubarb. To keep roots alert with choices, downward threads probe the perfect anchoring pebble, uncoil deeper to manure’s fetid lure. Refuge from robins for tunneling worms slowly breaking clods, but not as slow as stones leach mineral elixir, like bones, with the assumption of lifetimes ahead. For the pause they require, leaning on my favoured spade, nostrils flared by fresh cut paths through nodding grasses rooted in soil born of glacier’s crush and grindstone wash.
That I missed killing a red-headed boy eighty feet below me, one careless rock one foot to his left.
That all the good luck in the world can’t erase knowledge of what else might have happened, almost did happen. Only the ones who survive are able to think this way. The feel of what has come to pass smiles us, an incense, a sweetness.
That everything is wildly unlikely until it happens. Then it’s in evitable. People read time back wards and this makes them pious.
Poetry can tell stories in both directions simultaneously and so fear and weirdness infuse our rejoicing. Messing about with language is a way to feel the grain of existence, random and beautiful and rough against the tongue.
Douglas Scott Oltrogge
These are my hiding words my running words, my heartfelt but missing words, my words with wings as a fast as sparrows’. These are my words that wait around the alley corner for the sidewalk to clear and the traffic to die down— then run.run.run.
These are my vulnerable words, my naked words, my wounded words. My words whose insecure consonants and rejected vowels slip the tongue and trip the lip on their way to you who listens. These are my scared words, my scarred words, my tender words, my lonesome words that she left behind.
These are my words shouted in silent cars with the ignition turned off. The broken words I whisper to my daughters who are gone from me. These are tired, trying, tough words. Words with calloused corners— country plain. Wood splitting, wrench turning, hammer swinging words. My imposter words, my fraudulent, fake university words. These are the words I’m replacing myself with in the calculated count of syllables, my smoke and mirror words, my escaping words, falling words.
These are my trying words, my attempting words that occupy the empty spaces next to me. These are my apologetic words that practice the things I should have said. These are my forgiving words that rush from the couch to meet you with streaked mascara and wind-swept hair, at the door, with open, broken wings.
I take the mask out of the box to keep the dust off its white feathers
won at a silent auction that, strangely, no one else bid for a seeker’s distillation of a vision quest, it vibrates with intention—
as though something animal wants to get out or invites me to come in
in truth, I want to wear it— feathers, silver beads and cowrie shells
and flee up the hill into the woods with the deer herd
leaving words and clothing behind suddenly swift and silent and sure
nostrils flared tasting the forest at the back of my throat
or catch the next breath of wind gusting through the cottonwood and alder
fly upslope to the glacial cirque and the aerie on the cliff face,
discolored from years of mutes— remnants of nest still tucked in a crevice
putting on the mask is stepping off the ledge—
becoming other…
maybe becoming what I was meant to be
I measure risk and weigh consequences, hold the mask and become older
You and I could lose ourselves to accident or longevity and still be found in the motion of surf and wind, in ash, carbon and calcium, in chlorophyll of leaves, earth for roots of cedars, no longer ourselves but what makes the universe itself. Kiss the leaves of any tree you like, it might be me. I’ll take a sip on the shore at Manzanita and tell myself it’s not brine, it’s you.
Over the ash flow erosion state of recent history
Fall light leaves the ash filled valley intent to ascend
all the great routes that now turn cold blown over by steady rain or ripping winds full of ash.
In this brief blink of life we stand at its edge look into its long reach
life smothered by earth watch the light go summit ward disappear
into sinking clouds the anxious hold of winter and our short, short history.
The coming end wraps my sleeve like a letter jacket stripe. Each withered friend’s death circles, cheers me on. I am stuck court-side at the game,
only dreaming of a halftime show— long-legged girls kicking high, pert white pompoms bobbing in synch along the free-throw line.
It was Castaneda who called old age the last enemy of a person of knowledge. Transformed himself to afterthought when fake peyote stories
revealed his existence to be a lie. I will never be able to shift shape— become wolf, puma, star player, crow. Smoke good stuff, dunk, dribble, drum. Leap off a cliff, survive.
Past tense need not be a sentence of loss. I must change my gaze, focus. Refuse to leave the court early, shower, watch game’s last moments, breathless, from a balcony grave.
How easy to love a pelt of trees. These Douglas firs cathedral me in sky-scraping green above Agnes Gorge.
How easy to amble in simile, the CCC suspension bridge knocked into stream like a dangling dream
to rewild a ridge in the North Cascades back into Shangri La.
I’m first to glimpse the glacial white, the stage set waters we cannot ford trail checkmated by rapids, rock, we must retrace and hike out now.
My glance catches on crinkly arms, Doug’s lower branches emeriti
retired mighty scaffolding now but a wing and bone show old angels crouched and cautionary keening round the living pole
a sacrifice with no amen, and so the tree can canopy.
This much above all I recall. My husband would tell you about the bear.
Agile mother of flora and fauna from Azaleas to African gazelles— now also partly acidic,
Bitter from toxic additives on your palate, your various tongues acerbic, you do not become cynical, but clearly
Candid, mirroring humankind’s addictions, beliefs and hubris overestimating our progress—seldom
Devoted to your way, your gentle underlying strength, your nurture of open-minded curiosity and benevolence, your capacious-hearted reading of earth’s
Electromagnetic sound and light-wave conversations—holding no bias, reading without judgment what all the living and the dead need to say—the cries of rocks, the reports of sand, the blue heron’s hunger for love, fish and justice—restorative justice if we let the clear deep water of her eyes impress our gaze—forming
Faraday waves from attending Bach, Beethoven, Beatles, Be Bop, Rap, all shaking you upright to sing your reverence, lament, despondence, dark night of soul, revelation, alacrity, stand-up comedy, rapture, joy, all to transform metal singing bowls—and us.
Gregarious gorgeous gracefully nimble communication network— you are the tumbling, shivering, shaking network of earth’s streams of unconscious and conscious imagination from which Pegasus sprang to inspire magic’s mystery, from which the I-Ching’s dynamic chiaroscuros create the actual and possible tensions of new harmonies by which nature evolves. Unassuming house of Hospitality: Are you quantum physicist, John Bell’s all-seeing eye, reflecting light waves pointing here and there and there, keeping an unrelenting vigil lest the universe disappear?
International Intelligence Agency, you hold more books than libraries.
Judiciously meeting, reading, understanding multitudes of light and sound waves— even those of mitochondria and chlorophyll—you welcome cosmic immensity. Does your memory keep expanding? Do you share memory with elephants, who sometimes wish they could forget?
Kinesthetic cloud-sculptor, shape-shifter, are you the father of Raven, the trickster?
Lighthouse witness, welcoming and warning, your good counsel lifts us above mere senses. Are you
Medium and message? Bearer of synchronicity’s miracle? That shared longing of the universe to bond with earth?
Numinous, inspiring, you astonish and disarm us. Purr with cats at 50 hertz to mend broken bones and hearts.
Ouvre ton Coeur of music, to which dogs keenly listen, you are tuned to the muses and music of spheres to complete us until our lives come round right. No one’s
Predator, though forced by winds beyond your metier, you are always here to assuage, calm, succor into reciprocal balances.
Quixotic altruist, you are ninety percent of us as we swim our birth canals, endowing our eccentricities.
Robotic? Never!
Supple voice of sibilants and susurrus, you lull us into deep reveries— lucid dreaming, thereby
Tipping our scales with No-Wheres Now-Heres to companion our evolutions,
Urge us to revise our lives,
Value our ground-lightning bestowed blessings,
Wend us around obstacles.
Xanthic sun’s partner of photosynthesis, you make life’s green sugar.
Yearning for equity, your language hones our lively paths. So please,
Zoom us into our hollow growing points to learn care for you, not because of your overwhelming generous bounty, but because of who you are!
Remained at her bedside, face, wax like, soul lingering person became The Body when do you want us to take The Body you will take my mom when I tell you to After her soul departs After I leave the room oh, yes, as long as you wish, no hurry they’re right, of course she is now The Body window couldn’t open; made sure the door remained ajar just in case it’s true about those who have passed entering to greet her we buried her in a shroud, an old Jewish custom so unlike her— a woman who loved fancy clothes, wigs, make up, jewelry no matter might as well have buried her shoe or earring or a paper clip she was, indeed, The Body speaks to me in dreams didn’t know how to be a good mother No, you didn’t. But I knew how to be a good daughter The Body
Blessed are the moving things & the transformations they incite;
Blessed are the puny their skimpy shrimpdom lapped up & rocked to sleep in the blanket of God’s tongue, for they shall wake up and make it all happen again;
Blessed are the fat & wide may the world be laid out in their honor, the fruit applaud them, the creams faint at their feet, may we follow them & be repaired;
Blessed are the horsey-faced & gap-toothed their fumy mouths enlivening the dirt where they lie down laughing— and then grass, and then trees, then the whole weedy rumpus begins, may they fork it over with their toes & get it steaming, may the flies give them wings and bring all the world to bear;
Blessed are the lonely on their soggy hummocks may they open all the windows & drawers, uncap the jam and know the five-thousand hands of air as it unhobbles their sorrow & lets it run free;
Blessed are the pompous their quiver & deluxe, may their need swallow them whole, may they rally & roll on;
And the poets let them grapple till they pop. They’ll be first, they’ll be last. They will without a hitch & screeching inherit it all.
Away for the pandemic and suddenly new houses have replaced many of the old tumbledown ones with a good view. You’ll pay more if it almost touches cloud. Where’s the man who smoked a corncob pipe, a doppelganger for Popeye the Sailor Man? Where are the others? Time to grow up, face life: Some have cocktail parties. Some collect cans.
A man, picture a Hippie’s son turned investor, standing before a new house that’s stained Nantucket Red and shouting, “Where the hell are they?” A crow offers a sympathetic caw. “It’s almost nine and garbage men start at eight,” he fumes, so I ask if he intends to stay for a spell.
They dangle like a blessing over the sidewalk by the clinic some kind of white trumpety flowers with the usual indifference to their miraculous.
The clinic is going about its business, though there's this odd sign: arrow pointing toward the swinging doors, a baffling MINIMALLY INVASIVE ENTRANCE (Huns that are not going all out? Kudzu, Scotch broom inching in?) I'd say an invasion of any kind disturbs.
Let me just talk about the wooden toy in the store next to the clinic. It's a VW van like the one we drove across the country.
I loved how we sat high above the other cars and the way he turned the wheel, arm over beautiful muscled arm, also the bed in the back.
I think I've got to buy that toy, avoid the entrance a little longer stand under the moonflowers with my memories and my tiny bus.
It’s another pandemic lockdown week The days run together
But this day is special—Garbage Day!
Here comes the first truck Will it be yard waste or regular garbage?
It’s regular garbage!
Another truck is coming now
It’s yard waste!
Goodbye weeds, goodbye clippings!
Time now to wait an hour
For the grand finale Here it comes! Recycling!
Oh, no! There’s a problem
A big piece of cardboard is stuck In neighbor Kate’s container
Use the mechanical arm, Mr. Driver Shake! shake! shake!
Get that cardboard loose!
He did it! Hallelujah! Way to go! The cardboard is free and loaded The truck moves to my house
My container empties smoothly
Another fine loading job by me
I’m going to buy myself a trophy
The truck moves on Another week has passed It’s only 10 a.m. but I need a nap
Fog knows its way around bays islands inlets
coves
boulders
deadfalls
streams
Spanish moss
salt chucks
big houses
cabins
outhouses
window boxes
big holes
cruise ships
kayaks
hanging baskets
twisted flags
headlights
round-abouts until it runs away when the sun comes out.
We were not exotic dancers
Not superhero women
In pastel capes with sequins
Floating high above the stages
Twirl the pole, pump the music
Something in the moonlight catches my eye
The shadow of a lover goes dancing by
Blank eyes don’t see nothing
Before us now a cast of strangers
We were not exotic dancers
Suzy Chapstick, Laura Martin
Ordinary girls who got lost
In pink martinis and vats of cocaine
We were not exotic dancers
Quick change outfit, try to please him
A hundred shoes and stretchy fabric
We were not exotic dancers
Sometimes just bikini suit tops
Like a Coppertone commercial
Snort a line and buy another
Vials and vials of amber bottles
Shots and snorts and promised futures
Laugh it off here have another
Do you keep secret left untold Can't give love, heart or soul
We were not exotic dancers
Watching conscious over shoulders
Lived with boyfriends, our flawed lovers
Waited for us at all hours
Boys who served time for dope
In downtown halfway houses
Where we’d visit, bring a ciggie
We were not exotic dancers
This was just our ordinary
Throw a bag full, choose your music
Laura’s high pumps, sometimes tap shoes
For that rare occasion:
she broke out in type-like click sounds
Gregory Hines or Ginger Rogers
Head on down to clubs of pleasure
Flash a smile, make him love you
should i find your face latticed in great pine trees
i shall dance upon figs upon the highest branch
sunlight casts on miles of pinecones unreachable by the fruits of the nearby flower
my tree sways — woah! i find myself teetering over i grasp my fingers onto branch & dangle from above
my hands betray but i do not fall instead i float upon clouds & wait
for i do not chase for your face like i have done so many times before instead i fill myself with helium to continue to rise away
i do not see your face latticed in great pine trees.
I learned to swim here, my grip entrusted to your barnacled ladder when the currents tired me, warmed my ocean chilled body on your grainy platform, painted faces with wet fingers to watch them shrink and dry in the sun. You rocked me off to sleep.
You’ve grown soft, moss green along the edges, great planks splintered, cracked, too dangerous to be useful. No one cares for you any longer, opting for pressure-treat and non-skid. Only stanchion escorts, worn thin and smooth at the middle by iron rings and tides, remain at your side. I hear creaks, like an old porch rocker, as laughing children in speeding boats wake you
is a sharp knife— fillets the sky into salmon strips of red-green swimming light, carves the silver moon’s crescent curves above mountain humps, pink shadowed valleys, blade-tips the shining dog star hung above the bony horizon. Its blade cuts, finds the light.
(after Joy Harjo's "An American Sunrise")
Bless the height of this land
As it rises from the weight of its ice blanket
Bless the fingers of this land
Raking through beach grasses as the wind
Bless the tears of this land
In all its water cycle forms—rain, ice, snow, lakes, ponds and boggy places
Bless the stomach of this land
May it always provide nourishment
Of berries, greens, swimming and walking creatures
Bless the veins of this land
That wash soil to sea, scour spots of stillness, feed the heart and body
Bless the eyes of this land
That watch over all its creatures
And wish them well.
We are an island the size of Oregon. We had an Empire once—the largest the world has ever seen. On it— as they liked once to say—the sun never set.
So what?
We educated and we organized, we conquered and we annihilated, we raped and we pillaged through landscape after landscape across the earth. One much like another: always powerless enough, sometimes trusting enough, to take the yoke. The White Man’s Burden was the Natives’ Curse.
And now?
Now we have become, lord bless us, an empire again—of one: severed from Europe by hubris, sundered from America by the chilling seas. We will be a small land of unhappy people with three friends only: lost grandeur; false hope; sour nostalgia.
And why?
Because we are frightened of otherness, because we want to be great again, because politicians are whores and pimps.
But—yes—the English will be very English on our own.
And a decade from now?
Money will have drained away like water down a gutter till the last drop falls with a noiseless “plunk.”
Poverty will stalk the land like a hungry lion. Anger will strike down from on high like a plummeting eagle. Despair will clutch at throats grown thin and raspy.
But—yes—the English will be very English on our own.
Behind phone wires, cloud wisps like pink-red fingers seem to drift with us. They’re fuchsia, you say. Last evening on 4-South, we admitted a frail older woman. Thelma didn’t know where she was. When I told her, she glared at my plastic I.D. badge. That explains a lot about you, she said, stubbing one finger toward my chest.
Under the green EXIT sign glowing like radium, she proceeded to sit mute by our locked double doors, blocked the entrance, refused to go to her room. Four of us cradled her like a gaunt peahen. May your souls be forgiven, she said.
As our charge nurse Miss Dee gave her the injection of Ativan, we held Thelma gently on her bed. Later, I strummed the unit guitar, a few chords in the dark. By our hall table, not far from our glowing nurses station, I sang “On Wings Of A Dove” as she had asked. Now in the west, red clouds almost like fringes—on the empty street, we stop, and they stop, too.
an earlier version of this poem was published in the online journal Open: A Journal of Arts & Letters
Robin Woolman(Response to Uvalde shooting)
On my walk today I was passed by a red-cheeked teenager jogging. “Hi”
“Hello” I read the back of her out-sized white t-shirt: “District Soccer Champions 2018” and the list of Names descending to the hem.
On my watch today I was passed by 19 children shot through their school clothes by a teenager sporting an AR-15styleDDM4.
I think of a white t-shirt: “Kids Killed at School 2022” with their Names scrolling down a young person’s spine.
I think of more Names in Texas Florida Colorado Virginia and I think: a shirt is not long enough.
I will sew a gown with tiers. I will cut each layer wide enough for all the dead Names of a year.
I will use the lightest of materials like clouds, like ghosts, like shrouds: organza gauze muslin voile.
Each year the tier will be wider. Each tier will have the long stride of the gathering threads to pull the Names closer together. They will overlap in random folds so that Names become No-things: ElkenFlorCarvanosMarisRamRodexiLayRoJailCruzTorres
Then I will stitch tier to tier year after year hoping each seam might be the last, but fearing our pattern is cut. My gown will grow ruffle upon ruffle—a cascading chronology oftheNamesofthechildrenrippedoutoflives.
On my walk someday I will wear my gown trailing in the gravel and be passed by someone:
“Hi”
“Hello” and we will remember how each Name might have been a Champion.
Red Nova Nard Claar
Colorado Springs lies at the foott of the Rocky Mountains, near glacier-carved Pikes Peak, a landmark leading to its 14,114foot. summit. The city's Garden of the Gods Park features 300-foot tall red-sandstone formations. Perfect for mountain climbers and serious biking enthusiasts, like long-term Alaskan artists, now Colorado transplants Nard Claar and Sheary Clough Suiter, who can view both of these local landmarks from their home in Colorado Springs.
When Sheary and Nard met in 2007 at an art seminar in Taos, New Mexico, Sheary was living in Alaska and Nard in Colorado. In short order, they followed and found their bliss—a space to share where they could create art more effectively and join a strong artistic community. Their art follows social conscience and represents glimpses of their well-traveled world.
Nard’s roles have been as varied as his art, including as wilderness guide, ski instructor, carpenter, and commercial photographer. Born and raised in Colorado, he’s climbed all the Fourteeners and some of the Thirteeners. For the uninitiated, Colorado has 54 mountain peaks exceeding 14,000 feet—the most of any state. He’s skied and raced mountain bikes before mountain bikes were a thing. On the Continental Divide Trail, a rugged track through the Rocky Mts., he reminisces with typical humor: “I had 18 different bear encounters over the course of a month. Since I was not having bacon, the bear went on his way. I am not a tasty treat, and without a bacon wrap was not desired.”
Together, Nard and Sheary bike toured extensively, traveling self-supported with fully loaded panniers, often tent camping. Their accommodations, whether in a tent or in homes, were often facilitated by Warm Showers, an international biking overnighting/hosting group that offers reciprocal hospitality for thousands of cyclists.
Sheary explains: “In New Orleans, we stayed with a couple (members of Warm Showers). They had spent much of their life traveling the world using art for therapy. And so they were super intriguing hosts.”
Biking fosters the natural influences found in their art.
Sheary: “For about ten years, we've bike toured annually for two to three weeks in different parts of the country. You see the world at a slower pace. You interact with people because you're a novelty. People come up and want to meet you and talk with you. It’s a whole different way to travel. Our most strenuous tour was from Jasper, Alberta, to Whitefish, Montana, which included a lot of elevation gain and loss. But our longest tour was from Austin, Texas to St. Augustine, Florida—about 2000 miles.”
Nard, a mixed media artist, likens his style to Impressionistic work, which tends to abstract and emotionalize images
rather than representing them as captured photography. Only about ten percent of his art is done on location; he travels with a little watercolor palette to paint in the evenings. “I love the ability to do travelogues and small watercolors, as well as take photographs while traveling. But I also just love the freedom of being able to take watercolors and do contemporary abstracts with them because watercolors always have that sense of wonder when you do wet on wet like nothing else does. My little travel watercolor palette has been on all my bike tours, in all my travels, so it's been to seven continents now. Hardly dented, right? It's been modified somewhat, but it's been my companion.” He tries to open it, but this permanent watercolor set that he tries to show via Zoom, he had closed while wet, so it is—for the moment—a silver tin that is stuck shut. I laugh but imagine its colors.
Most of the couple’s bike tour routes were based on the mapping research provided by the Adventure Cycling Association, a non-profit bike touring advocacy group based in Missoula, Montana. The ACA’s monthly magazine even did a feature article on the couple, in recognition of their support for travel by bicycle. In addition to Nard’s abstract work, he’s known for his bicycle painting series; one of his large-scale mixed media paintings of traveling cyclists adorns a wall at the ACA headquarters.
Now in their 70’s, and post-COVID, the couple’s means for their treks changed somewhat when they acquired a camper van with a bicycle rack. Bike travel more customarily involves day trips from the van. “That seems to be a little more comfortable,” chuckled Nard.
Most of Nard’s art is studio work. He spends days sketching and designing how pieces go together, combining four or five photos into a painting. “Pikes Peak may not even look like Pikes Peak to some degree,” he explains. He allows the image and concept to evolve and change, which is one reason why he favors watercolor. “You only nudge it and make value suggestions and it does a lot of the work on its own.” Time stands still throughout the evolutionary process of painting “so unless there’s an alarm or an intention of focus to look at the time, it is an interaction between me and the paint; everything else just falls into the background.” Nard does not favor any one medium or style “because a part of the art for me is exploring who/what I am and how I relate to the world.” This approach inspires a “working meditation and a nudging to become whole.”
Sheary, born and raised in Oregon, moved to Alaska in her mid-20’s and stayed for 35 years, working as an editor and fishing lodge owner among other occupations. By then, already a published novelist, Sheary’s enrollment in the University of Alaska Anchorage MFA Creative Writing program was solicited by then program Director Ron Spatz. Sheary had already completed most of a BA, so it made sense to complete her writing degree at UAA.
She witnessed, over time, however that “It was easier to share visual arts with the public than writing. I was on the staff of Alaska Quarterly Review, and I saw those thousands of unsolicited manuscripts, and all they were hoping for was to get published, let alone receive monetary compensation. Whereas with visual art, you could easily begin getting your work out there with any number of accessible venues, such as the walls of local coffee shops.” She also credits motherhood in her 40s as the impetus for moving from writing and editing to visual arts.
Sheary describes Nard as “a degreed art professional” while she is “self taught. My degrees are in English or writing.”
Like Nard, though, Sheary’s first medium was watercolor. But as a member of the Alaska Watercolor Society, she was exposed to other watermedia paints and soon moved toward acrylics. Then in 2001, she experienced a breakthrough in her artistic journey when she was introduced to the beeswax-based paint medium encaustic through her membership
with the Girdwood Center for Visual Arts (GCVA, a local non-profit arts organization that continues to this day). Less than a year later, she was awarded her first solo exhibition when Chris Blankenship of Half Moon Creek Gallery (formerly in midtown Anchorage), asked Sheary to fill a last minute vacancy when the scheduled artist got sick.
By 2007, Sheary had become a premier Alaska encaustic artist and educator. With funding from a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Project Award, a backyard shed was converted into a yearround encaustic studio. As the number of Anchorage encaustic artists multiplied partially via Sheary’s monthly workshops, Sheary founded an Alaska Chapter of the non-profit arts organization, International Encaustic Artists.
In 2011, when her daughter moved to the East Coast for college, Sheary took the leap and joined Nard in Colorado Springs. However, as a gallery-represented artist at Anchorage’s Stephan Fine Arts, she never fully left Alaska behind. Both artists' work is still represented by Stephan’s year-round.
Sheary and Nard share their lives both on the open road and in their studios. They’ve adapted creative outlets to suit their combined interests, including their art forms.
They invited Cirque into their home via Zoom through me and Sandy Kleven. This was the second time Sandy had visited their home. She’s met them twice—Last summer after an opening showing their work at Stephan Fine Arts in Anchorage, Sandy hosted a reception for them in her home. Their work over the years appearing in Cirque makes us feel well acquainted. I’ve followed up through multiple emails from Alaska to Colorado Springs, where not just their Alaskan lives intersected, but, interestingly, several artistic lives from Alaska have—and not entirely through happenstance. A small contingency of Cirque-involved Alaskans—Nard and Sheary, Cirque Editor Mike Burwell, artist/poet Brenda Roper, multimedia artist and writer Monica Devine, artist Monica O'Keefe, and writer Beth Hartley—now make the New Mexico and Colorado areas home, close enough to see one another.
After 20 years living in Anchorage, Brenda relocated to Santa Fe and became an artist in residence at El Zaguan on Canyon Road. Her poetry has been published in Cirque, Ice-Floe, UAA’s Inklings/Understory and Alaska Women Speak Brenda participated in the US Poets in Mexico workshop in Merida, Yucatan in 2010.
Cirque Editor Mike Burwell met Brenda Roper through a long-time friend, Bob Jacobs, who employed her as a guide in McCarthy when he owned St. Elias Alpine Guides. Then a visual artist with her Art MFA from UAA, Brenda knew Sheary as a fellow Anchorage artist and Mike had met Sheary through Brenda. It wasn't until later that Sheary met Nard; Mike met him after he and Sheary were an item and living and creating art in Colorado Springs.
Cirque ’s fortune in picking up these artists began with Sheary and Nard’s visit to Brenda’s home in Santa Fe. Sheary explains, “My memory of Cirque goes back to knowing Mike and Brenda. We all knew each other in Anchorage, and we're friends. Brenda moved out of Alaska first, to Santa Fe. And after I moved down to Colorado, I saw Cirque in her casita. By then, Mike had moved to Taos (NM). Nard and I went down there, and we all confabbed.”
Brenda’s work appeared first in Cirque 2.1 (2010), at which point her bio referred to her as a 20-year Alaskan “Living her creative life” and “reinventing herself on one coast or another.” But, by 2011, Brenda’s bio noted she had “moved to the oldest artist colony on Canyon Road in Santa Fe, painting large, writing small, and taking photos to mark her path.”
Nard: “Part of convincing Sheary to move down to Springs was the promise of building her a bigger studio. We now share
a converted two-car garage, a space about 30 by 30. I installed cabinets, tables on wheels (from remnants from Habitat for Humanity), and exhaust fans for her encaustic work. We work together quite well. We sort of divided the space up half and half, and sometimes we stick to our own half, and sometimes we move into the other person’s space, depending on who has the next show to install, but we don't growl too much. It's obvious that we influence each other in both our style, which is primarily abstract, and our color palettes. We've had a number of two-person shows, and people always exclaim how beautifully our work hangs together.”
Cirque began to publish Sheary’s first images in Cirque 5:2 solstice 2014 with her three encaustic pieces “Beyond,” “Enterprise,” and “Navigator: Beginning.” The next issue showcased five of Sheary’s pieces, and the next had six and the next five, one of which was a collaborative piece with Nard titled “Switchback.” The pattern continued. By issue 8.1, 2016, Nard and Sheary had multiple pieces in Cirque and a true partnership of visual illustration emerged with the journal.
By 10.1, 2019, the Letter from the Editors from both Sandra and Mike mentioned “Artists whose style impacts most issues as Jim Thiele, Sheary Clough Suiter, Nard Claar, Kim Davis, Brenda Roper, Monica O'Keefe, Matt Witt, Robert Bharda, Jill Johnson, and many more.”
Beyond Cirque, Nard and Sheary interact with local art organizations and nonprofits, as well. Sheary explained: “There's a refurbished art deco building in downtown Colorado Springs where a group of nonprofits have come together to form the Philanthropy Collective. Because their offices are full of art by local artists, they began opening the space to the public by doing a First Friday Art Walk event every six months. They invited Nard and I to give the inaugural artist talk. It’s a real honor to be showing our work there, placed by a local curatorial service, Curate Your Art.
“There are two adjacent galleries in downtown Springs–Kreuser Gallery, and G44 Gallery—owned by Abigail Kreuser and Gundega Stevens, respectively—who jointly have the art placement business called Curate Your Art. They’re the ones responsible for curating the art at the Philanthropy Collective, which houses some of the nonprofits that we support. It’s like multiplying the exposure in many, many ways. Nard, in particular, is very active in supporting local nonprofits, such as Food to Power, Concrete Couch, and Trails and Open Space (each of which have an active web presence). Anything to do with the environment particularly.
Sheary explained “I’m stepping into using my art for activism to encourage questioning and discussion among viewers regarding issues that matter to me sociopolitically. I've had two successful solo installations thus far that have redirected the focus of my artwork. The most recent one was titled ‘The Clothes We Wear,’ bringing attention to the ills of the fast fashion industry, both environmentally and labor wise. As consumers, we buy and discard without conscious regard to the ways in which our actions affect the environment or the welfare of the laborers who make those clothes. Many of the pieces in that show represent a move to take my work off the wall. They included wax and
textile suspended sculptures utilizing deconstructed clothing that creates shape and form. I offered a handout listing ten easy ways to take action on an individual basis, such as mending and buying clothing secondhand.”
Because Sheary is from a literary background, it comes as little surprise that Sheary’s influences in art are based in artists’ words rather than their work. When Nard and Sheary met at the conference in Taos, she had just been awarded her first Encaustic solo exhibition at Alaska Pacific University’s Carr-Gottstein Gallery (now the Leah J. Peterson Gallery). During a mixed media slideshow presentation by artist/ instructor Katherine Chang Liu, Sheary felt like she'd been struck by a lightning bolt when she heard Liu reciting a quote by Georgia O'Keeffe.
Describing her retreat to New Mexico from New York City in the 1920s, O’Keeffe said, “I went to strip away what I had been taught, to accept as true my own thinking. This was one of the best times of my life. There was no one to satisfy but myself.” Sheary keeps an abbreviated copy of these words on her office wall, a daily reminder to never let the outside world define her or her art.
Awards recognizing Sheary’s expertise in encaustic include a Permanent Collection Purchase by the Anchorage Museum of Art, a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Project Award, an International Encaustic Artists Project Grant, and an Alaska State Council on the Arts Career Opportunity Grant, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Beyond Nard and Sheary’s travels nationally, their shared international adventures include a 2016 month-long artist residency in Listowel, Ireland at the Olive Stack Gallery. Sheary and Nard remember fondly the close connections in Listowel, where they were “looked at not as strangers passing through, but as members of the community.” The “Tidy Town” of Listowel (a sought-after national Irish distinction) is completely walkable in all directions in 10 minutes or less. Beyond running the art gallery, their days consisted of morning walks in the town’s “Garden of Europe,” a peaceful memorial to the foibles of war along with cool evenings and the joy of good Irish whiskey while chatting and listening to sessions in the pubs, and weekends devoted to offering workshops to locals grateful for the opportunity to learn and interact with ‘Yankees.’
We are grateful for their travels, their social consciousness and their art within the pages of Cirque .
I’m thinking of a camera obscura when I fold myself into a dark room with blackness and a pinhole from which to gather the words of poets.
The process of seeing landscapes from words is sometimes easy when writers craft their life’s journey and work, layering various points and stops to reveal an inner sanctum—as if I am along for the run. Think road work when reading Alan Weltzien’s work.
For me, Weltzien’s poems are my incredible lightness of being humane, yet I am in my dark box, my room, waiting for the next image, for clarity, for flashes on the wall while I succumb to sketching quickly what I imagine developing with photographic magic what this poet sees.
We Western writers gather up our own scrapbooks recording individual tutelages west of the hundredth meridian, traveling through it, turning its soil, and angling its light. The West is a state of mind, a spiritual presence, heart and soul and dream: a place Weltzien calls Montana.
We sometimes exit the poet’s camera obscura with latencies very difficult-to-discern. With Weltzien, I see captured: light, shadow, and all the grays in between. When I pickax through his work, I see and feel Wallace Stegner in the loam: “Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend” (Angle of Repose) and “Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed…" (The Sound of Mountain Water). The long angle of repose can be cut into a river bank with a quick blast of flashflood or over time with the slow meandering of water slicing a cutbank.
University of Montana Western professor Alan Weltzien carries a rucksack filled with his life’s ruminations, travelogues and a peculiar sensibility as both a wannabe “sage on the stage” and honest lover of literature. Weltzien taught for almost two decades in the West, and we are there with him as he goes through recalling his own tutelage and roadwork.
In his Cirque Press collection On the Beach: Poems 2016— 2021, Weltzien circumrotates through family histories, as well as sets in place his own rites of passage in myriad attempts to “sense place” in order to catalogue a sense of place, a rootedness with a universal grasp for his readers to grab in order to sketch their own geography of enlightenment. Alan’s are easily accessible.
Like many who have ended up in the West, Weltzien admits his mere mortality in the universe:
Big Sky Country shrinks a guy, enfolds me within countless open benches and ridges.
In this collection, he's etched poems representing the span of his life, and his roots of his Norwegian forefather coming to America, Puget Sound, specifically, in the story which makes up his Introduction, “Ruud by Nature.” There is radicalism, stage acting, adultery, near-bigamy as Weltzien corners his roots. It’s a funny tale, emblematic of so many men who left the Old Country to eke out a life in the New Eden, hoping the past could be erased in order to shape a new future. It never happens, but it does through offspring, in this case, great grandson O. Alan Weltzien.
Cascading from these roots comes the balladry of this 200-page book and its five sections: “High and Dry,” “On Youth and Aging,” “Observations and Professions,” “Distant Geographies,” and “Home Ground.” The collection is a mother lode of direct, almost like Buddhist haiku in its presentation. Weltzien has arrived at this point in his life with a sense of gravitas anchored to land, rivers, and hiking, that embraces the philosophies of writers like Gary Snyder, Norman Maclean, and Thomas Savage.
This poetry collection is Weltzien's life trawled into a net, but I delved further, into another of his distinctly autobiographical books: A Father and an Island: Reflections on Loss (Lewis-Clark Press, 2008), where Weltzien groundtruths trauma—his own, his father's, and his family’s as he dives deep into what the loss of a father to an incurable disease means to him and to us, the universal reader. In his memoir, like many of the poems in On the Beach, Weltzien builds a quintessential monument to his own younger days spent with his father on Camano Island, Washington.
In On the Beach, we get a sense of the power of memory throughout, particularly in the snapshots of his father flowing in many of the poems. They become the planks and timber Weltzien pulls apart in his poem "Unbuilding My Father" where we glimpse the poet's own slippage of time:
…Once a college friend, Marsha White, slept in the A-frame but I only kissed
her goodnight, too shy for sex. I walked into my adulthood as did my brothers and after more summers, sons or nephews unrolled sleeping bags, warmed the hut with laughter but they too departed and the A-frame stood abandoned, storage shed of forgotten voices. Moss surged on cedar, dirt moistened corner posts and plywood edges. New owner of familiar ground, I crowbar soft panels, intent on
replicating Dad’s weave, board by board. I dig out corner anchors, hear hammer or bar sink into pulp, concede the spread of rot. Instead of makeover, my brother and I pry the supports, pummel patches of siding, break the floor, undoing step by step Dad’s measurements and curses and sweat. Never a builder easy with tools— a failed inheritance—my hands touch his half a century later. I throw down the pieces he crafted into a fairy tale A, its smell lost
in time’s thickening soil.
So much of poetry is both lamentation and lucid recall, and in this collection, Alan places his own journey center stage as a way to reconstruct life and to determine a certain philosophy and ethos with his own perspectives as a poet.
He is a man who wants nature, wildlands, and the silence of animal life but has also hitched much of his work around Montana and the state’s writers—and there are many, including Ivan Doig, Thomas McGuane, Rick Bass, Doug Peacock, Peter Bowen and Jim Harrison. His edited book, The Norman Maclean Reader (2012, University of Chicago Press), is a must for those who want to know more about this most distinctive of Montana voices.
In his 2020 University of Nevada Press book, Savage West: The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage, Weltzien looks at a
complicated writer, a gay man, now famous because of the 2021 movie "The Power of the Dog," based on Tom Savage’s 1967 novel of the same name. We have the 2005 movie, “Brokeback Mountain” (set in Wyoming and Texas), adapted from a 1997 short story by Annie Proulx, that covers her concept of cowboys and homosexuality. The Jane Campion directed/written adaptation of Savage’s novel is cited as “revisionist Western psychological drama.” So goes post-modern Hollywood.
I ended up in Montana, considering a doctorate at the University of Montana, Missoula, and spent time with writer James Crumley, and I spent time alone in Big Sky country hiking and camping. I understand the allure of that place. So here I am, reading Weltzien poems and tasked to review them, but I cast myself out on some grizzly-trampled path, in Big Sky country, with my own narrative flowering like knapweed in this review-slash-riff.
So many roads and paths are traversed in this poetry collection, and the reader should be honored to have been gifted from Weltzien a writer’s keen eye and fabulous turn of a phrase. His juxtaposing of his own vulnerabilities as boy, father, man, teacher, and child, to the songs of his verse make it a pleasurable read. He invites us to spend time with him as he kayaks near orca—Puget Sound’s J-pod—but he also places us in travelogue mode while he pries beauty and sadness from his own observations of the Polish people when he taught there, as well as tourist views of the Philippines, Myanmar, Greece, Hawaii, and Chesapeake Bay.
You’ll feel the long arm of age and time reach Alan’s shores—that ever-present beachhead—as he quickly peels back nostalgia to just get down to the basics of decluttering life, emblematic in this process he described of giving away his extensive library when he calls it quits as an English faculty (“On Giving Away Most of My Library”).
From flesh torn, scabbed over and healed, some poems recount the hard knocks of living through life. Weltzien writes about his own hard work as a son and father and husband, and many of those poems are most compelling for me. In “Pouring My Mother,” Weltzien takes the spreading of his mother’s ashes as a statement of his own closing chapters in life, a perspective only found as a seventy-year-old man:
My face clenches and eyes pour behind sunglasses as my finger breaks open
the bag and I pour Lorraine, a steady sifting stream, into the bay where, seventeen years and four days later, she finally rejoins Father. The eulogies of others, some tearful, offset
my sobbing silence. I flash in and out of our private ceremony, wracked by the gap between tongue and heart, my reputation as wordsmith vanished.
In the stretching silence I mutter “Let’s go” and after we beach and tie the boats, I breast stroke out in the gathering tide and almost meet the random constellation of mums that bob gently towards me in my basin of tears where, as Whitman knew, we rock endlessly in our beginning and end and beyond, from salt to salt.
The memoiric aspect of this collection allows the reader to sound the depths of this man’s life, and one would enjoy a cup of wine with the fellow as he navigates the world he’s lived.
The book’s title poem, “On the Beach,” speaks to this perspective of aging:
How have I nearly reached my Biblical allotment of seventy years? On this beach I contain multitudes including shadows of earlier selves
and somehow, in my sauntering, I thread decades and geographies. No matter the distant time zones, I fly home to this backwater bay where I’m never alone and fix the compass of this life on this beach, endlessly rocking
In an interview he did in Portland in 2017, Weltzien
crystallizes what he sees as his art: “The personal or social relationship between the self and a given topography or two represents an abiding, fascinating, endlessly new and variable genre for people like me. I love writing, whether [it’s] called eco-fiction or eco-poetry or some other label, that foregrounds physical setting.”
Alan Weltzien, will assist any reader out of pitch-black sorrow into a place where they can say, no matter the circumstances, “I have lived.”
Kathleen Tarr
Introduction
It has rarely ever been a lucrative time to be a writer, yet within every epoch and era, it has always been necessary to write. I first met the writer and poet Marybeth Holleman in the early 2000s through creative writing circles at University of Alaska Anchorage. More recently, beginning around 2016, and thanks to Marybeth’s creative idea and organizational plan, we formed a loose-knit group of seven writers into something akin to a literary salon. For our LitSalon, we sometimes called ourselves the Salonistas. It wasn’t a book club, nor was its purpose to offer critiques or to prop up each other’s work. Our literary salon existed for literary friendship and to discuss, as writers, mostly contemporary work—poetry, nonfiction, fiction—to see what we, as writers, might learn from it. We read and discussed poems, essays, novel excerpts, and rotated meetings in various private homes.
Marybeth Holleman arrived on the doorstep to my hermitage-by-the-parkway, as I affectionately refer to my small ranch home off a noisy urban street in Anchorage, on October 30, 2022. Armed with two bags of Nepalese and Indian takeout food for our dinner, we carved out three hours to talk about her debut poetry collection, tender gravity. (We later emailed back and forth and spoke by phone. Parts of the following conversation were adapted from a recording I made.) Marybeth’s book had just been
published in August 2022 (Pasadena, California: Boreal Book, Red Hen Press, 2022). I popped open a bottle of Pinot Noir to celebrate the occasion while we devoured vegetable samosas, saag paneer, and naan.
Marybeth Holleman believes we must live in praise of nature’s replenishing beauty and radiance. Humans are here to praise, she says. However, at the same time, we should also ask ourselves to whom and to what are we listening? Deadening political rhetoric and droning media-speak can dominate daily lives adding to the overall cynicism. Holleman chooses to focus on the voices originating from the non-human world. “The non-human communicates all the time to us,” she said. “Even though we don’t understand it, we feel it, and we know it.”
The poems in tender gravity are antiphons to modern-day anxieties, climate fears, and grief about environmental destruction. Her poetry is not a call-toaction on any political scale. The poems are a reminder that poetry is transformative, a pathway in which to see and to acknowledge life, including the non-human, and to reach for some deeper comprehension and unity.
I vividly recall one particular meeting of our Salonistas. As members of the LitSalon, we had all gathered at Marybeth’s lower Hillside home on a crisp September day in 2016 to discuss and learn more about the Chinese American poet, Arthur Sze. Four zebra finches
chirped and zipped around their large aviary next to the kitchen. Her two mixed-Husky dogs, Ivy and Luna, lazed at our feet before the commotion began. A large black bear crossed the property. Nothing unusual about that, Marybeth said. But this curious bear ambled up two flights of wooden steps and came onto the deck. The bear stood for a moment, then moved closer and peered at us through the big picture windows adjacent to the couch where I was seated.
The non-human world had spoken.
And then, reading William Stafford, I learned how he wrote a poem every morning. And so I thought, well, that would be good writing practice, writing a poem a day. Because writing, as you know, requires practice. It’s like anything else: you can’t just go out and run a marathon; you have to build up to it, build endurance and strength. So, for many years, writing poems was just a practice for me.
Then I started to like some of those morning poems and sent some of them out. And so now I see that I have trained myself to walk through the world as a poet. Which is to say, I experience something, and words come in that way.
And here’s another thing: often, my subject matter—oil spills, climate change, extinction, all the ways in which we humans are destroying the very planet upon which we depend–is hard, difficult, dark. But in order to keep writing, I needed it to also be fun. And poetry can be a lot of fun, because you get to play with form. I saw how Annie Dillard, Barbara Kingsolver, and other writers I admire dropped the labels and wrote in all kinds of forms—fiction, nonfiction, poetry. So, why not play in all the fields?
Kathleen Tarr: I have known you for close to 15 years, and to put it in rather crass terms, I have kept tabs on your literary output—it’s been amazing! I first knew you as a fellow nonfiction writer and essayist. I own the anthology you co-edited with Anne Coray, Crosscurrents North: Alaskans on the Environment (UA Press, 2008), and your nonfiction book, The Heart of the Sound (University Utah Press, 2004). A few summers ago, on one of our strolls through the Alaska Botanical Garden, you told me you were trying to finish a manuscript for a novel and I remember thinking, “Are you nuts?” And now poetry has taken center stage. Why now, Marybeth? What has changed in your writing life, or life in general, that has brought poetry to the forefront?
Mary Beth Holleman: For a long time, poetry was my medicine. It was what I turned to each morning, to read a poem, to start my day, to—as Jane Kenyon said in her advice to poets—have good sentences in my ears. It wasn’t until I became a writer, after my work in environmental policy, that I began to read poetry. The first poet I ever read and really got deep down in my gut was Mary Oliver. She remains one of my favorites.
And this is not to say I am only writing poetry now. I have just finished an essay for an anthology on Barry Lopez. I’ve got a novel out to publishers. I use all the tools in my toolbox. Experimenting with form is useful and fun. As the poet A.R. Ammons said, I “look for the forms/things want to come as.”
But I do think poetry has a special power for revealing the more-than-human world. With its wide-open form, the way it can dance across the page, it’s a visual art. It’s not confined by all the norms of prose—sentences and paragraphs and punctuation. You can break all the rules of punctuation and grammar and just let things flow. I think this makes it easier to express the inexpressible, the ineffable, in poetry. I think it allows the more-than-human to show up, be recognized, speak, if you will. It allows us to break down, or slip by, all the walls of rationality human culture has devised, all the ways we think we’re different, from each other and from nonhuman life, all the ways we think we are separate, all those old lies that have created this mess. Poetry may be the magic door through which we escape, as D.H. Lawrence said, “the glass bottles of our ego” must be open so that “cool, un[-]lying life will rush in…”
KT: Beautifully articulated! All of what you said reminds
me of something Czeslaw Milosz noted: “Poetry is the passionate pursuit of the real.”
MBH: Yes. I think poetry can save us. Not just poetry, but also birches, also nuthatches, also mountain heather. Poetry, as one of the oldest forms of human expression, second only to the cave paintings in France, has not only a long and rich history, but can reach us in ways that circumvent our egos and our walls of rationality. And poetry can allow us to see how every single relationship, whether with another human or a ground squirrel or the waves of the sea, are reciprocal. We need each other, all of us.
KT: I felt lucky to be present for the September 8, 2022 book launch of tender gravity. I had to stand way in the back at the jam-packed event. I have to tell you I really appreciated that your book launch was held at the restaurant, Organic Oasis. Good grief, what perfect symmetry for you, an avid gardener, a naturalist, an outdoorsy person to have Organic Oasis, emphasis on the organic, to be the location. Trustees for Alaska, a conservation advocacy group near and dear to your heart, served as a major sponsor. Linda Infante Lyons, a well-known Alaskan visual artist whose artwork graces the cover of tender gravity, shared a Q&A with you and provided reflections about her Alutiiq heritage. A 13-year-old cellist, Izzy Allwright, from McCarthy, Alaska, played his impromptu accompaniment while you read the poem, “Skating After Many Moons.” All in all, a fabulous party!
MBH: Thanks for saying that, I think everyone had a good time. My son, James, served as the official photographer. Inviting the young cellist was a cool addition to the festivities. I ended up reading “Skating After Many Moons” to his playing cello two times that night. Afterwards, a woman thanked me for doing that. She said she got much more out of the poem after hearing it repeated.
KT: In a recent interview with Trustees for Alaska, you said one of your primary quests as a writer was to try and figure out how you can give voice to, or rather, as you say, how you can reveal the voice of the more-than-human world. Poetry helps create right connections. It heals. And through words alone, without stepping a foot on a trail or in a kayak, poetry can help open us to the natural world. Taken as a whole, doesn’t tender gravity represent a kind of altruism, albeit a poetic altruism, in same sense, if I may put those words together?
MBH: Well, yes, I hope to heal this disconnect we are all suffering from, a disconnect with life, to open humans up to the wonders of life on Earth, to help us wake up and reconnect with the world beyond our human skin.
Thinking of altruism and writing, the great American short story writer Grace Paley, when asked whether writers have a moral obligation, said that all humans do, whether a plumber or an artist, whatever your calling is, she said, you have to “make sure there’s a little more justice in the world when you leave it than when you found it. Most writers do that naturally, see that more lives are illuminated, try to understand what is not understood and see what hasn’t been seen.”
And in that altruism, it’s not just the nonhuman world that benefits. Opening ourselves to reconnect with the world beyond humans heals us humans. We know this, but we forget. The novelist Lydia Millet relates how, when she first moved to New York, she was “amazed” by how people were “relentlessly interested in exclusively the human self.” This is short-sighted, at best: why not look beyond the human for wisdom, guidance, insight?
It’s been said that all writing seeks to answer one question: How shall we live? I’ve always turned to the natural world, replete as it is with, as Darwin wrote, “endless forms most beautiful” of living and being and dying, for answers to that question, for models of how to live.
I look to the world beyond humans again and again because there I see a kind of grace and reciprocity and harmony—a way that every being, animate and inanimate, fits together into a seamless whole, cooperatively living together and stitching together the world—as I write in my poem “Marbled Murrelet”—that human society seems to have lost and to desperately need.
For this, I’m eternally grateful. And so I seek, in my work, to praise the nonhuman world. I’ve come to believe, to answer Wendell Berry’s question, “What are people for?” that our most important job may just be to praise and to love this gorgeous world. I want to reveal this power of the world beyond humans, this grace and beauty, so that others, too, might find such solace, grounding, and joy.
Finally, I do consider this work collaborative, in that I’m just a conduit, a transcriber, a translator. The world has a lot to say to us. We spend most of our time just talking to other humans, but the rest of life also has agency, and voice, and—what we humans may need most—a different kind of wisdom.
KT: Marybeth, there is nothing tender about the super force of gravity, is there? Gravity keeps the planets in orbit. Gravity has been described as “the invisible super glue” pulling every object downward. We can’t see it, taste it, smell it—but oh, how we know of gravity’s gravitas! I am curious about the pairing of these two words—tender and gravity—in your book’s title and the immediate tension established.
MBH: The short answer is, it comes from the first poem, “The Beating Heart, Minus Gravity.” You may have noticed that the book itself begins and ends with air: in the first poem, last line, “the tender gravity of air” and in the last poem, last line, “the welcoming air.”
We are very lucky to be alive on this generous planet right now. This is a very generous and loving world we get to inhabit, with this perfect atmosphere. Think of the generosity of seeds, the giving nature of water, the astonishment of atoms combining to create air that we can breathe, through lungs that work every second of every day.
This world, it is tender, it holds us—I think now of a William Stafford poem called “The World”—no matter what difficulties may come, no matter how harsh and terrifying
the world may seem, it is also tender, it offers itself to us, every day filled with more gifts than we can possibly ever count.
And it’s also elusive, this thing called gravity, visibly of course, but also, hard to get our heads around the concept of it—so it is mysterious, isn’t it? And really, all we have are theories and names, we don’t really know what’s going on.
In writing my novel, where one of the characters is a physicist, I did research on quantum theory and the theory of everything, and, well, the Newtonian theory of gravity has given way now to the Einsteinian theory of gravitational fields—which, put simply, means that there’s not this giant force, like a magnet at the center of the earth holding us here, but rather there’s a field that is as much matter as we are, that curves around every object, each person, and holds us. This curvature of spacetime, talk about mystery!
So, yes, a mystery, a tension, in the title. A way of dropping the reader out of the expected, right from the start.
KT: Besides sharing time in our LitSalon, we have other common interests. For instance, the “god of dirt,” as you mentioned it in tender gravity, has called to us both. We are plant lovers and houseplant addicts. I mean look around my hermitage-by-the-parkway…it’s like I live in a greenhouse. I hand-carried an orchid back from Florida for you, and you gave me a cutting from a plant in the iris family with the poetic name of Wandering Apostle… unfortunately, it has since wandered off to plant heaven.
I started counting the plant references in your book— sundew, sphagnum moss, eelgrass, trollius, geraniums,
willow, bedstraw, equisetum, cinquefoil, gentian—to name but a few.
MBH: Oh, yes, our botanical connection! Our houseplants! That Wandering Apostle plant, I thought it’d be perfect for you, given your Thomas Merton-infused life. It was from a cutting I got from friends in college. For years I didn’t know what it was even called, but it has followed me for so long. As has my Christmas cactus, which I started from a cutting from my mother’s plant. I’m so grateful for these long-lived beings with whom I share my home.
KT: I thought of another connection we have. It’s that Cirque Journal was, perhaps, the first place where we had poems accepted…No, come to think of it, my very first poem appeared in a local publication produced by Moose Bound Press back in the early 80’s. This “journal” was a stack of photocopied pages held together with plastic comb tooth binders—does anyone remember those antiquated things? I published my first poem much more respectfully in Cirque 1.1. Didn’t you publish your first poem on the pages of Cirque , too?
MBH: I’m very grateful to Cirque ’s founder and editor-inchief, Michael Burwell, because Cirque did accept an early poem of mine in Cirque 1.2, “Yesterday, On the Familiar Trail.” But Ice Floe was the first literary journal to publish one of my poems.
Before I published a poem in Ice Floe, though, and before there was Internet, the poet and playwright, Arlitia Jones, was working in a downtown bank. Arlitia had not yet published her poetry book, The Bandsaw Riots, and she had not yet written a play. Arlitia convinced her employer to produce a promotional calendar with accompanying poems, and she chose one of my poems for the month of March. We even had a reading at the bank!
KT: Humble poetic beginnings, indeed! You also held a series of jobs that took you all over Alaska, and this predated your vocation and identity as writer/poet.
MBH: One of my first jobs was as a receptionist at the University of Alaska Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER). Then, afterwards, I was promoted to research assistant to help map subsistence use areas in Southeast Alaska. I went to Kake, Klawock, Port Alexander, Point Baker, and other small villages. I took some trips out to Western Alaska, too, to Unalakleet, Eek, St. Mary’s, and
St. Paul in the Pribilofs. As a student in UAA’s traditional MFA program—I graduated in 1991 and studied under Tom Sexton—I took a class in archaeology and went on a dig in Unalaska Island at a very remote site. We flew onto a lake in a Grumman G-21 Goose to the base camp, from which we worked for about 8 weeks.
My first job, though, was working for the Alaska Railroad selling train tickets between Portage and Whittier, and then that autumn I worked at the gift shop at Denali.
KT: Prince William Sound. March 24, 1989. Exxon Valdez Oil spill. This is one of the pivotal events of your life, is it not? That disaster still creates ripple effects in your psyche.
MBH: Yes. I had moved to Alaska three years earlier, in 1986, because I fell in love with Prince William Sound. I knew big tankers traversed the eastern side of the Sound, but I had no idea that such a massive oil spill could happen. This event was a coming-of-age moment for me, but of a different kind. A loss of another kind of innocence. I knew I couldn’t take anything for granted anymore. That bad things could happen, that things you didn’t even know were possible, could happen. I can’t really think of another thing about my time in Alaska that has had that kind of deep, serious impact on me. Maybe it’s how it must be for those who experienced the 1964 earthquake. Nothing stays the same. There is also a kind of shift inside you.
And now, well, it's so difficult to witness how much Alaska is changing with climate chaos, so difficult to see glaciers I’ve known for decades retreating, leaving. And it’s just painful to see how little our society is willing to deal with it.
I’m always struggling with eco-grief and eco-anxiety. Aldo Leopold said that to be an environmentalist means you are “walking in a world of wounds.” I do notice how places are degraded, species are lost…I see these things but sometimes wish I didn’t.
Rumi said the cure for pain is in the pain: you go out into the more-than-human world, the world you love that you’re losing; you go there, face the loss, and find, then, solace. You witness how the other beings are just living their lives, with “no forethought of grief,” as Wendell Berry put it. You realize this is a single moment in time, you’re but a speck in this vastness of time and space. You realize, well, of course, the world will go on, with or without humans.
The unknown, the unknowable, brings me great solace. We learn more every day: for example, we know more now about fungi. But we still don’t understand how the bartailed godwits can fly non-stop from Alaska to Tasmania. Instead, we try to measure “intelligence” by our own limited standards. We humans do ourselves a disservice by thinking we know so much, by thinking we can know everything.
KT: Despite the internal pessimism we are discussing right now, as a reader, I felt tender gravity invites the reader into a kind of protective space, into a realm away from it all, into a space that is warm and inviting, to be among the flora and fauna, on the page and in imaginations. Everything animate and inanimate contains a spiritual essence, as Linda Infante Lyons said during your public conversation. We can heal our relationship with the earth and be good stewards of the planet.
MBH: Yes, we are all of this earth, and we’re all dependent upon one another. Linda was sharing the spiritual beliefs of her Alutiiq heritage. We’ve much still to learn from indigenous traditions…From all our ancient traditions and heritages, really, like the Celts, Druids, etc. And certainly they remind us that we do know, we do feel this connection. We’re all born with it.
And you and I talked about “nature writing.” Or how we refer to some poets as “nature poets.” Are there human poets and city poets and country poets and farmer poets? Well, maybe Wendell Berry is a farmer poet! But, wow, all the categorizing we do! We are part of nature, but we act as though we’re not. We try and separate ourselves. So much so that anyone that writes about the nonhuman world is labeled “nature writer.”
So I’ll return to this idea that we’re here to praise this gorgeous planet, and to care for it. Why not write poems to help others feel that, to share what I’ve felt, what I know we can all feel?
KT: I know you are very passionate about environmental causes. But how do you combine art and literature with activism?
MBH: I feel strongly about wanting to be of use in the world, to not just be taking up space, but to make a positive difference. But I’m often conflicted: should I sit down and write, or should I march, do some more direct
Of course, though, writing is activism. Writing itself makes a strong statement about our place in the world. I started out in environmental policy because I thought that if politicians just understood what science was telling us, they’d make good choices. I was soon disillusioned, and realized that what had influenced my values, my sense of the world, was the natural world itself, my direct experience in it, but also the written word. I realized writing has a profound and lasting effect on how we humans move through the world. So, striking a balance between direct activism and writing is very important.
Poetry does help us slow down, take a deep breath, look at the so-called “simple” things. Besides, it’s more exciting to live in the world as mystery. We need to keep our curiosity, humbleness, and sense of wonder.
(I sipped a little more wine and turned to one of Holleman’s poems, “Refugium.” I read it aloud to Marybeth. From the last stanza:
…”Let me remain here with you/ large and immoveable rock/ mountain/let you be my whole world.”)
KT: “Refugium” is one of my favorite poems in tender gravity. And I also marked the poem, “With” which ends with this: “…every day and night/world without end.”
I recognized the phrase “world without end” from the famous Catholic prayer, “Glory Be” which closes with “as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end.”
Did you consciously interject that phrase to echo back to the prayer, to something Biblical? Over the years, we have talked about you practicing Buddhist meditation, but you haven’t told me much about your Catholic upbringing or how that may have influenced your writing, or language choices at times?
MBH: I was born into a large Catholic family, middle child of six, Italian on my mother’s side, Slavic on my father’s. I went to a small Catholic school through the eighth grade. So, the language of the Bible, of prayers, of hymns…I grew up steeped in them. And I find those rhythms, phrases, stories slipping into my work. It’s not intentional; it just happens, and then I look back on a draft and see those
resonances. That’s how “world without end” appeared. Another poem ends with the line “the wor(l)d. and then there was.” A play on lines from the Bible. And then the poem “Prodigal” comes from an Old Testament story of two sons, one who stayed and one who wandered. This was a story that puzzled me throughout most of my childhood. Still does. Like a Koan in Buddhism, perhaps it’s never meant to be fully understood, but just pondered, meditated upon.
or physical movements, etc., then poetry is a good way to do that because it communicates, as Eliot remarked, before it is understood. And, yes, also, to reaching the “uninformed.” When people tell me they don’t understand poetry, I just tell them they just haven’t found the right poet yet. That’s how I felt until I read Mary Oliver’s poetry—hers were the first poems to speak to me, the first I understood immediately.
Let’s see…you asked me about international writers I have admired. There’s Paul Celan, Isabelle Allende, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Robert MacFarlane, Arundati Roy, Wislawa Szymborkska, Anna Akhmatova…
KT: Switching from great poets and writers for a moment, I want to know something about Marybeth Holleman that would surely surprise people, something that shows a completely different side of you. You relayed the story to me about how you went snorkeling with sea lions in Monterey Bay, California. Wow! But what else about you?
KT: I know the list is long, but I’m curious about what writers have made a difference to you, and I am especially interested in the non-American ones? By the way, here’s an historical side note to mark this year in another way, poetically speaking: tender gravity has been published in the 100th anniversary year of T.S. Eliot’s, “The Wasteland.”
MBH: I didn’t know that!
KT: Yeah, in the October 3, 2022 issue of the New Yorker, Anthony Lane wrote a very interesting essay about T.S. Eliot. He quotes from an essay T.S. Eliot wrote on Dante in which Eliot says that between two first-time readers, the erudite and the uniformed, Eliot would lean toward the second. “Genuine poetry can communicate before it’s understood.”
MBH: Yes, I believe that to be true…if I’m trying to reveal the voices of those who have language, but not as words, but as pure sounds, as energy, through facial expressions
MBH: I love cars. I know, an aberration for an environmental writer! I grew up in a big family and we all loved cars. My Dad was always working on old cars; that was his hobby. And my younger brother, especially, always had so many classics. Right now, I have a 1962 VW convertible in Anchorage. We bought it in North Carolina, fixed it up, and drove it around for years. The VW sat in Chapel Hill, until Dad fixed it up, stored it, and eventually I had it shipped to Alaska.
KT: I remember times when we talked sports, and you spoke about your love for college basketball, but your genuine interest in cars, well this is a real shockeroo! (laughter)…I want to return to this idea that tender gravity is a response to existential angst, the pall of dread that hangs over us so often, the sense that humankind will only commit more foibles, missteps, violence, and stupidities. I mean, what will we do next?
MBH: Well, yes, I want my poems—every word I write, really—to be of use in the world. To be worth the trees they’re written on, as Thomas Lyons once said. And what I have to offer, and what I think is of use, is to remind us of our greater connections, of the inherent reciprocity of every relationship, and of the joy to be found there.
But, yeah, where do we as a species go next? It doesn’t look good, does it? I mean, we’ve gone through too
many mass shootings, Sandy Hook, climate change, the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, election deniers, outright fabrications by elected officials, incredible losses of species and habitats and clean air and water… I don’t know what will finally wake people up. That is my doomsday self, speaking. That’s why I have the bumper sticker on my car that says, “I’d rather be a coyote.” Do you know that quote?
KT: What a strange sticker to have on your car! No, tell me the story.
MBH: Sometimes—increasingly, these days—I’m ashamed of being human! I’d rather, as Walt Whitman wrote, “turn and live with the animals.” “I’d rather be a coyote” comes from singer/songwriter Katie Lee who lived in the West and fought the Glen Canyon Dam alongside Edward Abbey and others—a travesty, this dam, which flooded a unique and gorgeous canyon, and created Lake Powell. This incredible female artist and activist was scathing about developers who would destroy anything for profits. In her obituary, she was quoted as saying she just didn’t want
Paul K. Haederto be a part of the human race when she witnessed all the destruction we caused. She said, “I’d rather be a coyote!”
Why does my species do such stupid things? Pick your poison. We’re just not thinking. We’re destroying the only home we know. I just don’t get it. If we were any other species, our actions would have made us extinct by now. Which may be where we’re headed.
So, Katie Lee’s quote resonated with me…had some bumper stickers made and gave them away to friends who feel the same. It seems to sum things up…
KT: Except that coyotes don’t build jet planes or write poetry.
MBH: Well, not that we know, anyway! (laughter). I’ll bet coyotes do some creative things akin to poetry. It’s just we can’t, or don’t, recognize it. And that brings us back to the joy, the solace of all we don’t know, the mystery.
It’s as if my mind creates shapes that I don’t know about. I get this shape in my head, and sometimes I know where it comes from and sometimes I don’t. When I got to New Mexico that was mine. As soon as I saw it, that was my country. I’d never seen anything like it before but it fitted to me. It’s something in the air, it’s just different. The sky is different, the stars are different, the wind is different.
Georgia O’Keeffe
In the act of reading Emily Wall’s poetry, I feel shape and form beginning to congeal in my brain. A window opens to a world of reimagining my own relationship to the poet who is our guide into her own vision of what it means to be a human, a woman, a mother, a daughter, a child of the world. We will be taken on a magic carpet ride into what feminism is. What the ultimate act of creation can be in childbirth. We will see who we are in the poet’s hands: the son-daughter, niece-nephew, mother-earth relationships we as children of mother earth and mother culture hold dear, open and secretive. Emily Wall opens up our journey.
We have Wall in the crystallized energy of a fist, or flame, or birth canal. As we read her work, we are reborn, remade
and recentered, even for just a moment during and after being with her as she sings songs of honor, love, body and spirit femina.
It’s not hyperbole that the reader of poetry will begin to shape her own vision of the fragility and strength of human existence after galvanizing within Emily Wall’s work of profound mimesis. Let me explain how Wall’s work has tied into what many have looked to as art’s purpose: as a recreation of our own psychic formation (mimesis). Art is also shaped by its “otherness” and by history, and Wall is a studied writer of history.
To take this further, I see in Wall’s body of work—whether
she’s with Georgia O’Keeffe’s artwork/life in her chapbook, FIST or through the life of The Virgin Mary in a conjuring of Wall’s proto-feminism in Flame, or in birth in her Breaking into Air (Birth Poems) this undergirded idea which states all stories are about exile and homesickness. That is, all art contains a narrative.
As reader of Wall’s art, I must comport myself mimetically "to lose myself, forget myself, extinguish myself in her artwork." Given that philosophical overlay, I enter the world of this artist with openness to her magic, her myth making and her willingness to envelope herself in persona. I am taken by Wall’s magical incantations.
For Emily Wall, the words in her poems are benedictions to women like Georgia O’Keefe, Alice Waters, the Virgin Mary and the collective female of gestation and birthing.
In FIST Wall transmutes O’Keeffe onto her page. O’Keeffe spent much of her life at Ghost Ranch in Pueblo Indian country. She was a Wisconsin-born rebel, who was told many times by many a man that she would or could not be an artist. Wall utilizes a proto-feminist epigram at the start of her chapbook, FIST, written by Georgia O’Keeffe:
One morning as I climbed to the top floor for the Life Class, there [Eugene Speicher] sat with his fresh linen smock, blocking the whole stairway and threatening that he would not let me pass unless I promised to pose for him.
I was annoyed and wanted to go up to work.
‘It doesn’t matter what you do,’ he said.
‘I’m going to be a great painter and you will probably end up teaching in some girls’ school.’
Here she is challenged by sexism and parochialism. O’Keeffe laughed at all these “great” male artists Back East wanting to write the great American novel or produce the great American play, while none of them spent any time away from their East Coast haunts. O’Keeffe left that world and embarked on a rather unique journey for not just a female artist, but for any artist.
Wall’s book FIST is in seven parts, and all poems are shaped as letters Wall imagines O’Keeffe writing. Part 1: Amarillo Texas; 2: New York, New York; Lake George, New York; 4: Taos, New Mexico; 5: Ghost Ranch, New Mexico; 6: Abiquiu, New Mexico; 7: The Far Away.
For the studied poet, Wall’s formulation of FIST is around three specific styles or techniques: ekphrastic, epistolic, persona poems. Wall explains that she had O’Keeffe paintings printed out and taped to her walls when she worked on this chapbook.
“I’ve lived with and worked under these images for the past few years, letting her colors and shapes and vision guide me,” she writes at the beginning of FIST. Each poem comes from an original work, and at the end of the chapbook she pairs each poem to the title of a painting.
The last letter in this book, “The Faraway—Pelvis Blue” impregnates the reader with both the words Wall envisions and what O'Keeffe might attribute as influencers of her painting: desert and bones. It is almost a séance with Georgia O’Keeffe, as Emily Wall imagines the chillingly authentic song O’Keeffe would have chanted:
The rush of wind in lungs when I cross the world of sky and heat and there, the one wing— —of bone— I didn’t even know I was looking for now found— and carried— all the way home.
Now, I trace its deep curve—
this pelvis, this cradle — this very center— that tethers me to forever.
Taking a leap in her world as a poet and conjurer, Wall tackles the inner shape of a woman—certainly one of the more famous women throughout history. Mary. The Virgin Mary. For Wall, her book, Flame, is in a nutshell what she posits as an endnote: “This chapbook is a collection of persona poems written in the voice of Mary or Mariam (Marian), mother of Jesus (in the Christian tradition) and Isa (in the Islamic tradition). The biographical poems are interspersed with poems that read like letters—her voice now, speaking to us, and offering us both direction and hope this current political climate.”
We are part of an act of living, of being, as Wall imagines the daily life of Mary, mother of this “holy spirit,” this god and master. God and spouse. This is a book that simplifies a woman’s universal role in holding life inside, giving birth and raising a son or daughter.
Wall brings to life a world of a woman living in Nazareth, Bethany and Ephesus. A Jewish woman, and through that incarnation, Jesus became the savior of the world. For millions, Mary became Mother of All the Living. For my
friends in Mexico and along the border, she is the Divine Mercy Incarnate.
For Wall’s Mary, we see her power of homemaking and raising a son; of food and spices; of womanhood, sisterhood, daily tasks; and of the quietude of aging. She captures the essence of Mother of the Church, this Queen Mother of the King of Kings. Somehow the socalled refuge of sinners is not part of Wall’s personification of Mary.
It’s ok to pray to me. You’re not going to blaspheme the creator, or my son.
Some men will tell you you can’t pray to a woman, to anyone but Him.
I don’t sit on a throne. I don’t start or stop the rain. I don’t cause a girl to look over her shoulder.
But one night, I did birth a beautiful boy. I did hold a first breath in my hands. You mothers
know this weight. I do stop by his house, on Saturday nights with a pot of soup, and sometimes, advice.
I’m here now, watching your hands light that prayer. I do sometimes remind him to listen, when those who
This is Wall’s poem, “Soup,” emblematic of the voice and tenor of this woman’s continence and spirit. Throughout, Wall creates a Mary who is fresh, a child of the earth and mother of a man of miracles. The Mary in Flame comments on the power of women who bring the living food and drink, who attend to birthing, to the aged, and to death. This Mary is the chronicler of life where Jesus was born, lived and died. The resurrection truly is in the voice of Mary, in her wisdom, her ability to see through the hubris of religious dogma and endless squabbling interpretations of her son’s acts.
It is Wall channeling the poet’s own hope for this woman of two millennia.
In "Stone," Wall writes a poem imagining Mary speaking to Joseph, the husband but not the father:
My husband is a mystery to you who search thin pages for mention of his name, what he might have spent his time doing. A carpenter is what you imagine. A man with a beard, dressed in brown. Standing
in a hut with animals, standing loosely beside a child not his own.
What was he thinking?
Was he even real?
It is the stone-on-top-of-stone-and-mud house building that best describes Joseph, who is the strength of a man who acts the father of Christ. His role is to be a builder, a carpenter, and in the end of the poem, at the end of Mary's pregnancy, the work of Joseph is enduring and necessary:
This is what I know to be real: a small stone house on the edge of the village. A pair of hands used hard, used well.
A baby that is coming. A place for us to sleep.
With one profound yet simple poem after another, the book becomes a talisman of sorts for both mother and child, wife and husband, woman and mate to undertake the long stretch back in time. This is a holy book only in that the process brings to the page evocation of the force of the mother, aunt, grandmother, daughter, sister.
Yet she is the giver of the son, The Son, who has been tutored and guided through powerful wisdom of women—bearers of children and givers of food. “Blood” is a poem that further solidifies both Wall and Mary’s vision for humanity:
Have you noticed? The men count the days we bleed
and they shy from birth with its rich blood.
They spend days and pages on the way my beautiful son bled.
It is the work of women to talk about food and rooms and blankets. We begin with the work of the body.
Mary talks of her son not conjuring up a miracle of food for the hungry, but giving piece after piece of a loaf of bread to fill their bellies.
He didn’t take away their hunger. He picked up a loaf of bread
and broke it and gave some to the small girl in front of him.
She took a bite, swallowed. I know now, I have done my work well.
No matter your belief system, or religiosity, the shape of these poems is the vessel of a woman lifting the processes of life into acts of humanity, love, caring and seeing. In Flame, imagine clay and water, or the rising dough of bread, or the veronica of golden sun on one’s lap, or the stone in hand to stave off the pain of childbirth, or the simple things like goat cheese, oregano, olive oil, and the sky.
Take Flame with you to a valley, or some hill, maybe a beach, a place of running water or wind in pines or aspens. The silence will evoke a deep resonance in your heart. The sound of earth will be the rhythm of birth, living, dying and rebirth. The light in the sky will be the shape of life held in your own mind’s eye.
You will read Flame as if it is a prayer and if you are like me, a believer in all myths but unbeliever in the giant manwoman in the sky directing all things big and small, this book will be, still, an awakening of what power is to be a life giver.
Emily Wall has rehoned the universal holy trinity, the mother of all mothers, and we have song in her poems, as well as supplications to the hearth and home. We will care about a thousand year old olive tree and a two-dayold lamb. We feel-hear-touch wind, rain, sun, snow, cold and warmth as the bosom of the mother. Her womb is our home. In these poems, the mother holds the reader close to her heart.
We are self-afflicted in this earthly suffering. Wall is a voice shaping Mary’s hope. Wall is dream catcher who is able to paint beauty of a life through her simplicity and suffering, so we can ebb away our self-injury, self-effacement, and self-hate for a moment in time. She (Mary/Emily) is there for us, as we read this book. We know the suffering, the horrors, and the agony of what women on earth have had to endure, and still do. We recognize that mother/mother culture we have abandoned. We know she is there wailing for her fallen children. But somehow Mary/Emily is also here to heal, protect, resurrect hope.
In Wall's Breaking into Air, she starts off with magnificence in the first poem, drawing the allusion of birth, and labor as a goodbye. As that feral fetus leaves the feral place, the womb, the woman in the first birthing poem is both reveling and regretful, momentarily, that the growing of flesh, blood, bone and brain inside is about to be a purging. Expurgation.
This first poem is a pulsating description of birth:
And then it’s time to let go. The midwife has told you this moment would come, yet you linger in that feral place, where you hold your hands in the rich loam of birth, feel the bold
cracking of your body, a rock deep and sweet as Henry, resting upon the floor of the world, in this feral place, where you hold and hold and hold.
That’s the high caliber of the poems shown early on. With “Henry,” we understand that all our births have left us upon the floor of the world. Gravity, earth, as we have left the bubble world of water and muscle, movement of our mama, and our own syncopation with our mother’s body
magic, the sound of her voice, her crying, the spasms, each ache and pain, and her joy. Left to the gravity of the world.
The next poem covers three births, in the figure of Samantha. The third birth is a journey of a child, like a fish, unfolding its fins, moving head out of the birth canal, as the mother, Samantha, is there with midwife and her mother, with the heart monitor signaling 140 BPM, and the healthy baby emerges, strong strong, both baby and mother, strong strong. Emily invokes:
and your momma put her hands on your head holding as much of you as she could and you rested
on the soft sand dunes of your mothers
strong and strong our momma-talk drying you. Our hands opening, finally, your own silver wings.
The next poem is of Mary of Nazareth, as the midwife. There, a neighbor calls forth to have Mary assist. Savta, Mary’s grandmother, has the birth stone, and Mary mixes herbs with wine to put on the lips of the birthing mother. The men are outside, on the roof. Two sisters hold their sister’s thighs.
We talk the baby out. We quietly share a glance
that it’s a girl. Then we call to the placenta. Come, sister.
This is the way of simple birth, done a billion times. But Emily captures, again, THAT Mary, which we have been introduced to and shaped by in her previous book, Flame
The women’s work is glorious, life giving and life shaping. The birthing ends with the simple acts of living and sustaining:
We do our work well
and then Savta and I eat a few bites of bread, breathe in the smell of blood and new skin. We walk home
in the final hours of darkness, under that faint curve of moon. Come, sister.
We are there, outside the door, somewhere, listening to the birthing. We too can smell the sea, the blood, the urine and sweat. Sometimes, Emily takes us to a difficult labor. In a hospital. These are the last lines of “Hazel’s Birth”:
This is about me, and Hazel, stepping out of that dark lake, stepping onto the shore, and learning how to breathe.
In her poem “Shaawatke’é’s Birth,” there is a deep resonance in Lingit identity, as the birth of a daughter is a celebration of the Lingit language, which is the language of culture, history, guiding a family that must move forward in a modern world where indigenous people are shunted aside, at best, pushed toward cultural extinction, at worst.
Interspersed in the poem are the songs, the words, of the father and mother of this child coming into the world with a strong tongue, one that will carry on language, therefore, the Lingit culture, people:
ch’a haa kát uwagút. haa yoo x‐’atángi yaa nanáan i een áyá k‐u.aa, kei gux‐ latseen. kei gux‐ latseen: haa Lingítx‐ sateeyí.
sometimes
this life is so difficult, it has come upon us. our language is dying. but with you, though, it will get stronger. it will get stronger: our Lingít identity
In Breaking Into Air, each birthing poem takes the reader through a gallery of births Emily was able to tap into by
reading personal journals and listening to stories from both mother and their partners. The book is shaped by her friends, many of whom are in Alaska, and Emily thanks three nameless Juneau doctors who helped her with the telling of birth experiences. The book is a collection of deep moments of creation. Many of the births are cradled in the reality of pain, hospitals, spinal blocks. This is a deeply personal book, one that takes the reader into the heart and soul of mothers.
Cynthia Steele
Windows down a bit, whisps of blond hair dancing, occasionally snagging on lip-sticked mouths, and rolling along Pacific Northwest roads in a rented Grand Am, we belt out “Born to Be Wild.”
For three weeks in August 2022, as a publisher and editor of Cirque, Sandy Kleven and I traversed from Anchorage to Juneau to Washington State and Oregon, with visits to Tess Gallagher and Gary Copeland Lilley and many literary friends rarely or never met before in person.
“Everything will go swimmingly,” I kept saying as I viewed our pressured itinerary. My word for the travels with Sandy: kismet. This trip better have kismet.
Not that we didn’t have moments like Thelma and Louise at the precipice. But just moments, such as hysteria over a mislaid purse, or one of us disappearing to take pictures of roadside llamas when we were already late. But more often, kismet, indeed, such as a road construction delay immediately lifted, or when raucous noise from a party beyond the wall drowned out our literary readers, we lifted. We were welcomed inside where the sound system served us well. Stars aligned. That’s what it’s like, traveling together.
This is a tale of two live readings, three official soirées, and three literary kinship stops. Sandy adopted the title Cirque d’ Soirées early on. An evening gathering of the literary.
I left Anchorage just days after major hand surgery. Twisting my other arm, Sandy had convinced me that a three-week road trip would be just the thing for healing my incisions—hidden under an itchy cast. Even so, I
managed to live-stream the soirées—duct taping the camera to a stand with one hand and hitting myself over the head with the other.
What a privilege touching down in Juneau at Hearthside Books, where Dan Branch’s daughter, Anna, and others read from his book Someday I'll Miss This Place Too.
The room was packed with readers, their families, and/ or many of the literary townspeople in great spirits. At just post-Covid, with a few remnant strains, most were, understandably masked. Fly-in communities, like Juneau, are vigilant in order to keep the virus from swamping their towns. Also featured was Margo Waring reading from her Cirque Press Poetry Collection, Growing Older In This Place.
After Juneau, we flew to Seattle, where we rode Seattle’s Great Wheel at Pier 57 and on August 17th, held the first official soirée at the home of Christianne Balk and her husband, Karl Flaccus. Ah, the pink hollyhock, apricot roses, periwinkle amidst wax ivy, sunflowers hovering over lavender, catching all the sun’s latter ardent rays.
The sixteen readers included the prolific Lyn Coffin. At her urging, Sandy read Lyn’s poem, “Not Orpheus. Not David,” a tribute to Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The heaviness of Russia’s attacks on Ukraine medical centers hit us.
Out on the deck, we read through the long sunset. Then, Craig Smith read a COVID-era poem about the weekly arrival of the garbage truck, newly interesting and momentous to those who had sheltered in place. The crowd’s laughter reflected its commonality.
In for the night in Mukilteo, at the home of Sandy’s friend, Kay, I was surprisingly crowned for my birthday—a milestone I kept to myself through most of the day. We shared fresh fruit and nuts on the porch as the sun set red on the water. In great company, we talked until well after midnight.
The next morning under cornflower skies, we ferried from Edmonds to the home of the much-awarded poet Tess Gallagher, stopping first at a roadside fruit stand and seeing a Spanish sparrow.
Waterside in Port Angeles, Tess shares her home with poet-partner Gary Copeland Lilley, whose most recent poetry book is The Bushman’s Medicine Show
As Sandy cooked, hummingbirds drained feeders and umber deer wandered into view. The thick-grown antler velvet sheds and then peels off in layers due to the ebbing blood flow of the season before the antlers finally fall. Gary sees the stag sporting a particular reggae vibe as having “dreadlocks.” Tess calls them “chandeliers.” Velvet in bedraggled vines.
Gary and Tess’ affectionate, collaborative relationship inspired us as they discussed current work. We walked to the closed gazebo, ate, and fell into a groove with Tess and Gary.
Tess read her poem “Why Are You Sitting in the Dark?” speaking words with care and fine diction. She lost two partners and collaborators: well-known short story writer Raymond Carver and Irish painter and storyteller Josie Gray.
Next, Gary reads a poem he’s still forming about police harassment. Tess encouraged him to get more details down—that there’s something important there. I remembered Gary’s comment to me on the Zoom program Cultivating Voices: “Badass poems Cynthia Steele,” after he heard “Sestina to the Abortion Secret” and “Trailer Park Utopia.” Our time with them in Port Townsend was rich. The delicious pauses within reading, the lack of a clock. Sandy discussed Josie’s work and publication plans. The moments flowed.
In the morning, Sandy and I left our hotel’s Covid-closed outdoor pool, stopping for coffee with Tess and Gary. At the house she owns on adjoining property which is more
like a gallery, Alfredo Arreguin’s complex paintings of Tess’s face emerged from a forest of plant life. She said, “Arreguin invites us to go with him.” So it was with Tess and Gary.
Sharing a water overlook, the Capitol Building, the mountains, we revel, and the food is as amazing as the company—crab and shrimp half salads. Yannone has two books published by Salmon Poetry of Ireland: Boats for Women and The Glass Studio. One spine-tingling effect of living in the post-COVID world is the warmth and exhilaration of touching the hand of a friend previously out of reach.
Next, we visit Portland, joining Cirque published poets Dale Champlin and Marc Jansson at the quaint Rose City Book Pub (vaccination required). Marc read poems from his Cirque Press poetry collection November Reconsidered, a gritty satire on many topics.
Then we drove south, along the Sound to meet with author David Rowan in Union City. A town of 600-some people near Hood Canal seems to be centered on the Union County Store, which is where we met David. David is plodding/plotting along on a new book after Cirque published his novel Loggers Don’t Make Love. We ate ice cream, hugged, and continued our journey.
The hazy skies of Olympia called. There we met a friend on the deck of the Olympia Oyster House—Sandra Yannone. As the adept facilitator of Cultivating Voices, Sundays on Zoom, Sandra takes the time to let words resonate.
Dale read from Callie Comes of Age (also from Cirque Press)—a novel in the form of poetry—with crisp details of a girl's coming of age. Her words pull the reader into the time. Sandy and I quoted bits and pieces of Callie on the drive forward, such as when Callie says one thing but means another. Nancy Deschu, a true reading devotee, read in Portland and then followed us to Hood River and Salem.
At Rose City, we were joined by the entertaining, welltraveled Paul Haeder who Mike Burwell calls, “one hell of a writer.”
Great readings, sound company, and great drinks, and we hit the road again. This time, to Hood River. Within sight of Mount Hood, the home of Leah and Bill Stenson sprawls, its Japanese influences everywhere. Upstairs, a meditation area they share beckons. Sandy and I take
mental snapshots of the delicate décor as Leah shows us our guest rooms. The reading, on an upper floor of an outbuilding, are intentionally acoustically perfect. Dozens of attendees and readers flood in. A spread of food and drink included a sparkling homemade lemonade. The readers ranged from hilarious (Nancy Wilbur Woods) to drop-dead serious (Casey Killingsworth from his soonto-be-released poetry collection Freak Show). Truly a multiplicity of people and ideas. I shoot black and white photos.
Afterward, chili for a late dinner. Bill announces, “Root beer floats, anyone?” Absolutely. He shared music, we talk into the night, and a brief belly dancing reverie may have occurred. I drift into sleep on my hand, smiling, then wander back, prop a door open for a draft, and recline.
The next morning, Sandy and I separately meander the property, me in search of Fat Cat, a genuinely fluffy feline, grey with black-slit, vivid gold eyes. We had been introduced to this pet, perhaps a British Shorthair, by way of Leah’s poem the night before. When I found him, we communed in rising daybreak, stretching.
Under light skies and the gaze of white-topped Mount Hood, we hit the 100-mile trek for Salem and the Jefferson, OR, home of Amalie and Bob Hill. The smell of cooked chicken and a plethora of other foods wafted from the kitchen.
Marc Janssen draped the Salem Poetry banner on the podium, and readers began, including Sherri Levine. We listened to readers along with birds, who chirped away at feeders. Those present included David Goodrum whose photo was used as the cover image for Cirque #24, and David Stevenson, former chair of the University of Alaska Anchorage Creative Writing Program. I read a poetic conversation in poems about rain between UAA English professor, Toby Widdicombe and me. Many stayed on into the night, chatting as darkness settled deep around our little group. We stayed until the tiredness crept upon us in the warm, clear, dimming air.
We closed out our joint trip on an all-to-brief visit to the fruitful, sloping, surrounding hills of the Methow Valley at Bill and Lynda Humphrey’s Ranch. Sandy had been Zooming with Lynda, a former school principal, on Cirque Press' Circles imprint book Miss Bebe Comes to America— La Bebé Llega a Estados Unidos. Judi Nyerges, illustrator, joined online. I’d no idea deciding cover images could be so complex. Afterward, I ended up wandering the ranch, photographing pheasants around the grounds and then wasps clustering at the spout of the hummingbird feeder. The sun set behind the Humphreys who ended the day with us outside, firing up the Swiss Raclette Grill.
As suddenly and feverishly as it began, it ended. We celebrated the goodness and generosity of those who make up our larger Cirque literary world. We will be back next year—with soirees and readings in Alaska and the Northwest, celebrating Cirque and the writers of Cirque Press. Thank you everybody. We had a wonderful time. We had kismet.
Brenda Roper
Jean Anderson's most recent collection of stories is Human Being Songs: Northern Stories (University of Alaska Press, 2017). She's lived in Fairbanks since 1966 and has published stories and a few poems in journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, Kalliope, Prairie Schooner, Northern Review, Permafrost, and Cirque and has won several awards for her fiction.
Amuqan Julia Jimmie. I was raised in Tuntutuliak. When I was growing up, the population was about 300. When I moved away the population was close to 350. As with all my classmates, Yup'ik is my first language. We learned to speak English at the Tuntutuliak Day School as it was called back then. Our parents encouraged us all to speak Yup'ik. My mom would tell me that our language is what our people have always had. That with our language, our ancestors taught us how to live, and with it we will teach our children how to live and survive. It was never written down, only spoken, so it is how Yup'ik wisdom has been passed down for generations. Talking to loved ones was encouraged to teach our way of life and they would say that a person who has love in their heart is the one who talks, tells stories and is also the one who teaches.
Julien Appignani: The National Park Service brought me to Alaska, where I met my wife and spent several cold, wet and (in hindsight) adventurous years. I found out about Cirque at the 2018 Kachemak Bay Writers Conference, which I’d attended in the hopes of finding a home for a novel. Not long after the conference, my wife and I moved to Big Bend National Park, southwest Texas; we’ve since moved again, to New England, close to where I grew up. I currently teach Humanities at a small, cool STEM school in Nashua, New Hampshire. It’s a joy to see that Cirque has found value in my writing, even at such a great distance, and I look forward to submitting work to the journal again. In a way, Cirque gave me a start; now that the relationship has spanned a few years, it seems likely it will do the important thing – and just keep me writing. While I keep my writing side a bit of a secret from my students, I try to bring to the classroom the literature, music and art that I’ve found most urgent and most sustaining over the years. This carries a certain personal (and, perhaps, professional!) risk, but it’s given me a chance at one and the same time to share and to get deeper into the works of art I care about most, as a reader and as a writer. If only now it would give me a chance to do some more writing!
Constance Bacchus lives with her daughter in the Pacific Northwest. She has writing in The Wild Word, Re-Side, The Gorge Literary Review, Silver Pinion, City Brink, Revolute, IceFloe Press, Salmon Creek Journal, mineral lit, and Shrub-Steppe Poetry Journal. And her book, Lethe came out this year.
Tim Barnes taught in the English Department at Portland Community College for twenty-five years, where he was the chair of the creative writing department and advisor on the literary magazine Alchemy. He is author of several poetry collections, most recently Definitions for a Lost Language. He co-edited Wood Works: The Life and Writings of Charles Erskine Scott Wood (OSU Press, 1997) and is the creator and compiler of the children’s book, Everyone Out Here Knows: A Big Foot Tale, words by William Stafford, illustrated by Angelina Marino-Heidel (Arnica Creative Services, 2014). He has been the editor of the "Friends of William Stafford: A Journal & Newsletter for Poets & Poetry" since 2011. He lives in SE Portland with his wife Ilka and their cat Lorca.
Gabrielle Barnett is an Anchorage based writer. Her work appears in Cirque Journal, Alaska Women Speak and the anthology Building Fires in the Snow
Katie Bausler is a storyteller—aloud and on the page. Published written work includes columns, poems and essays in Alaska Dispatch, Edible Alaska, Stoneboat, Tidal Echoes, Alaska Women Speak, Wildheart, Motherwell and Insider. A former broadcast journalist and public relations and marketing professional, she hosts and produces the 49 Writers Active Voice podcast with writers on these pivotal times. She also writes a newsletter focused on alpine skiing and is volunteer DJ on public radio. She has an MFA in Creative Writing Nonfiction from the University of Alaska Anchorage. Katie and her husband Karl live on Douglas Island, near Juneau, Alaska’s capital.
Christine Beck is a trans writer from Yakima, WA. She has been published in such magazines as Vallum: Contemporary Poetry and 50 Haikus, and recently earned a BA in English from Eastern Washington University. She currently resides in Spokane with her wife and two cats.
Toni La Ree Bennett’s verbal and visual work has appeared in Cimarron Review, Caesura, Gold Man Review, Cirque, Gravel, Puerto del Sol, Hawaii Pacific Review, december, and Memoir with a poetry chapbook publication by Finishing Line Press, Solar Subjugation, among other publications. She lives with a feisty finch named Petey. Photography and writing samples can be seen at www.tonibennett.com.
Originally from New York City, Robert Bharda has resided in the Northwest U.S. where for the last 35 years he has specialized in vintage photographica as a profession, everything from salt prints to polaroids. His illustrations/artwork have appeared in numerous publications, both in the U.S. and abroad, and are current on covers of Naugatuck River Review, Blue Five NoteBook, book covers and within recently published Catamaran and Cirque. His portfolios of images have been featured in Cahoodahoodaling, Blue Five, Superstition, AADUNA, Serving House Journal, The Adirondack Review, Ekphrastic Review, The Critical Pass, Cold Mountain Review, Santa Clara Review and more. Also a writer, his poetry, fiction and critical reviews have been published in The North American Review, Northwest Review, Shenandoah, Quarterly West, Willow Springs, ACM, Cutbank, Fine Madness, Kansas Quarterly, Yellow Silk, Poets On, Cimarron Review and many others, including anthologies.
Kristina Boratino has been published in Compassion International Magazine, Cirque Literary Journal, Erase MS, and more. She resides in Edmonds Washington with her two children.
Nicholas Bradley is the author of Rain Shadow, a volume of poems published by the University of Alberta Press. He teaches in the Department of English at the University of Victoria.
Jeffery Brady writes from his cabin on West Creek on the traditional lands of the 'Lkóot in Dyea, Alaska. He reached the honors class in creative writing at the University of North Carolina in the late 1970s before discovering Alaska and branching off toward a nearly 40-year career running a community newspaper. Now retired, he has returned to his love of poetry and fiction, drawing from south and north.
Jack Broom is a Seattle native who retired in 2016 after 39 years as a reporter and editor at The Seattle Times. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Western Washington University in 1974. His work in photography began in the 1970s as a reporter/photographer for The Wenatchee World, where he worked before going to The Seattle Times in 1977. In recent years, his photographs have won awards at state-fair competitions in Washington and have been featured in previous issues of Cirque. He is a past president of the Edmonds-based Puget Sound Camera Club.
Thomas Brush: My first poems appeared in Poetry Northwest in 1970. I've published widely in magazines and anthologies. My most recent books, from Lynx House Press, are God's Laughter, 2018, Open Heart, 2015 and Last Night, winner of the Blue Lynx Prize, in 2012.
Annis Cassells is a writer, poet, and teacher who lives half-time in Oregon and in California. Her work has been published in print and online journals. In 2019 Annis published her first poetry collection, You Can’t Have It All. She is a contributor in the social justice anthology, Enough, Say Their Names: Messages from Ground Zero to the WORLD, which features photography and artwork from the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Passionate about the legacy of family stories, Annis teaches memoir classes and personal writing workshops. She is currently composing poems for her next collection and writing motorcycling stories for her own memoir.
Dale Champlin, an Oregon poet with an MFA in fine art is the editor of the Oregon Poetry Association’s poetry journal Verseweavers and the "OPA Newsletter." Ever since her daughter married a bull rider, Dale’s been writing cowboy poems. Memories of her early days hiking in the Black Hills of South Dakota, the bleachers at Pendleton Roundup, and summers camping at Lake Billie Chinook imbue her poetry with the scents of juniper and sage. She has had poems published in Willawaw, Visions International, San Pedro River Review, catheXis, The Opiate, Pif, Timberline Review and elsewhere. Her first collection, The Barbie Diaries, was published in 2019. Callie Comes of Age, Dale’s second full-length collection, was published with Cirque Press in 2021. Champlin’s next collection, Medusa, is due out soon.
Susan Chase-Foster writes poemoirs and magical realism in Raven’s Roost, her Japanese-style cottage in Bellingham, WA when she isn’t visiting family and friends in Alaska, Taiwan, New Zealand and Mexico. Her work has appeared Cirque, Noisy Water, Heron Clan and other publications. She is the author of Xièxiè Taipei, a collection of poems and photos from Taiwan, and Co-Editor of This Uncommon Solitude, an anthology of poems written by Pacific Northwest poets during Covid. Susan is currently working on a novel set in a fishing village in Mexico. Her blog has been hibernating for a while at stilllifewithtortillas.com.
Michael Christenson has read his poetry in bars, parks, libraries, jails, classrooms, auditoriums, coffee shops, rooftops, and at the VFW Post in Robert Bly’s hometown. Three-time Alaska state slam finalist, he is also the reigning Woosh Kinaadeiyí Grand Slam Poetry Champion. He has been a bus driver, a beer bottler, an NPR newsreader and occasional playwright, theater critic, director and producer. And improviser. He is either job adverse or has a very short attention span. His hobbies include going into the woods and snorting the underarms of the trees.
Nancy Christopherson's poems have appeared in Abandon Journal, Aji Magazine, Amethyst Review, Circle of Seasons, Cirque, Free State Review, Helen Literary Magazine, Hole In The Head Review, Kosmos Quarterly Spring Gallery of Poets, Molecule Tiny Lit Mag, Peregrine, Raven Chronicles, The Cape Rock, The Stillwater Review, Third Wednesday, Verseweavers, VoiceCatcher, and Xanadu, among many others. Author of The Leaf, she resides in Oregon and serves on the executive board of the Oregon Poetry Association. Visit https://www.nancychristophersonpoetry.com. On Instagram @ nancychristophersonpoetry.
Nard Claar, nardclaar.com, is an artist and also works with non-profits who value the environment, arts, and community. An avid cyclist, skier and artist. His work is currently exhibited in Colorado at 45 Degree Gallery, Old Colorado City, Academy Art & Frame, Colorado Springs, Manitou Art Center, Manitou Springs, and Stone, Bones, & Wood, Green Mt. Falls, as well as at Stephan Fine Arts in Anchorage, AK, Attic Gallery in Camas, WA, and the Encaustic Art Institute in Santa Fe, NM. Nardclaar. com.
Mary Eliza Crane lives in the Cascade foothills east of Duvall, WA. She has participated in readings throughout Puget Sound and the
US, as well as with Siberian poets in Novosibirsk, Russia. Mary has two volumes of poetry, What I Can Hold In My Hands (2009) and At First Light (2011), published by Gazoobi Tales. Her work has appeared in many journals and northwest anthologies, including WA129 Poets of Washington (2017) and Bridge Above the Falls (2019), and has been translated into Russian. She is currently working on translations of contemporary Siberian poetry into English.
Alice Derry is the author of six volumes of poetry, most recently Asking (MoonPath 2022), along with three chapbooks, including translations of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. She taught for 30 years at Peninsula College where she curated the Foothills Poetry Series, holding some 12-15 readings per year. Since retirement, she has been active in helping local tribal members access poetry and has taught a number of community workshops in poetry. She has printed the first in a series of essays on native plants, collaborating with artist Fred Sharpe. Raymond Carver chose her first poetry manuscript, Stages of Twilight, for the King County (Seattle) Arts Prize. Strangers to their Courage was a finalist for the Washington Book Award. In July 2022 she was faculty at the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference. She lives and works on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Her website is www.alicederry.com. Cirque nominated “The Genesis of Life Lay Deep and Anticipant Under the Sky, 1944” for the Pushcart Prize.
Nancy Deschu lives in Alaska and writes nonfiction and poetry based on science and sense of place. She also takes photos as she travels around Alaska.
Steve Dieffenbacher has lived in the North Pacific Rim most of his life. Its landscapes and people are continuing inspirations for his poetry and photography. His full-length book of poems, The Sky Is a Bird of Sorrow, was published by Wordcraft of Oregon in 2012, winning a ForeWord Reviews award. He won the Cloudbank poetry prize in 2010. He also has three chapbooks, At the Boundary (2001), Universe of the Unsaid (2010), and Intimations (2018), and he has won honors in writing and photography as a journalist. He lives in Medford, Oregon.
Peg Edera is a native of Portland, Maine. She migrated to Portland, Oregon 35 years ago. Peg writes in community most days of the week. She is the author of a collection of poetry Love Is Deeper Than Distance: Poems of love, death, a little sex, ALS, dementia, and the widow’s life thereafter (Fernwood Press). Her work has also appeared in Friends Journal, Untold Volumes: Feminist Theology Poetry, and the Oregon Poetry Association anthology Pandemic, among others. In 2023, one of her poems will be included in the anthology The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal, edited by James Crews.
Gene Ervine grew up on a wet hundred acre woods in Washington State. His childhood was barely damaged by television. He read books and imagined. Gene split, stacked and moved a lot of firewood. All of that seasoned his poetry and helped keep him happy. His poetry was encouraged in high school and college writing courses, he became a National Park Service exhibit planner and interpretive writer after other adventures. His delight in nature continues to grow since making Alaska his home. He writes poetry and lives in Anchorage with his dear wife, Nancy. They have two grown children.
Nadine Fiedler has had a long career in communications and as a freelance writer and editor. Her poems have been printed in the Oregon Poetry Association yearly journal and Windfall: A Poetry of Place, and she was an invited reader at the Portland Winter Poetry Festival.
Natasha Aġnaŋuluuraq Gamache is an Iñupiaq and Yup’ik woman who descends from the Iġaluiŋmiut, or Fish River Tribe Inupiat, of Council, White Mountain, and Golovin, Alaska. She is the proud mother of 6 children and currently resides on the unceded traditional lands of the Iñupiat (Nome, Alaska).
Mary Fogarty George is a writer living in southwest Alaska along the Kuskokwim River. When she was a young woman, she lived along the Bering Sea coast and raised a family there until a time came and she moved up into the river country. Mary lives with her husband and their twenty five dogs. She enjoys solitude and village life.
Matthew Gigg is settled on Treaty 7 Territory in Calgary, Canada. His writing has been published in Grain Magazine, Blank Spaces, The Hopper, and elsewhere. He is currently working on his first novel.
Lenora Rain-Lee Good, a Vietnam-era veteran of the WAC was born & raised in Portland, OR and now lives in Kennewick, WA. A member of the New Mexico State Poetry Society, she is the author of three published books of poetry—Blood on the Ground, Marking the Hours, and The Bride’s Gate and Other Assorted Writings. She co-authored Reflections: Life, the River, and Beyond, with Jim Bumgarner and Jim Thielman. She may be reached through her website https://coffeebreakescapes.com
David A. Goodrum lives in Corvallis, Oregon. His photography has been juried into many art festivals in cities such as St. Louis, Missouri, Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana, and Madison, Wisconsin. His intent is to capture images that might instill in others - as they do for him as he makes them - a sense of calm and tranquility. He hopes to create a visual field that momentarily transports you away from hectic daily events and into a place that delights in an intimate view of the world. Additional work can be viewed at www.davidgoodrum.com
Karen Gookin grew up in the wheat farming country of North Central Montana. Her poems recall family times in that Big Sky land, along with life and loss in the shrub steppes of Washington State where she has lived now for 41 years. In her “working” life she wrote and edited for two newspapers, played flute/piccolo in Yakima Symphony Orchestra, and taught English at the public school and university levels. Karen and her husband Larry, both musicians and retired CWU professors, live in Ellensburg.
Donald Guadagni is an international educator, author, and writer currently involved with Human Rights Defender research and projects. His publication work includes human rights, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, prose, myth, science fiction, fantasy, humor, academic, romance, humor, true crime, internationally published photography, and his artwork.
A child of the Azores and Europe, Paul Haeder ended up in Arizona, in the Chiricahua Mountains as a newspaper reporter in Bisbee. He followed that avocation to Washington, Oregon, Mexico, Vietnam, Central America. He’s widely published as a nonfiction writer, storyteller and poet. His collection of short stories, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing From Vietnam, was published by Cirque Press in 2020. He’s got novels under his belt, and lots of narratives from south of the USA border ready for unpacking. His penchant for social and environmental justice takes him places most people fear to travel. He’s been a college teacher, social worker, homeless veteran advocate, and faculty union organizer. He lives on the edge of the Pacific, in Oregon, with a wife, snake and cat. He is Projects Editor for Cirque
Kay Haneline has studied art at University of Alaska, Anchorage, the Oregon School of Arts & Crafts in Portland, Oregon, Hui Noeau on Maui, and with Sonia King in Falmouth, Massachusetts, Janice Mason Steves, J.C. Hickok, Jerry McLauglin and Lisa Cootsona. Her art "Reds" was the cover image for Issue # 22 of Cirque
Jim Hanlen taught 20 years in Washington state. He retired to Anchorage, Alaska.
Annekathrin Hansen grew up near the rugged Baltic Sea beaches in North East Germany. She attended Waldemar Kraemer’s drawing and painting classes at Art School in Rostock and Heiligendamm, Germany. She studied and received an Engineering degree and worked
in Germany and Australia. Anne interpreted aerial photos and created many types of maps in land surveying. She is skilled in sculpturing, photography, print making, painting, mosaic and Mixed Media. Anne graduated from various workshops. Further self-studies led to her recent artwork. In 2010 she moved to Alaska. Her artwork can be seen at Georgia Blue Gallery and IGCA.
Scott Hanson is a writer, philosopher, poet and student of the Tao Te Ching who lives in Kingston, WA. He was raised taking ferries to and from Vashon Island and the San Juan Islands, graduated from University of Washington, and loves the mountains and waters of the Pacific Northwest. Although he has been a writer of journals, poetry, family vignettes, short stories and film reviews throughout his life, his first published book, Infinite Meditations for Inspiration and Daily Practice will be released by Cirque Press in the first half of 2023.
Corinne Hughes is a queer poet and fiction writer. Her work has been supported by Tin House and the National Book Foundation. Her poetry can be found in Passengers Journal, Cathexis Northwest Press, Cirque Journal, and is forthcoming in the Horror Writers Association Poetry Showcase IX and the next SMEOP Anthology by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press. She currently serves as a poetry reader for Palette Poetry and studies in the Poets Studio at the Attic Institute in Portland, Oregon, where she lives with her two blue Finnish gerbils.
Rob Jacques resides on a rural island in Washington State’s Puget Sound. His poetry has appeared in dozens of literary journals, including Atlanta Review, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, The Healing Muse, and American Literary Review. Two collections of his poems have been published: War Poet (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017) and Adagio for Su Tungp’o (Fernwood Press, 2019). A third collection, Dust and Dragons, was published in late 2022.
Brenda Jaeger born and raised in Alaska, has her work in collections such as the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, Standard Oil, Ketchikan Pioneers' Home, Copper River Seafoods, and others. She shows through the Georgia Blue Gallery, Anchorage, and Parsons Art Gallery in Independence, Kansas. She is listed in Who's Who in American Art. She paints en plein air and teaches online at the Brenda Jaeger Art Studio, http://www.brendajaegerartstudio.com.
Marc Janssen has been writing poems since around 1980. Some people would say that was a long time but not a dinosaur. Early decrepitude has not slowed him down much; his verse can be found scattered around the world in places like Pinyon, Slant, Cirque Journal, Off the Coast and Poetry Salzburg. Janssen also coordinates the Salem Poetry Project - a weekly reading, the occasionally occurring Salem Poetry Festival, and was a nominee for Oregon Poet Laureate.
Jill Johnson splits her time between Alaska and Eastern Oregon. Feels lucky.
Penny Johnson: In the last few years my poems have been published in WA 129, Yakima Coffeehouse Poets, Shrub-Steppe Poetry Journal and Yakima Herald-Republic. I do have an MFA from Goddard College. I've lived under this mountain with my animals in Ellensburg for 12 years and moved to WA as Mt. Saint Helens blew.
Martha Jackson Kaplan grew up in Seattle, and now lives in Madison, Wisconsin. She is a Pushcart nominee, as well as the recipient of the Zylpha Mapp Robinson International Poetry Award, editor-in-chief awards from Möbius, The Poetry Magazine, and has received two Poets Choice Triad awards from the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. She publishes both poetry and flash fiction, most recently at Night Heron Barks, Cirque #23 Vol.12, No.2, and Nixes Mate. More about her can be found at marthakaplanpoet.com
Sarah Kersey earned her MFA in poetry from Eastern Washington University in 2022. Her work has been published or is upcoming in
Atlanta Review, Rock & Sling, Sunspot Literary Journal, and more. She was a finalist in Atlanta Review’s 2022 International Poetry Contest, as well as a finalist in Sunspot Literary Journal’s 2022 Geminga contest. She currently teaches English at North Idaho College.
Nancy Knowles teaches English and Writing at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande, OR. She has published poetry in Toyon; Eastern Oregon Anthology: A Sense of Place; Torches n' Pitchforks; War, Literature, & the Arts; Oregon East; Willawaw Journal; Grand Little Things, Amethyst Review, and Wild Roof Journal. She earned first place for her Shakespearean sonnet “Diamond Craters” in 2022 from the Oregon Poetry Association.
Nathalie Kuroiwa-Lewis is a Professor of English at Saint Martin’s University, a private, Benedictine, liberal arts university located in the Pacific Northwest. She is also a board member of the Olympia Poetry Network. Her poems have been published in periodicals such as The Madrona Project, The Wild Word, and The Tiger Moth Review, among others. She currently lives in Olympia, Washington.
Eric le Fatte was educated at MIT and Northeastern University in biology and English. He has worked correcting library catalog cards in Texas, and as the Returns King at Eastern Mountain Sports in Massachusetts, but currently hikes, writes, teaches and does research on tiny things in the Portland, Oregon area. His poems have appeared in Rune, The Mountain Gazette, The Poeming Pigeon, The Clackamas Literary Review, The Raven Chronicles, Windfall, Verseweavers, US#1 Worksheets, Perceptions, Clover, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Clade Song, Deep Wild, Pangyrus, and happily enough, in Cirque
Kelly Lenox’s (she/her) poetry, translations, and prose appear in Poetry Daily, Cold Mountain, Gargoyle, Hubbub, SWIMM, EcoTheo Review, and elsewhere in the U.S and abroad, with Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. Her debut collection, The Brightest Rock (2017), received honorable mention in the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Book Award. Kelly holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and works as a science editor for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. (www.kellylenox.com)
Sherri Levine is an artist and poet living in Portland, OR. Her poems have been published in local and national magazines and journals, such as Cirque, Wooster Review, Calyx, Poet Lore, Jewish Literary Journal, Clackamas Literary Review, Driftwood Press, and others. Her first fulllength collection of poems, Stealing Flowers from the Neighbors (Kelsay Press) was published in 2021. She is the creator and host of Head for the Hills, a monthly poetry series and open mic. Ordinally from upstate New York, she escaped the harsh winters and is now soaking in the Oregon rain.
Sue Fagalde Lick, a former California journalist, is a writer/musician/ dog mom living with her dog Annie in the woods on the Oregon coast. Her books include Stories Grandma Never Told, Childless by Marriage, Love or Children: When You Can’t Have Both, the novels Up Beaver Creek and Seal Rock Sound, and two poetry chapbooks, Gravel Road Ahead and The Widow at the Piano. She blogs about childlessness at https:// www.childlessbymarrige.com and life on the Oregon coast at https:// www.unleashedinoregon.com. When not writing, she is a Catholic music minister.
Tigard Oregon is where artist Julie Lloyd calls home. It all began more than twenty years ago using pressed flowers to arrange into images. She now adds common objects and computer layers to diversify colors and texture to her work. Julie’s art has been viewed in Las laguna art gallery, Eros and Eros, Cirque Journal, and The Closed Eye Open. Her love of flowers and nature inspire creativity.
Janis Lull is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She has published poems in many literary journals over the years.
Wallace McDonald was born at Fort Ord, California, in 1950. After graduating from high school in the Los Angeles area, he intermittently attended classes at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He settled in Petersburg, Alaska, in the early 1970’s where for several years he made his living as a crewman and gear operator in several commercial fisheries, then built a related small business from which he recently retired.
Ron McFarland lives & writes in Moscow, Idaho. His most recent books are Professor McFarland in Reel Time: Poems and Prose of an Angler (2020) and Gary Soto: A Career in Poetry and Prose (2022).
Mark Muro is a writer and actor who lives in Anchorage Alaska.
David McElroy lives in Anchorage and Halibut Cove, Alaska. In winter he travels abroad. He recently retired as a commercial pilot of small planes in the Arctic in support of wildlife research, industry, and wild fire control. Before that he attended the Universities of Minnesota, Montana, and Western Washington. He taught English in Guatemala, and Seattle’s community colleges. To pay for college he has worked as a smokejumper in the western states and Alaska. He also worked as a taxi driver in Seattle. He has been published in national journals including Cirque and The Alaska Quarterly Review. He has four books of poems called Making It Simple, Mark Making, Just Between Us, and Water the Rocks Make. He is a recipient of grants from the National Council on the Arts and the state of Alaska Council on the Arts and Humanities. He has given readings at the New School of Social Research in New York and the universities of Alaska, Western Washington, Montana, and Arizona.
Thomas Mitchell: I studied with Richard Hugo and Madeline De Frees at the University of Montana where I completed my MFA in creative writing. My poems have appeared in numerous journals including The New England Review, New Letters, California Quarterly, The New Orleans Review, Quarterly West, and The Chariton Review. My two collections of poetry, The Way Summer Ends (2016) and Caribou (2018) were published by Lost Horse Press. My new collection, Where We Arrive, was released in the Spring of 2021. I was recently selected as the recipient of the Cloudbank Poetry Award.
With deep New England roots, Rebecca Morse has spent most of her adult years living apart from a place that figures strongly in her writing. Her career in teaching and administration spanned over thirty years and took her to North and South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Vermont, and Interior Alaska. She has lived in Fairbanks since 1990 where she enjoys fiber arts and book arts informed by landscape and its inhabitants. Her prose and poetry has appeared in Cirque and her letterpress chapbook, Fielding Lake Perspectives I was published by Northwoods Press in 2021.
Born in the Ohio River Valley, Anne Murphy migrated west to the call of the Pacific and its wildness. A career in non-profit conservation and education kept her in the milieu of citizen-driven work on the shores and watersheds of the Salish Sea. Since retiring in 2013, she has shifted from technical, persuasive writing to settle in with another calling –poetry, bringing along a cache of stories and lessons learned from Northwest people, creatures and dynamic earth processes. She lives along a creek on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula.
My name is Jesse Nee-Vogelman, and I am a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Montana's fiction MFA program. There, I received the university's highest creative writing award, the MerriamFrontier Prize. My work has been previously published or is forthcoming in the New Haven Review, Reckoning, the Tampa Review, and the Harvard Advocate, where my story won the Louis Begley Prize, selected by Jamaica Kincaid. Previously, I served as the Artist-in-Residence at the Signet Society of Arts and Letters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I currently live and work in Missoula, Montana.
David Oates writes about the arts, nature, and urban life from Portland, Oregon. He has recently had poems in Orion, Rattle, and December. “The Heron Place” won the 2015 Poetry Award and publication from Swan Scythe Press (San Francisco). A longform prose+poetry hybrid was finalist for the Iron Horse Trifecta. He is author of six books of nonfiction, including The Mountains of Paris: How Awe and Wonder Rewrote My Life (November 2019, Oregon State University Press) and Paradise Wild: Reimagining American Nature. His essays have appeared in Georgia Review, Creative Nonfiction, and Orion, winning nonfiction awards and two Pushcart Prize nominations.
Mary Odden’s essays and articles, along with a few poems, have appeared in the Georgia Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Alaska Magazine, and Cirque. Her book of memoir/essays, Mostly Water: Reflections Rural and North, was published in June 2020 by Boreal Books/Red Hen Press. Her current project is an episodic novel about western Alaska.
Douglas Scott Oltrogge is a literature teacher, writer, and performance poet native to Montana; however, he has spent many years wandering throughout the greater Pacific Rim. His writing reflects the vast open expanses, the loneliness, and the independence familiar to all who have the greater Northwest in their blood. He currently lives on the family homestead in central Montana where he and his wife raise their children in the same way his family has done for the past 140 years.
Barbara Parchim lives on a small farm in southwest Oregon. She enjoys gardening and wilderness hiking and volunteered for several years at a wildlife rehabilitation facility caring for raptors and wolves. Her poems have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Ariel Chart, Jefferson Journal, Isacoustic, Cirque, Windfall, Allegro Poetry, Trouvaille Review, Front Porch Review, Turtle Island Quarterly and others. Her first book of poetry titled What Remains was published by Flowstone Press in October 2021.
Bruce Parker holds an MA in Secondary Education from the University of New Mexico. His work appears in Triggerfish Critical Review, Pif, Blue Unicorn, Cerasus, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and is an Associate Editor at Boulevard. He has published a chapbook, Ramadan in Summer (Finishing Line Press, 2022).
Justine Pechuzal is a writer, artist and educator living in Seward, Alaska. Wilderness is her muse and creative work the means to explore. Both thoughtful and expressive, Mrs. Pechuzal's vivid words and images convey universal themes. Her work has appeared in Alaska Women Speak, Cirque Journal, Adventure Kayak Magazine and the 49 Writers 2021 Poetry Broadside Invitational. Her poem "Pilgrims" was selected to represent Caine's Head State Park for the Alaska Poems in Place program, and her essay "Dual Citizenship" was awarded the Grand Prize for the Alaska Dispatch News Creative Writing Contest. She holds an MA in Art Education and a BA in Creative Writing and Art History from the University of Arizona.
Tami Phelps is an Alaskan mix-media artist using cold wax, oil, photography, assemblage, and fiber. Her work has exhibited in national and international exhibits and is included in the permanent collections of the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, and the Museum of Encaustic Art in Santa Fe, NM. She is a regularly invited Artist-inResidence at McKinley Chalet Resort, Denali National Park, Alaska. She grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, where she works in her studio loft. Online at www.tamiphelps.com
Timothy Pilgrim, Pacific Northwest poet, has a few hundred acceptances from U.S. journals such as Seattle Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Cirque, and the Santa Ana River Review, and international journals such as Windsor Review and Toasted Cheese in Canada, Prole Press in the United Kingdom, and Otoliths in Australia. Pilgrim is the author of Seduced by Metaphor (2021).
Shauna Potocky is a poet and painter who calls Seward, Alaska home. Shauna has a deep love of high peaks, jagged ridgelines and ice. She has a strong connection to the natural world—the landscapes and seascapes with their rough or subtle edges where life unfolds. Shauna’s work has appeared in publications such as Alaska Women Speak, Beyond Words International Literary Magazine, Cirque Journal, and her forthcoming book of poetry, Yosemite Dawning, is scheduled to be published by Cirque Press in early 2023.
Mandy Ramsey is an artist, mother, photographer, and yoga teacher who loves to create and write. She self-published her first book Grow Where You’re Planted in 2019, which blends her poetry, photography and love of yoga through the seasons in the Alaskan landscape. She holds a MA in Yoga Studies and Mindfulness Education and has been living off the grid in Haines, Alaska since 2000 in the timber frame home she built with her husband. She believes that flowers and the natural world can heal, connect, inspire and sprout friendships. Find out more on mandyramsey.com
Native New Yorker, Diane Ray writes from a hill overlooking a lake in Seattle. During the covid era her work appears in: Cirque, Canary, Sisyphus, What Rough Beast, Poems in the Afterglow, and the anthologies Voices Israel, Sheltering in Place, and Civilization in Crisis. Ray curated and moderated two international poetry readings for Voices Israel
M. Ann Reed teaches the Organic Unity Study of Literature in support of the Deep Ecology Movement globally and locally. Awarded a doctorate in Theater Arts/Performance Studies and a keen reader of C. G. Jung, her more than ten literary essays are cited or remarked in the disciplines of medicine, literature, and psychology. Rowman & Littlefield published her co-authored book, Strange Kindness. Her poems support various literary arts journals – Antithesis, Azure, Burningword, Eastern Iowa Review, Parabola, Proverse, Hong Kong, Psychological Perspectives and The Poeming Pigeon. Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, making oxygen, remaining inside this pure hollow note
Ellen K. Reichman, M.Ed, is a former teacher, counselor, and writer since winning a school wide writing contest in second grade. She attended Rutgers University, Seattle University, City University, and Bellevue College. She and her husband of 53 years live with their standard poodle in Kirkland. Proud parent and grandparent of two children, and two grandchildren. Former contributing columnist for local newspaper. Published in various newspapers and the following journals: Cure, Heal, Cirque, Persimmon Tree, Common Ground Review, and Passager. Writer of children’s books; lover of children, nature, exercise, and mostly connecting with others.
Brenda Roper is letting life unfold at the moment. Comfortable in the not knowing. A lover of beauty, wine, walking and travel. Maybe she’ll be a writer one day. Or simply a walker of the world sharing words and photos along the way. www.brendaroper.com
Dave Rowan’s story Idaho, which appears in this edition, is only his second short to be published. The first one found print in the University of Puget Sound’s 1974 edition of Crosscurrents. During the forty-nine years since then, Rowan graduated from UPS with an English degree, logged eight seasons on the Olympic Peninsula, wrote two novels, became a Civil Engineer, worked at Seattle City Light for twenty-eight years and then retired. During the spotted owl crisis, being an exlogger helped him freelance articles to The Seattle Times, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle Weekly, and Northwest Editions. In 2008, he self-published the guide book Around the Edge of the Olympics on a Mountain Bike. Cirque Press published his first novel, Loggers Don’t Make Love, in 2020, and he is currently working on a novel about the United States Air Force Academy titled Bright Power, Dark Peace. Rowan is a native Seattleite and now lives on Hood Canal. He has two children and two grandchildren.
Katharine Salzmann lives in Portland, OR. Her poems have appeared in Windfall, Slipstream, Salt River Review, and Sojourner, among others. She has two chapbooks published by the pop-up persian pony press, Hemopoiesis, 1995 and Prayer Ceremony, 2007.
Tom Sexton spends his days walking his Irish Terrier, Murphy, writing poetry, and making breakfast for his wife. Many years ago, he began the Creative Writing program at the University of Alaska, Anchorage and was the English Department Chair for many years. He is proud to say Mike Burwell was his student. His poetry collection Cummiskey Alley: New and Selected Lowell Poems was published in 2020 by Loom Press. Snowy Egret Rising from Chester Creek Press is coming out in 2023.
Anchorage nature writer Bill Sherwonit is a widely published essayist and the author of more than a dozen books, including Living with Wildness: An Alaskan Odyssey and Animal Stories: Encounters with Alaska’s Wildlife
Kit Sibert: My poems are informed by a childhood in Cuba and life in the East and West United States, by my loves, the stages of my life, and my ever surprising creative unconscious. I now live in Eugene, Oregon. These poems are driven by memory and imagination, by death of loved ones, by the Covidian Age, and by a lurking existentialism. I have two chapbooks: Beyond Me (integral to a multimedia art show at Maud Kerns Gallery), What You Have Become (Finishing Line Press) and a book of my poetry and paintings How the Light Gets In (lulu.com). I have poems in Passager, Cirque, and Gyroscope Review among others.
Craig Smith is a retired Seattle newspaperman who spent the final 32 years of his career as a sportswriter at The Seattle Times. He is a native of Kenmore, WA, and a graduate of Bothell High School and the University of Washington, where he was editor of The Daily
Mary Lou Spartz is a poet, playwright, and long-time Alaskan and Juneauite. Poetry, writing, or reading never ceases to challenge and delight her. Capturing the joyful and the not-so-joyful never loses its appeal.
Cheryl Stadig lived in Alaska for 18 years, calling several places home including Anchorage, Teller, Ketchikan, and Prince of Wales Island where her two sons were raised. Running the wilds of Maine in her youth helped prepare her for life in rural Alaska. Her Alaska resume includes work at a 5-star hotel, a university, a village general store, and as a 911 dispatcher/jail guard. She would happily consider the job of hermit should a dot on the northern map be in need. Her work has appeared in previous issues of Cirque, Inside Passages, and other publications.
Cynthia Steele, Cynthia Steele serves as Associate Editor for Cirque and as a dog whisperer. She has an MA in English and a BA in Journalism. Her new work appears in Cirque, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality & the Arts, The Blue Mountain Review, and in the Anthology on Domestic Abuse: When Home is Not Safe.
R. Brett Stirling moved to Alaska in 1997 because he never wanted to live anywhere else. He retired in 2022 after 21 years as an Alaska educator and principal. He worked for 17 of those years in rural Alaska in the Yup'ik and Inupiaq communities off the road system. He currently lives in Delta Junction with his wife and two children.
Richard Stokes is a Juneau resident of over 50 years. His prose and poetry work usually reflects his love of nature, his aging or his boyhood in the sharply defined black-white world of rural Georgia in the 1940s-50s. He graduated from Emory in Atlanta in 1961.
Sheary Clough Suiter grew up in Eugene, Oregon, then lived in Alaska for 35 years before her relocation to Colorado in 2011. Her encaustic fine art is represented in Anchorage, Alaska by Stephan Fine Art, in Camas, Washington by the Attic Gallery, in Santa Fe, New Mexico by the Encaustic Art Institute, in Green Mountain Falls, Colorado by Stones, Bones, & Wood Gallery, and in Old Colorado City, Colorado by 45 Degree
Gallery. When she's not traveling the back-roads of America with her artist partner Nard Claar, Suiter works from her studio in Colorado Springs. Online at www.sheary.me
Mercury-Marvin Sunderland (he/him) is a transgender autistic gay man with borderline personality disorder. He's been published by University of Amsterdam's Writer's Block, University of British Columbia's Decomp, UC Davis' Open Ceilings, UC Riverside's Santa Ana River Review, and UC Santa Barbara's Spectrum. His visual art can be followed as @ RomanGodMercury on Instagram and TikTok.
Emily Kurn Tallman is a graphic designer, writer and musician living in Anchorage, Alaska. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry, from University of Alaska Anchorage and a BA from Brandeis University. Her work has been published in Cirque Journal, Catamaran Literary Reader, Anecdote Magazine and The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss
Kathleen Tarr is the author of the memoir, We Are All Poets Here. A frequent contributor to Cirque since its inception, her writing has also appeared in The Alaska Quarterly Review; Eco-Theo Review; Anchorage Daily News; America Magazine; Tri-Quarterly, Sewanee Review; the peerreviewed journal, The Merton Seasonal, and in numerous anthologies. She has received fellowships from the University of Southern California’s Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies and a William Shannon research grant from the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University. For five years, Kathleen served as the program coordinator of the University of Alaska’s low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing. She earned an MFA in literary nonfiction from the University of Pittsburgh where she was also awarded a full, three-year teaching assistantship. She is a member of the Alaska Historical Society and was recently elected to serve on the national board of the International Thomas Merton Society. A long-time Alaskan, she lives and writes under the Chugach Mountains surrounding Anchorage.
Carey Taylor is the author of The Lure of Impermanence (Cirque Press, 2018). She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the 2022 Neahkahnie Mountain Poetry Prize. Her work has been published both in Ireland and the United States. Carey holds a Master of Arts degree in School Counseling and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. https:// careyleetaylor.com
Jan Tervonen grew up in a Finnish-American family in a small town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan surrounded by the beauty of Lake Superior before settling in Seattle over 30 years ago. She was taught the values of simplicity, organization, and a good pun. She developed a minimalistic abstract style with a wry sense of humor representative of her Finnish-American roots. Her paintings have been featured in numerous solo and group shows in the Pacific Northwest including the Edmonds Arts Festival Foundation Gallery, Lynnwood Convention Center, Kirkland Library, Overlake Hospital, Renton’s Carco Theatre, and Pratt Fine Arts Center.
Jim Thiele worked as a photographer for a biological text book company for several years before moving to Alaska in 1974. He has worked for The Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the University of Alaska as a biologist. He is a recently retired financial advisor. His photographs have been seen in several publications, including Alaska Magazine, Alaska Geographic, and Cirque. He lives in Anchorage with his wife Susan. Taking photos forces him to stop and really see the world.
Gary Thomas: I am a retired mental health professional who enjoys taking the time to see the world through the lens of the camera and my brain. I also like to dabble in poetry as a further expression of myself. I live and play in Oregon and Washington.
At the University of Michigan, Thomas A. Thomas, poet/photographer, studied with Donald Hall, Gregory Orr, and Robert Bly. He won Minor and Major Hopwood Awards in Poetry, and his poem "Approaching Here" was choreographed and performed at UM. His works appear in print and online, most recently in Cirque Journal, Gyroscope Review,
Blue Heron Review, Vox Populi Sphere, TheBanyanReview.org and FemAsiaMagazine.com, as well as in translation to Spanish, Serbian, and Bengali. His book of collected works, Getting Here is available on Bookshop.org and other sellers. He was nominated for both Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize for 2022.
Pepper Trail: My poems have previously appeared in Cirque, as well as in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Catamaran, Ascent and other publications, and have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net Awards. My collection, Cascade-Siskiyou: Poems, was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry. I write and explore the world from my home in Ashland, Oregon.
Lucy Tyrrell’s writing and photography is inspired by nature and wild landscapes, outdoor pursuits (mushing, hiking, canoeing), and travel. After 16 years in Alaska, she traded a big mountain (Denali) for a big lake (Superior). Lucy lives the spirit of Alaska deeply, even in Wisconsin. She was Bayfield Poet Laureate 2020–2021.
Emily Wall is a Professor of English at the University of Alaska. She holds an MFA in poetry. Her poems have been published in journals across the US and Canada and she has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes. She recently won the Minerva Rising Dare to Be chapbook prize. She has five books of poetry: Fist and Flame are chapbooks published by Minerva Rising Press. Liveaboard and Freshly Rooted have found homes in Salmon Poetry. Her most recent book Breaking Into Air: Birth Poems is published by Red Hen Press. Emily lives and writes in Douglas, Alaska and she can be found online at www.emily-wall.com.
Margo Waring lives in Juneau where she hikes, gardens and grows old. Her book, Growing Older in This Place was published by Cirque Press. We are all looking forward to the next spectacular issue of Cirque
Sandra Wassilie has spent most of her life in Alaska, most recently Seward. Currently she resides in Oakland, California, migrating north as circumstance allows. Her first collection of poems, The Dream That Is Childhood: A Memoir in Verse, about her childhood at Lake Minchumina during the 1950s, was published by Cirque Press (2020). Her poetry also appears in a chapbook, Smoke Lifts (2014), and in several literary publications. Wassilie has served as a managing and poetry editor for Fourteen Hills, and cofounded the Bay Area Generations Reading Series. She has received the Ann Fields (2011) and Celestine (2014) Awards for poetry.
Toby Widdicombe was educated at Cambridge University and the University of California. He has been a professor at UAA for thirty years after stints at the University of California Irvine, the University of California Santa Barbara, and the New York Institute of Technology on Long Island. His major research fields are American literature, Tolkien, textual studies, Shakespeare, and utopianism. He has published ten books and numerous articles. He was an editor of an international journal for several years. He teaches a wide range of English courses, principally to majors. He writes poetry, nonfiction, children’s fiction, plays, and academic argument.
Richard Widerkehr’s fourth book of poems is Night Journey (Shanti Arts Press). At The Grace Cafe (Main Street Rag) was his previous one. His work has appeared in Sweet Tree Review, Writer’s Almanac, Atlanta Review, and many others. He won two Hopwood first prizes for poetry at the University of Michigan and first prize for a short story at the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference. He reads poems for Shark Reef Review.
Poet, Paul Winkel, is a retired Engineer. He has lived in Alaska for 40 years and loved every minute. He has published a number of poems in Cirque
Matt Witt is a writer and photographer in Talent, Oregon. His photography and writing may be seen at MattWittPhotography.com. He has been Artist in Residence at Crater Lake National Park, AbsarokaBeartooth Wilderness Foundation, John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, Mesa Refuge, and PLAYA at Summer Lake, Oregon. He is a contributor to Writers on the Range
Robin Woolman has long been a performer and teacher of circus skills in Portland, Oregon. She loves backpacking in the high country of the Pacific Northwest or strolling the neighborhood, while playing with words in her head. She dates her passion for writing back to Miss Mataroli’s second grade class…More recent poems and plays have appeared in Global Poemic, Deep Wild, Cirque, Poeming Pigeon, Westchester Review, and, coming this fall, Red Shoe Press’s 2023 Oregon Poetry Calendar
In the Winter of the Orange Snow captures a era of freewheeling adventure in southwest curiosity and courage, and the phrase “only in Bethel” was coined in response to events
Diane Carpenter captures the spirit, the oddities, the bizarreness of characters and happenings, as well the unique and beautiful environment and indigenous people of the Kuskokwim. She does so with humor, sensitivity, and clear recollections. It’s a tough land. One cannot help but greatly admire this woman. No tourists here in Bethel, Alaska, where primitive ways became modern times in the span of a lifetime.
Sky Changes on the Kuskokwim
Diane Carpenter’s book is a delightful tramp through the Alaska bush country in the 1950s and sixties through the eyes of a great storyteller. The tales are sobering, hilarious and very informative, each a window into the details of the storyteller’s life and times. For many Alaskans, the book will be nostalgic. For others, it will bridge the gap between those who live on the road system and the bush. For readers in the Lower 48 states, this book will be an astounding ride on boats, airplanes, and dog-sleds through the
– James H. Barker, author ofAlways Getting
Ready / Upterrlainarluta: Yup’ikShe was a state delegate to the National Women’s Conference in Houston and lead organizer of the Alaska Village Electric Cooperative (AVEC). She taught in public schools and the local college. As she approached retirement, she set up the Pacifica Institute, a non-profit educational organization that developed many innovative programs. In 2007, Diane retired and moved from Bethel to the historic town of Alamos, Sonora, where she renovated a 250-year-old villa. She recently celebrated her 90th birthday there.
The Woman Within: Memory as Muse, is a treasure. A collaboration of unique talent that sends creative and thoughtful ripples through the pond.
— Douglas Mehrens, founder of the Museum of Encaustic Art, Encaustic Art Institute, and Encaustic Arts Magazine
The authors deftly invite us to a place of calm reflection in which diversity, respectfulness, and choice are honored.
— Sheary Clough Suiter, visual artist and educator
This book is a visually charming memoir-cum-paeon to the feminine by artist Tami Phelps, her husband poet Kerry Dean Feldman, and photographer Richard J. Murphy.
— David McElroy, author of Water the Rocks Make, University of Alaska Press
Alaska visual artist Tami Phelps’ work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Encaustic art (Santa Fe, NM) and the Anchorage Museum (Anchorage, AK). She attended college and Montessori education in Hawaii, Arizona, Colorado, and Washington, receiving her B.Ed. degree from University of Alaska Anchorage. Her art is on the cover of Drunk on Love: Twelve Stories to Savor Responsibly (Cirque Press, 2019, by Kerry Dean Feldman), and covers of Cirque: A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rim. She is author of Miss Tami Is Today Tomorrow? Kindergarten in Alaska: Stories for Grown-Ups (Cirque Press, 2021), illustrated by Tammy Murray, with Kerry Dean Feldman.
Kerry Dean Feldman is currently a professor emeritus in anthropology at the University of Alaska Anchorage after a four-decade career (PhD, University of Colorado, Boulder). Five Star/Gale (Maine) published his historical western novel, Alice’s Trading Post: A Novel of the West (2022). Cirque Press published several poems in Cirque journal, his short story collection, Drunk on Love; Twelve Stories to Savor Responsibly (2019), and his noir murder mystery set in Montana, Kettle Dance: A Big Sky Murder (2022).
The Woman Within will be launched at Georgia Blue Gallery in Anchorage along with Phelps’s original art on April 7, 2023.Our Vision:
A vibrant community of diverse Alaskan writers of all levels and ages, coming together to find and share our voices.
Our Core Purpose: Engaging, empowering, inspiring and expanding a statewide community of Alaskan writers.
We rely on member support to offer dynamic programming statewide:
Free Public Readings with Acclaimed Authors Classes & Workshops to Hone Your Skills
Generative Retreats in Beautiful Places to Foster Your Work
A Weekly Newsletter & Blog to Help You Stay Connected
A Community of Shared Support
Buffy McKay is a poet of power. In Salt & Roses, she looks hard at life across a range of free verse, villanelles, and haikus, and leaves us with poignant and glimmering lines that can stop you dead in your tracks. When she captures the ethereal essence of inner and outer landscapes, you can imagine her with the likes of Mary Oliver and Elizabeth Bishop, sipping tea and swapping lines about fish.
—Doug Pope, author of The Way to Gaamaak Cove
The gorgeous poems in Buffy McKay’s Salt & Roses traverse the wilds of Alaska and comb the watery landscapes of Rhode Island and Scotland. McKay’s connection to each place runs deep, and these roots she shares in a generous and loving way. In one poem, she illustrates how ancestry lives in a smoked fish and her mother’s word for it: dunghnak This collection sensually explores the lands dear to McKay, family homelands which nourish her body as well as her soul. She captures life’s beauty with a wide-angle lens. Yes, there are salt and roses within these pages, but also cancer, death, loss, and regret. More than a book of poems, Salt and Roses is a book of prayers.
Roberta “Buffy” McKay is of Scottish and Inupiat descent. She enjoys writing about memory, time, and place, and has written poems since age 3. First published in the We Alaskans section of the Pulitzer Prizewinning Anchorage Daily News in 1993, her work has appeared in various literary journals including Cirque. She has won scholarships to the Community of Writers, Olympic Valley, CA and Billy Collins’ master class at The Key West (FL) Literary Seminar, and remains grateful for their value and life lessons.
“I’m inspired by my environment and geography and their effects on me. I’ve lived in some incredible places and had some amazing adventures so far in this life, and that seems to turn into poems.”
Currently, Buffy can be found beachcombing with a new dog, Benji, in New England and writing her autobiography, To Sir Sean Connery, With Love
Sandra Kleven
Michael Burwell Editors & Publishers
—Martha Amore, author of In the Quiet Season and Other Stories
“Crisp dialogue drives the action at high-speed in this short novel that takes place in a small town, where a local boy who left to become an LA detective returns from an Internal Affairs Group investigation as a suspect in a gruesome murder. Add romance and lust. What more could you want?”
—Ron McFarland, author of The Rockies in First Person, Subtle Thieves, and Stranger in Town
“I felt like I was swept downstream in a fastmoving river, bounced off rocks, swirled into eddies, and spit out on the bank to dry. Feldman’s storytelling is expertly crafted, visceral and raw though he skillfully manages to squeeze in charm and tenderness to boot. In other words, this book has it all. A meaty, passionate, sexy mystery that will twist your gut. Take a big bite and chew a while on Feldman’s whodunit.”
Sandra Kleven Michael Burwell Editors & Publishers
Kerry Dean Feldman is a Montana-born writeranthropologist, currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He is co-founder of the Alaska Anthropological Association (1973 – 74). Kerry is the author of Drunk on Love: Twelve Stories to Savor Responsibly (Cirque Press, 2019), and Alice’s Trading Post: A Novel of the West (Five Star/Cengage, 2022). He won national competition awards for short stories during his Montana teens, but he put publishing fiction aside until he experienced and “knew enough” about life to offer stories in genres that helped him understand his own life better. Kettle Dance is his homage to noir mystery novel writers and filmmakers. He lives in Anchorage with his artist-wife, Tami Phelps.
It’s really, really good.
—Monica Devine, author of Water Mask
From Cirque Press, Silty Water People is a collection of poems exploring the effects of assimilation on contemporary Tlingit/Scandinavian families in Wrangell, a small island community in Southeast Alaska. Two hundred and twenty years after colonization began, through the complex themes of intergenerational trauma, identity, racism, and history, Prescott uses mythology, geological time, and a deep connection to place to weave Silty Water People.
Available from Cirque Press, your local Indie bookstore, and Amazon. $15
“...universal resonances within its sense of place...”
- Ishmael Angaluuk Hope, author of Rock Piles Along the Eddy
“Deeply personal and powerfully written...”
- Nicole Stellon O’Donnell, author of You Are No Longer in Trouble and Steam Laundry
“...characters landing like words, like rain, onto the text-peppered page...”
- Kersten Christianson, author of Curating the House of Nostalgia
“We won’t soon forget the bedrock exposed in these poems.”
- Emily Wall, Professor of English at the University of Alaska Southeast, and author of Flame, Liveaboard, and Freshly Rooted
BY ALASKAN POET KAREN TSCHANNEN
Poems so compressed the page itself trembles. So brave, in dark places, the reader clutches the poet’s sure hand. Apportioning the Light shines. It shines.
AVAILABLE AT AMAZON OR BY EMAIL: cirquejournal@gmail.com, $16 - CIRQUE PRESS
Sandra Kleven & Michael Burwell, CIRQUEPublishers
“A life lived to its fullest, a craft perfected so that it seems seamless, the highest compliment I can give to any writer. I read it from its beginning to its end without putting it down. Kudos to Cirque for publishing Apportioning the Light.”
– TOM SEXTON, ALASKA POET LAUREATEKaren Tschannen has been published in AlaskaQuarterlyReview,Ice-Floe,PNWPoetsandArtists Calendar(s),NorthofEden (Loose Affiliation Press), TheSky’sOwnLight (Minotaur Press), Crosscurrents North,Cirque, and other publications. Tschannen was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2016. Her perceptive verse is notable for the care taken with language in both the sound of a phrase and the appearance on the page.
Kashi Attorney at
Cirque, published in Anchorage, Alaska, is a regional journal created to share the best writing in the region with the rest of the world. Cirque submissions are not restricted to a “regional” theme or setting.
Cirque invites emerging and established writers living in the North Pacific Rim— Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Hawaii, Yukon Territory, Alberta, British Columbia and Chukotka—to submit short stories, poems, creative nonfiction, translations, plays, reviews of first books, interviews, photographs, and artwork for Cirque’s next issue.
Issue #26—Submission Period September 22, 2023 to March 21, 2023
-- Poems: 5 poems MAX
-- Fiction, Nonfiction, Plays: 12 pages MAX (double spaced).
-- Artwork and Photography: 10 images MAX accepted in JPEG or TIFF format, sent as email attachments. Please send images in the highest resolution possible; images will likely be between 2 and 10mb each. If you do not submit full-size photo files at time of submission, we will respond with an email reminder. No undersize images or thumbnails will be eligible for publication.
-- Bio: 100 words MAX.
-- Contact Info: Make sure to keep your contact email current and be sure that it is one that you check regularly. If your contact information changes, make sure to inform us at Cirque. To ensure that replies from Cirque bypass your spam filter and go to your inbox, add Cirque to your address book.
-- Submit to https://Cirque .submittable.com
-- Replies average two to three months after deadlines, and we don’t mind you checking with us about your submissions.
-- Cirque requires no payment or submission fees. However, Cirque is published by an independent press staffed by volunteers. Your donations keep Cirque Press going. You will find donation buttons on Submittable and you can also support us via Paypal to Cirque journal@gmail.com.
Thanks for your poetry, prose, images and financial support.
Lake Forest Park Dahlia Cynthia Steele
