Th.
Nephi Anderson (via Th.’s gravelly voice)
Mark Bennion
Tyler Chadwick
greenfrog
green mormon architect
Elizabeth R.

And, of course, many thanks to WIZ’s loyal readers and commenters.

I appreciate each writer’s help keeping People Month on WIZ interesting and fun.  We’ll do it again next year (maybe earlier), so start drawing up your People Month writing plans now.

For Th.’s–Eric Jepson’s–bio, go here.

Listen to Th. reading this exerpt from Dorian, by Nephi Anderson.

About six o’clock in the afternoon, Mildred Brown went down through the fields to the lower pasture.  She wore a gingham apron which covered her from neck to high-topped boots. She carried in one hand an easel and stool and in the other hand a box of colors. Mildred came each day to a particular spot in this lower pasture and set up her easel and stool in the shade of a black willow bush to paint a particular scene. She did her work as nearly as possible at the same time each afternoon to get the same effect of light and shade and the same stretch of reflected sunlight on the open water spaces in the marshland.

And the scene before her was worthy of a master hand, which, of course, Mildred Brown was not as yet. From her position in the shade of the willow, she looked out over the flat marshlands toward the west. Nearby, at the edge of the firmer pasture lands, the rushes grew luxuriously, now crowned with large, glossy-brown “cat-tails.” The flats to the left were spotted by beds of white and black saleratus and bunches of course salt grass. Openings of sluggish water lay hot in the sun, winding in and out among reeds, and at this hour every clear afternoon, shining with the same undimmed reflection of the burning sun. The air was laden with salty odors of the marshes. A light afternoon haze hung over the distance. Frogs were lazily croaking, and the killdeer’s shrill cry came plaintively to the ear. A number of cows stood knee-deep in mud and water, round as barrels, and breathing hard, with tails unceasingly switching away the flies.

Dorian was in the field turning the water on his lucerne patch when he saw Mildred coming as usual down the path.  … he joined her ….  They then walked on together, the big farm boy in overalls and the tall graceful girl in the enveloping gingham …

… The two stopped in the shade of the willow.  He set up the easel and opened the stool, while she got out her colors and brushes.

“Thank you,” she said to him … she seated herself, placed the canvas on the easel, and began mixing the colors.

…”I thought you finished that picture yesterday,” he said.

“I was not satisfied with it, and so I thought I would put in another hour on it. The setting sun promises to be unusually fine today, and I want to put a little more of its beauty into my picture, if I can.”

The young man seated himself on the grass well toward the rear where he could see her at work. He thought it wonderful to be able thus to make a beautiful picture out of such a commonplace thing as a saleratus swamp …

… The painter squeezed a daub of brilliant red on to her palette. She gazed for a moment at the western sky, then turning to Dorian, she asked:

“Do you think I dare put a little more red in my picture?”

“Dare?” he repeated.

The young man followed the pointing finger of the girl into the flaming depths of the sky, then came and leaned carefully over the painting.

“Tell me which is redder, the real or the picture?” she asked.

Dorian looked critically back and forth. “The sky is redder,” he decided.

“And yet if I make my picture as red as the sky naturally is, many people would say that it is too red to be true. I’ll risk it anyway.” Then she carefully laid on a little more color.

“Nature itself, our teacher told us, is always more intense than any representation of nature.”

… Mildred arose, stepped back to get the distance for examination. ” … those cat-tails in the corner need touching up a bit…  But say, Dorian” … [h]ave I too much purple in that bunch of salt-grass on the left? What do you think?”

“I don’t see any purple at all in the real grass,” he said.

“There is purple there, however; but of course, you, not being an artist, cannot see it.” She laughed a little for fear he might think her pronouncement harsh.

“What–what is an artist?”

“An artist is one who has learned to see more than other people can in the common things around them.”

The definition was not quite clear to him. He had proved that he could see farther and clearer than she could when looking at trees or chipmunks. He looked critically again at the picture.

“I mean, of course,” she added, as she noted his puzzled look, “that an artist is one who sees in nature the beauty in form, in light and shade, and in color.”

“You haven’t put that tree in the right place,” he objected, “and you have left out that house altogether.”

“This is not a photograph,” she answered. “I put in my picture only that which I want there. The tree isn’t in the right place, so I moved it. The house has no business in the picture because I want it to represent a scene of wild, open lonesomeness. I want to make the people who look at it feel so lonesome that they want to cry!”

She was an odd girl!

“Oh, don’t you understand. I want them only to feel like it. When you saw that charcoal drawing I made the other day, you laughed.”

“Well, it was funny.”

“That’s just it. An artist wants to be able to make people feel like laughing or crying, for then he knows he has reached their soul.”

“I’ve got to look after the water for a few minutes, then I’ll come back and help you carry your things,” he said. “You’re about through, aren’t you?”

“Thank you; I’ll be ready now in a few minutes. Go see to your water. I’ll wait for you. How beautiful the west is now!”

They stood silently for a few moments side by side, looking at the glory of the setting sun through banks of clouds and then down behind the purple mountain. Then Dorian, with shovel on shoulder, hastened to his irrigating. The blossoming field of lucerne was usually a common enough sight, but now it was a stretch of sweet-scented waves of green and purple.

Uncle Howard,

At sixty, your traces stalk the hollows
of grocery stores from here to Snowflake,
Arizona. A thatch of curly gray hair
shuttles past the cash register, your cow-
milking hands pull a list out of an empty wallet.
You are forever in the next aisle over,
shaking a watermelon, picking at your
mustache, laughing with the manager
over an inside joke concerning paper or plastic,
laughing through the vegetables of loneliness
and the continual grind of bare freezers
and birthdays without anything, not even a cake.
Today it’s a flannel shirt
I see slipping through sliding glass
doors. Something lost in the hunter’s
worn down red, a familiar set of stripes
running through the plaid. Tomorrow
in San Diego your fingerprints will appear
on a drinking fountain, and in two weeks
a phone call will course from Oahu,
full of guttural questions and sun.

Yet it’s always yesterday
I imagine you near the backwoods
of Oklahoma, opening large stable doors,
then brushing the mane of a palomino
as a bird warbles through the muffled dawn.
You submerge in growing
light, occasionally smiling at nothing
near the end of the street.
You pat the horse and speak
secrets into a flickering ear.

From here I have only this letter
I’m not sure where to send
or a eulogy I am too afraid to speak.
Perhaps, tonight I’ll return
to an obscure shelf in the grocery store,
buy couscous or ask a stranger
to explain the difference between
writing to the disappeared
and speaking to the dead.
That’s when I’ll envision you
again, carrying a saddle
into another dawn’s hazy light, 
that’s where the picture fades,
where the horse lowers its head,
eats what’s left out of your hand.

                   Love,
                                   Mark

____________________________________________________________

 For nearly a decade, Mark D. Bennion has taught writing and literature courses at BYU-Idaho. When not teaching, he can be found watching tennis, playing racquetball, or eating kimchi. He recently published the poetry collection Psalm & Selah: a poetic journey through the Book of Mormon (Parables Publishing). Within three weeks, he and his wife, Kristine, will welcome their fourth child into the world.

“Letulogy” was originally published in The Comstock Review ,Vol. 21, No. 1,  Spring/Summer 2007.

When early autumn’s storm wrung from the clouds
Summer, wearing the last thundering rain thin
And sharp on the wind’s rasp; when thorns
Of the first frost bloomed over the grass,
And the morning glory hung brown and bitten
On the garden fence; on those first nights
Of cold window glass and the drip of chill
Onto the plank, when I wrapped in the blanket
And the dog curled at my feet, I heard,
Above the clay clink of wind-churned chimes,
Above the wag of the unlatched screen door,
Round blows of fruit fall against the ground.

I have been here three years’ windfall
Not hearing the bump of pears, but when the tree
Burst blossoms against the window, I watched
Crawl across the floor shadow from thousands
Of swaying cups lifted into the storm of pollens,
And when after petals leaves screwed from the nodes,
I looked out into green overcast: fruit had pushed
Off flower and bent down boughs as with old age,
But more mystic that blunt drop of fruit earthward
That jerked my ear like a new word.

Someone else should hear it: I could better tell
How, when the wind rattled its sticks upon the houses,
I heard a pear fall to a bruising; how it struck
Above the rip of water from passing cars’ tires;
How, as I let slip with sleep my garment of senses,
A tree caught the last thread and plucked it
With a ripe pear; and how I lay awake beneath rainy
Leaves or sat for spells by the window, as one haunts
Heaven those nights her globes bear down the branch
For a single star to fall away in flame.

____________________________________________________________

“The Pear Tree” was the winner of the 1987 BYU Eisteddfod Crown Competition for a lyric poem.  It was published in Irreantum 4.2 (2006): 99.

Sometimes, in lonely canyons, when there’s no one else there, I’ve heard noises my ear interprets as half-words and singing threading around stone bends like odors rising off home cooking.  While intriguing and beautiful, these voices confuse the human ear, which is always hoping for words or phrases of address, the touch of deep-reaching words. 

As I’ve said elsewhere, people need to feel that touch of fine language but out of need often settle for less, trying, sometimes desperately, to make more of poor speech than is actually there. We strive, like Rapunzel, to spin gold from straw.  Even when by illusion we half-succeed, we often pay for it by loss of relation. Human language is beautiful when it rises out of wellsprings of feeling for others, when people speak in such a way as to make it possible for others to hear. My experience is that animals can also come to rely on the human voice, similarly hoping to feel its strong effects. 

Much of our language is a wasteland of discordant sound and unreaching yet grasping words.  For the rest of the month on WIZ, I hope to post links to poets and others reading or singing their work, good stuff that sits nicely in the ear.  If I’m lucky, we’ll get up some podcasts, including of me reading.  Anybody visiting WIZ who thinks he or she might have something suitable for broadcast, please email me at pk.wizadmin@gmail.com.

To start, you can go here (link) to hear Leslie Norris read his poem “Water.”  When you reach the link, click on “Listen to Leslie Norris reading ‘Water’”.

1. First

“She’s like an apple
in a water balloon,”
the doctor says. They watch

their fruit unfold across
the screen in light movements.
Submerged beneath her sea

enclosed by silent walls,
slow fluid breaths inspire
her ripening, baptize

the room in innocence.
Within this matrix
of tranquility,

they sense her beckoning
through sound’s translucent waves,
calling from her still place

into time’s raging sea
for a Return. Then Light
ripples from around her world

as from the Garden tree
whence God called Adam
and questioned why his seed
had grown so ripe with blood.

2. Last

Within their yellow tree
atop a falling hill,
shades of spring shadow

the waiting fruit. Chilled rains
stagnate in micro-seas
about their stems, throw drops

of ripened dew across
his face as he climbs
upward, pulls the apples,

and drops them
to her waiting hands.
Pale bruises hide beneath

the golden skin, some from
their gathering, some from
tussles with branches

and hungry birds, and some
from the inside-out
of parasitic guile.

Holding his breath,
he cradles the last fruit
as naked branches steal
the blood from his cold hand.
 

3. Return

The pair, fallen with years,
returns to their garden,
straining for shades of green

within withered gold.
Arm in arm, they step
beneath their tree

and rest against the trunk.
His eyes pursue the land
into a blurry field

and hers cover his face
in reminiscent strokes.
As the sun departs his gaze,

dark winds carry
the breath of swollen fruit,
pooled around their feet. He sighs;

she leans against his arm
and waits with him as night
folds across his frame.

Her tears swell with their fruit,
distilling through Earth’s skin
into the flowing blood
of their generations’ veins.

____________________________________________________________

For Tyler’s bio and blogs, go here (scroll to the end). 

Originally published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 39:3 (2006).

What’s left? A bag of bones, draped with a thin and mottled fabric of skin. Bits and pieces of the sharp-tongued intellect, the manipulative middle sister, the telecom executive mind, the loving aunt to a dozen or so nieces and nephews.

“…aaaaaaaaaarrrraaaaaeeeaaaerrammmmaaaarrreeeaa…”

She’s stuck in the middle of a word, intoning it until the breath of the word runs out. She looks at me, confused – unsure of whether it’s the word or her mind or my presence that is out of place, not right.

Eyes look out from deep hollows in her skull, the upper lip drawn up, exposing the greyed and yellowed front teeth. The eyes seem to have shrunk, eyelid skin disappearing under the ocular orbits of her skull, a bottomless crevasse, reappearing hugging the round eye.

How can an eye look uncertainly? Is it the shape of the eyelids? The brows? Hers never move.

A sentence about the dogs she cared for 30 years ago comes out clearly, intoned with the wry sense she used when managing us as kids, telling me of a white dog trying to hide in the greenery of her backyard.

“eeeeeehhhhhhhaaaaaaaahhhhhhheeeeehhhhhh”

She gets stuck on another word; runs out of breath. Stops to inhale.

Yesterday, the daylight from the window at the head of her bed cast artists’ shadows across her face, framing her skeleton head in a silver halo of clean, frizzy hair. Despite her complaints, the room is clean, the temperature is pleasant, she’s only ten steps from the nurses’ station.

She tried to get out and about on her own a week ago and fell. The scabs and bruises mottle her skin even more than age. She’s got a clear adhesive bandage on a wound on her wrist, too tempting a target for the hen’s pecking instinct, the unwatched fingernails’ primate-picking-grooming instinct.

Yesterday, she was sleepy, drifting off, startling awake when doors closed in the corridor. The light was really perfect for drawing. I had a sketch book in my bag, but I was seated beside her bed, her cool fingers holding my hand. Once when she drifted off, I thought to slip my hand from hers and retrieve my sketchbook. But even a millimeter of movement brought her back awake in a moment. I resisted the sketching urge and held still. I was the one posed.

Today, the light is more muted, as the advance guard of a snowstorm moves into the valley. I can still see the bone shapes in her face, the drooping cloth of her skin lying across the skull, her front teeth protruding from aging, drawn back lips, the weight of her skin draping toward her ears. With a sketch today, I think I could capture the light I saw yesterday.

What’s with this urge to sketch? Just to free my hand, my self from this diminishing biome? Create distance from her, to turn her into an abstraction of darkness and light? Or maybe a desire for the intimacy of drawing someone, my eye touching each edge, each curve, probing each shadow of her face, an intimacy we once shared through words, an intimacy that too many strokes, each cutting off blood to a different fragment of mind, now deny us?

She reaches for my hand again. I receive hers.

She articulates as carefully as she can, “I would find it quite pleasant if you would remove this bandage,” lifting her bandaged wrist. I tell her that the doctor would be unhappy with me if I did that. We repeat this conversation five or six times during the hour. Sometimes I defer to medical expertise. Sometimes I lie about doing it later. Sometimes I look her in the eye and tell her that I think she’d pick it raw without a bandage. My responses seem to matter more for the sound of my voice than the content of the words. Do I mislead myself that the actual words don’t matter?

I pause to take a breath myself. It doesn’t bring me back to center, but it does stretch, then relax more deeply the intercostal muscles. I’m reminded that I’m the mind of a body. I rest, holding her cool fingers in mine.

Walking back to my car in the parking lot, my heart feels strange, entangled, alive.

____________________________________________________________

For greenfrog’s blog, In Limine, go here.  For his bio, go here.

I decide to explore this living organism called a city.  Much more seems to be going on here than is visible on the surface.  The landscape before me is teeming with life like a tree, with roots extending deep into the earth and branches soaring into the sky.  Lightning and water flow hidden through arteries giving life to all.  Burrowing under the city’s skin I enter one of the arteries called a subway.  Here I am transported to another time.  As I emerge, not knowing what to expect, my eyes take time to adjust to the changed scene before me.  A person reeking of urine and dressed in rags asks for money.  I get a sandwich from a guy at a deli.  Someone follows me calling out that he knows me, but I’ve never seen him before.  This part of the city is old.  The scale of all I see is different.  Ground Zero lies in ruins.  People around me share where they were when it happened.  There is a wall lining an entire street with flowers and graffiti-like markings.  One of the scrawlings says, “I sat in silence watching.”  Why are all these people here?

By chance I run into a friend from high school.  I don’t know what to say to him.  He doesn’t say anything, so we pass each other on a piece of concrete called a sidewalk.  How do I make my mark?  How do I make a difference?  I run into a friend from college.  He lives here now.  We talk as though we were not in a foreign place.  I forget that I am the foreigner.

An obsession begins to develop towards this strange wilderness.  I feel at home for the first time in my life even though I am alone.  But I’m not alone.  This vast landscape is layered with people, surfaces, textures, and materials that combine infinitely to provide me the community, music, crime, art, filth, food, and beauty that I need.  Every stranger I pass on the street helps contribute to make each of these parts of my life here possible.   Again I burrow into the city’s skin.

I emerge reborn, now a child of the city, confident.  I am ready to begin.  I know where in the landscape to place my stick.  I enter a box called an elevator and fly upwards, unseen, as high as is humanly possible, to the top of an Empire.  Here I stand on stones carved out of the earth by human hands.  These stones suspended 1250 feet above the street allow me to see the grandest achievements of Humanity.  It is February 14th at midnight.  Sleepless in Seattle comes to mind.  Except my love is not coming for me.  My love is already here, all 8.3 million of them.

____________________________________________________________

Jonathan is an architect and blogger who loves talking about sustainability, the environment, buildings, and cities.  He has worked in Orlando, San Francisco, Portland, and now Salt Lake where he is approaching one year in Utah working for the LDS Church.  He blogs at green mormon architect and salt lake architecture and is looking forward to a return trip to New York next month.

This week on WIZ we’re celebrating that heady condition of feeling the life that you are and the life of others around, be they strangers or loved ones.  We’re singing songs of relishing being alive and of maturing through levels and stages of life.  Have fun, and readers, please feel free to raise in the comments your own thoughts about what it means to feel alive or to face the challenges that  circumstances have presented to your feeling as alive as you desire.

Let’s see what we can make of this third week of August 2009.

At the fair’s farthermost edge, wings rest upon the green.  Their colors—kite colors—catch at me.  I cross the field whispering, I’ve always wanted to try this!  An attendant helps me strap into the hang-glider.  I snap helmet and goggles in place and cast myself to the wind.

Well, it turns out I’m a natural.  Within me wakes the Aufklarung of flight, of orientation with the horizon and fearlessness in the face of movement ungrounded.  I spin course by stars I cannot see and trust in winds I do not control.  Over the green I soar, in accord with a finely drawn yet constantly changing map in my blood.  I both follow and make the map as I go.

Suddenly, there’s a wall!  I wheel to the right, only to find another, rising hundreds of feet into the air.  I turn on a wingtip and circle, but—another wall!  What do they mean?

Looking up, I realize that the odd tint to the sky is the shadow of a vast ceiling.  Skylights bubble outward, permitting glimpses of free air, yet it is a ceiling all the same.

I fly within these confines, skillfully using the space, but my condition has been reduced to that of a swallow trapped in a barn.  Looking at the skylights, I think, I must get my wings into that blue.

                                                                               * * * * *

The MRI shows that some conflagration has laid waste to more than a third of Mattea’s brain.  Water-filled cysts, like giant blisters, remain where portions of right and left lobes once were.  Genetic tests come back normal, and close scrutiny of birth records leads to the conclusion that, while the birth was precipitous, nothing about it could have resulted in destruction of such magnitude. 

Antibody screening, however, reveals an abnormally high count of anti-bodies in Mattea’s bloodstream and in mine for cytomegalovirus.  I’ve never heard of it; but as it turns out, it’s a common pathogen, found everywhere—one of the few able to cross the placenta and attack a fetus whose immune system has not yet armed to repel marauders.  The reality is staggering: Mattea suffered terrible damage from this organism while in my womb, and I hadn’t a clue.  I failed to protect her from something I didn’t even know existed.  The doctors’ assertions are severe: “blind and deaf,” “quadriplegic,” “no hope for self-reliance,” “needing a host of interventions.”  Some of these I know to be untrue, but the business of sorting through it all to figure out what is or what might be is maddening.  Where do we go from here?

                                                                               * * * * * 

Deeper into the canyon.  Like a tonic, the pollen dispels hesitation.  The world rushes through my seven-year fog of diffidence, nearly to the point of overwhelming me, yet my senses, wildly aroused, strive forward.    

Ravens’ voices rattle in the cliffs.  From time to time, I see a single black bird dip into the wind and sway from rim to rim.  Its lazy skimming across a cliff face provokes me.

A canyon wren calls, its song dropping like a pebble down the smooth face of silence.  These pebble-notes drop into my soul as if into a pool; ripples of pleasure spread out, then roll back on themselves.

As I walk, a phrase I’ve heard recently leaps to my mind: wilderness interface.  This term refers to areas where urban development has crept onto the rough ground of wilderness.  Craving relationships with Nature that has receded to areas no longer located near work or shopping, people build among the nearest native wildlife, then commute.  Such developments appeal to me, as they do to many others.  I mentioned my admiration for one to a friend who works for the U. S. Forest Service.

“A nice area,” she said.  “But as a Forest Service employee, I must point out it’s a wilderness interface.  The fire hazard is high there and the residents have just one path to safety so far.”  She spoke of the fact that the development is thickly wooded, with a single road leading into and out of this tinderbox.

Every year it happens somewhere in the West: wildfire, destroyer of the status quo.  Forest, meadow, human flesh, animal flesh, cabin, million-dollar home—it doesn’t matter.  Property rights go up in firestorms, resorts and last resorts reduce to ash.  Sometimes we fight such fires, trying to save that to which we feel we have a right—home.  At other times, it’s just too big.  We surrender all, risking to trust the new green sparking beneath ashes of incinerated old growth, new green often dependent, in fact, upon these very fires to prepare the ground for burgeoning.

What I feel as I hike through the canyon is like the chemical and muscular fires of childbirth.  It happens not because I will it—though conscious human will leads to points of ignition—but because, I think, the soul has its own wilderness interface area.  There the domesticated new brain meshes with the ancient wild one, and sudden fires ignited by lightning bolts of circumstance—vicissitudes—sweep through, burning everything to the ground.  Yet always, lying beneath the obvious and expected, old forms stir, ready to lift life to the next level.

Now I run toward the beauty of this place like a beggar to a table spread with shining delights.  But what’s here at hand or within sight isn’t enough.  And I don’t desire to devour it, but to get across it.  

How can I explain this?  At this moment I feel the ground I walk spinning with unnamed and uncounted bodies and forces through wide fields of possibilities.  The world I have lived in—a world of senses atrophied by focus upon domestic crises—falls away.  Perspective opens.  Stretching into blinding blue, I orient by stars I know are there.  And there.  And there.  In the stirring and shifting of lights I taste momentum and position as if on the tongue but can’t taste both at once.  It’s heady, like flying.  Well, it is flying—life rising to its next level.  Yes, I remember now: life craves living.  This trip is no longer about escaping captivity.  Now it’s about getting out.

__________________________________________________________

First published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (Spring 2005): 119-129.