with little angled feathertips of light,
I heard her speak. It was a quiet voice,
like summer clouds that weep along low hills
of poplar groves then peacefully rejoice

in finding laurel blooms. A haunting voice,
sifting across another time, to leave
a secret song before the night was due
and tuck it into twilight’s bell-shaped sleeve

where it might dissipate. Beside the bank,
where black swans often lie in twos, a word
clings to an apple on the bough. Sometimes
when breezes lift the branches it is heard.

_________________________________________________________________________

Karen Kelsay is a native Californian who grew up near the Pacific.  As a child, she spent most of her weekends on a boat. She has three children, two cats and extended family in England, where she loves to visit. Karen is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the editor of Victorian Violet Press, a poetry journal. Her poems have been widely published over the past few years, and some of her recent work has appeared in The Boston Literary Review, The New Formalist, The Christian Science Monitor and The Lyric. Her first book, Collected Poems, was finished in 2008.  Since then, she has authored two chapbooks, one published by Pudding House Press and the other by Flutter Press. “Handmaidens of Spring” was first published in Munyori Poetry Journal

Llevamos viviendo en él menos de un año.
El fantasma ha desaparecido.
Poco a poco somos nosotros los que aparecemos
En las fotos enmarcadas.
Hay flores en la repisa
Y tengo los perfumes ordenados por día y precio.

Desde la ventana, se ve un colegio.
Junto al colegio hay un parque que escala una colina,
Una colina coronada por dos enormes depósitos de agua.
Ésa es la parte más alta de esta ciudad,
Ése es nuestro pan de azúcar ajeno y humillado,
Pero a mí me gusta, a mí me gusta porque es mi casa
Porque veo un verde enmarañado que se resiste al hormigón
Porque de día la luz de la mañana no llama a la puerta
Entra de golpe
Como el gorgojeo de los gorriones que se posan  en el colgador.

Todo eso no lo habríamos visto con luz.
No tenía luz. Nadie vivía en él.

Cada mañana me levanto
Y miro alrededor y veo formas distintas en los objetos,
Formas que hablan de posesión y de significado,
De promesas y de sueños y del valor que solo
Reflejan, que no tienen
Como esa pequeña colina de hierba mala
Y esos depósitos de agua
Y ese cielo acongojado que retuerce el horizonte
De hormigón armado y tejados de amianto y antenas
Como dedos índices que no apuntan a ningún lado.

Ése es mi hogar. Ésa es mi tierra.
Éste soy yo. Supongo. Porque aún no tengo espejos
Donde pueda ver claramente quién soy yo
En relación
Con esta casa y este lugar,
Que necesito llamar,
Mi tierra y mi hogar.

Home (and) Land

Let me tell you how I came to buy this house
Look
We had seen forty-nine different houses in two months
Some were empty
Some just left, perfumes still in the bathroom
And a very old smell of tobacco
On the walls where the paint had come off.
Some others were still full of life, with framed pictures
While we struggled to pay attention to the realtor.
This was house number fifty in a cold and rainy
Friday when we both were trailing upwards to
The steepest neighbourhood in town.
No electricity. No one was in there.
We were shown the place by slashes of torch.
We went into that shadowy jungle
Where we could feel the presence of a distrustful ghost.
Next morning,
We made a lower bid, pure estimation
But they said yes to it
So everything went so quick
That we finally got a house we’d seen with blinded eyes.
We’ve been living here for less then a year
The ghost is gone
We’re starting to be in the pictures
We frame.
There are flowers in the windowsill
And I’ve got my perfumes arrayed by day and value.

From the window, I can see a school.
By the school, there is a park climbing a hill,
A hill that has atop two big water tanks.
That’s the highest point in town.
That’s our sugarloaf mountain, scatty and humiliated,
But I like it. I like it because this is my home.
Because I see a tangled green that resists concrete.
Because by day the morning sun doesn’t knock
And goes in by force
Like the chirping of the sparrows that come to rest upon the windowsill.

All that we couldn’t have seen with light.
No electricity. No one was in there.

Each morning when I wake up
I look around and see the different shapes of things.
Shapes that reveal ownership and certainty.
Shapes that tell about promises, dreams, and the value
That those things don’t have, they only pretend
To have like that little hill of weed
And that water tank
And that aggrieved sky that twists the horizon
Of concrete and roofs of asbestos and antennas
Like forefingers pointing to nowhere.

That’s my home. That’s my land.
That’s me. I guess. Because I still don’t possess
A mirror where I could easily see who I am
In regard
To this house and this place
Which I need to call
My home and my land.

_______________________________________________________________

Poem and translation by Gabriel Aresti Jr.  Gabriel Aresti Jr. is the pen name of Ángel Chaparro Sainz.  Ángel was born in Barakaldo, Basque Country, northeastern Spain around 1976. Currently, he is a professor of English at the University of the Basque Country where he has been teaching literature, poetry and history as well. Some of his short stories have been published in Deia newspaper and some other anthologies after being winners of contest such as Villa de Gordexola, Ciudad de Eibar or Ortzadar–all of them in the Basque Country. He runs a literary blog called lasenoritaeggsphueler.blosgpot.com but it’s a brand new project.

Victorian Violet Press, an online poetry magazine, is seeking submissions for the December issue. Please check out the magazine to get an idea of what type of poetry is published. You can find the magazine here.

Guidelines: Our taste in poetry is eclectic, but these subjects are preferred: inspirational, poetry for children, poetry about children, nature and life. Formal and free verse are both accepted, we particularly enjoy metrical poems that have lyricism, originality, accessibility and beauty.

Poems should not be obscure or overly abstract and should have a strong element of rhythm and a strong metrical element whether they are free verse or formalist.

Send 3-5 poems pasted in the body of an email with your name in the subject line. Simultaneous submissions and previously published poems are okay. Please wait three months after your last submission, before sending more poetry.

Ancient  chipmunk hole below the pin oak

This burrow has been used for many generations of chipmunks.

Early moonrise in my backyard

Taken in Pennsylvania

View of the Kiskiminetas River through a stand of trees, springtime

Taken in Pennsylvania

________________________________________________________________________________________

Elizabeth is thirteen years old and enjoys writing and photography. Capturing the magic and beauty of nature is a talent she hopes to be able to expand to its fullest potential someday.

______________________________________________________________

Jenna is a rising 9th grader with a specialized track for Medical Services.  Jenna hopes to study medicine and become a neurologist. In her spare time she enjoys volleyball, travel, photography and hanging out with her friends.

The pics accompanying are unfortunately not as fine as I’d like, but adverse conditions–high winds for the photo shoot, swarms of biting gnats, a dark work space–conspired against us in all our attempts.  We did what we could under the circumstances, which are always somewhat haphazard at Casa Karamesines.

William and Katherine Morris’ mother Linda actually conducted the interview.  It was a great pleasure to meet the source from whence sprang these two unique and talented blogging associates of mine.  I’ve known William (whom I’ve never met)  for several years now and often wondered where in the world he came from.  At last, more clues!

At WIZ’s companion blog A Motley Vision, I’ve posted, at Katherine’s suggestion, three questions and answers cut from the interview to trim length.

“Look, here’s Fezzika,” my mother said, bending down to point out the Woodhouse toad tucked under the garden stone. We had discovered the amphibian’s house a few days earlier, and I was fascinated by the placement choice. She had dug into the soil under a cornerstone edging the flowerbed beside the main path through the garden. The stone is flat, shaped a little like a boomerang, wide and bent in the middle, providing a convenient entrance and shelter.

The first one or two years we lived here we simply dug plots of soil to plant our garden in and sometimes hired someone to till up an area we chose. But the second time we tilled, my mother discovered two toads that the tiller blades killed. One had missing limbs and made it as far as the surface of the tilled soil before dying. It was heartbreaking that these benign creatures had been injured in our yard where we tried to protect and encourage toads and other creatures.

My mother decided to try things a different way. We went up to a nearby gravel pit and gathered rocks from there, transporting them to our yard. Using these stones we built raised beds to plant our garden in, making an almost-grid around the new flowerbed and then shoveling soil into the beds, mixing manure and compost in as well. With this new approach to the garden, we had no need to till the plot.

Soon after that, toads readily swarmed to the garden, coming out of secret holes at night and hopping through water puddles that the sprinkler left. They squatted in the plastic container of water my mother placed at the south end of the garden, a little “toad spa”. Some nights, there would be two or three toads soaking in the water at a time. When any of the family walked through the garden at night, we had to be careful that we didn’t step on a toad sitting in the path. Oftentimes I went barefoot, partly so that I would feel more easily if I disturbed an amphibian.

Over the six years we’ve lived here, the behavior of the toads in our garden has changed. They accept our garden as an ideal environment, traveling to stop at our water puddles, foraging in our area, burrowing under the black plastic and wandering around the garden. What my mother did not expect was that the toads would begin making permanent homes under the stones of the garden bed. This year, when my mother was in the garden, she realized that one of them—Fezzika—had dug a homey burrow to live in. This toad is an especially large female Woodhouse toad, as jumpy as any other when we walk around. My mother decided that we could name her “Fezzika” in honor of the giant in The Princess Bride because the toad is so large.

She wasn’t the only toad who moved in. Not long after we found Fezzika, we discovered that another toad had similarly excavated a spot under another flat stone in the herb bed. Slightly smaller than Fezzika, it had dug a sideways tunnel against the rock only a few inches away from our lemon thyme. It also seems that some of the toad homes are community burrows. A couple years ago, there was a gopher hole under one of our peach trees. Not only one toad lived in here. There were one or two others, and even a tiger salamander that shared the burrow with them.

Before Fezzika had moved in, the toads had generally only dug into the softer soil of the garden, first in the tilled soil of the old plots, then into the shovel-turned soil in the raised beds. They sometimes hibernated in the beds, and they liked moving in and out from beneath the black weed barrier. We would often find holes in the beds where one had spent the day in a burrow. Our garden was clearly a good environment for them, with plenty of water and insects to support their diet. The only slight downturn was that our cats prowled the garden and sometimes batted at them, but our felines usually left the toads to themselves. They certainly never ate them.

One reason the cats leave the toads alone (besides our chastisement) is that toads produce a gland toxin called bufotalin. This toxin is stored in large sacs slightly behind the Woodhouse toad’s eyes. It’s a milky substance that, if it enters the bloodstream, can cause increased heart rate or other heart problems because it has effects like digitalis, or Foxglove. It also has a distinctly bad taste.

Female Woodhouse toads are generally bigger than the males, and they can be as long as four inches. Once, when I was at a pond with some friends and we were catching toads, I caught a large brown toad that was possibly a Woodhouse. It had the characteristic light dorsal stripe but was a brown color, something I had never seen in Woodhouse toads before.

Just down the street from us is a large pond formed by runoff from the irrigation sprinklers in the alfalfa field above. From March to July, we can hear the male Woodhouse toads in the pond. The males emit a long, wailing call that can be compared to a sheep with a serious cold. The males use these calls to attract the females to ideal breeding waters.

Woodhouse toads deposit long strings of eggs numbering from twenty to forty eggs per strand in relatively still waters. Once these hatch, the tadpoles feed on debris in the pond, gradually maturing as they grow legs, lose their tails, and finally become tiny toads, no bigger than the nail of my little finger. From there, it takes three years for the toad to fully mature into the sizes of those amphibians now inhabiting our garden.

Unlike frogs, toads have a thicker skin that they can absorb water through. When the toads sat in the plastic container of water during the night it was to have a drink through their skin. Once they mature from tadpoles, the toads can wander as long as they like, being sure to stop at puddles and ponds to stay hydrated.

Now that the toads have come as far as digging rock-roofed homes in the garden, it doesn’t seem likely they’ll leave. My mother hopes that sometime we’ll be able to build a pond of our own, a little piece somewhere in the backyard that will encourage the toads even further. They’ve become year-round neighbors for us and interesting creatures to study. Toads eat a large assortment of insects in our garden, everything from flies to slugs, when slugs appear. Their presence is a welcome addition to the garden ecosystem.

__________________________________________________________________________

Val K. is thirteen years old and lives in a house in the Utah desert with her family, her carnivorous plants, a dog, five cats, and several toads. In between the times she spends writing, she works on crafts involving building, embroidery, gardening and more and also takes time to read incredibly long epic novels. She spends what is left of her free time writing fantasy stories and has a book written and a sequel in the works.

Boy: I can’t see anything!

The mayor: We must do something!

All: But what?

Town folks: Ask the king!

Mayor: Not the king!

Boy: That is a good idea.

Mayor: The king does not rule the skies.

Narrator: So, everybody thought…

Boy: We could ask the wind to blow the dark cloud away.

Town folks: Good idea!

Boy: Wind!

Wind: What.

Boy: Could you blow the cloud away?

Wind: If the king lets me blow down whatever I want.

Mayor: I’ll go ask the king.

Narrator: The mayor reluctantly goes to the king’s palace. He tells the king what the wind wants. The king agrees to the plan. So the wind blew the cloud away. But from that day on the wind blew things down.

End.

____________________________________________________________________________

Virginia is 10 yrs old and she wrote this for school. She likes reading. Her favorite thing to read is a series of books called Warriors, by Erin Hunter. She likes catching fireflies, too.

Okay, maybe they’re not doing it like that.  (But oh, what I could have and would have done with such technology in my wild child days!)  In fact, maybe they’re not going out into the Mystery much at all, if Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods gives an accurate account of how children and nature have fallen out of love.  But there must be some kids still getting out there, developing lightning-fast reflexes from chasing lizards, solving the whole-body puzzle of climbing a tree, honing their future driving skills by walking on logs across creeks, etc.

It’s in the hope that nature children still exist somewhere that Wilderness Interface Zone is issuing a call for nature poems and short essays written by children.  The works may address any aspect of nature and the child’s relationship to it.  Poems should be 50 lines or under and essays 150-1000 words.  If you have a budding nature photojournalist in your family, we will consider posting his or her photos.  Children ages 6-18 are invited to submit work to pk.wizadmin@gmail.com from July 6, 2010 to July 31, 2010.  Depending on how many submissions we get, we’ll post them in batches off and on July-August.  Parents and kids: Please review submission guidelines here before submitting.

April 22, 2010, Earth Day and M’s birthday.  Twenty-four hours have passed since the doctor put his words out there.  I’m still hot with anger and grief, still breaking into sobs at the slightest twinge of thought.  I’ve examined M repeatedly for signs that the doctor saw something I’d missed.

Our whole family has traveled a difficult road to buy her the safety and time she needs to make what she can of her outraged life.  Over the years, I’ve spent thousands of hours lying beside her, searching her body with my eyes, questioning it with my fingertips as I’ve struggled to discover causes—and relief—for her episodes of suffering.  With my voice—singing, asking, offering, praying—I’ve reached into her pain and distress and felt the arms of her trouble wrap around me.  Intense involvement and careful inquiry has been the only way to approach understanding and to help her.  It’s the only way to reach many of these children.

Her problems are legion, many have gone unsolved, but to my eye she appears as anchored in life as ever and a good deal more so than during her earliest days.  Her level of  awareness of and involvement in the world around her is at an all-time high.  After a few hours of doubt, I trust my eighteen years of twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week care and surveillance and douse the worry the doctor’s words sparked. M’s life is precarious—yes. The doctor’s appraising question about whether or not we had considered how to arrange her end had been premature at the least.  But I’m fully aware that worry over her condition is not the whole fire his question ignited.

Every Earth Day now I head to the cliffs of Crossfire Canyon to spend as much of the morning as I can sitting at the edge of how far I can walk in that direction.  Many qualities of the earth-air interface that cliffs offer single them out as sterling locations for observation and thought.  Especially on a day like this.  Thunder showers that began yesterday just as we left the clinic cooled off the region.  Walking toward the spot I have in mind, I take in the rain-washed day.  Overhead, scraps of the storm—flat-bottomed cumulus humilis clouds—float the flax-blue sky, drifting WNW.  At my feet, raindrops shimmy in low-growing clusters of white-petaled phlox, shining back the sun.  On the cliffs, a bit of a bluster huffs through on water-scraped winds. With it comes the scent of rekindling wood—juniper, pine—warming in spring sunlight.

The morning has a high polish, wind, water, and lightning having buffed it to a gleam.  Since I was last cliff-side, the green smoke of emergent cottonwood leaves has billowed up more thickly.  Looking straight up, even without sunglasses I see cloud vapor stretching, curling.  Cloud shadow falls into the canyon then pulls off, a tumble of sunshine filling the hole it leaves.  I watch a shadow approach my sunlit perch.  The stone goes grey as the shadow’s leading edge draws its chilly blanket over me.  Down in the canyon, the same shadow’s back edge flows off the cottonwood trees and their green cloud lights back up.

The canyon is very quiet, surprisingly so.  The occasional distant cluck of a raven twangs against canyon walls.  Usually by this time in spring the air is a-glitter with swallow and swift flight, their vocals jazzing up the stones.  But beside the raven and wind snagging on trees, I hear only the changing voice of the snowmelt pumping through Crossfire’s main artery, the rise and fall of its murmur, a chorus of energies braiding up into canyon-cutting flow.

Above the cumulus clouds spreads a feathery layer of cirrus fibratus (mares’ tails) looking like frost on a window. I glance up in time to see a rainbow appear in the pane of atmosphere where they’ve formed.  But I’m doing more than just “seeing” it. If sunlight refracts through ice crystals and there’s nobody with ocular organs to register the phenomenon sitting on a cliff at a happy angle to the refracting medium, does the rainbow shine?  The bow has a waxy burnish to it, the red hue smoky.  At the edge of the cumulus clouds closest to the cirrus bow, thin skins of vapor flush pink and green—bubble colors.  This nacreous bloom fades quickly.  I’m glad I happened to tip my head back at that moment.

Again, cloud shadow turns me grey and cold.  The warmer back edge of the shadow slides toward me, but the clouds seem to be growing and spreading, thickening the chill.

In the airspace directly ahead I see no flying insects, so maybe that’s why I’m not seeing swallows yet.  Today, the clouds—stretching, doubling back on themselves in an airborne taffy pull—those seem to be the things to watch.  The sun finds an opening and through clothes and skin I drink a draft of warmth.  But the next shadow is only a thousand feet away running like Mercury straight toward me.

I catch sight of a golden eagle very high up turning slow circles.  Which reminds me.  This last week and a half has been vibrant with bird migration.  The hummingbirds returned to our yard last week, some old hands showing up at the feeders.  Turkey buzzards arrived in their first wave.  Driving into town this earlier this morning, I forced a grudging, skin-headed pair to abandon their rabbit roadkill prize.  Mountain bluebirds have been back for a while but brightening the yard more this past week.  Larks have ramped up their jingles.  Little yellow and black birds—tiny things, very innocent and mild-mannered—have shown up to feast on our dandelion seeds.  These birds arrive every spring for the dandelions then move on after two or three weeks.  My neighbors’ barn swallows are back, flinging themselves into the wind above the fields, blue-black backs glinting in the sun.  From mid-April into May, San Juan County gets its wings.

The cloud vapor continues to churn, fronds and sprays and entire clouds whipping up like mud stirred in a creek.  Winds up there must be very strong.  Down here, air currents continue to pick up speed, growing more constant.  My fingers become chilled and stiff, uncomfortable, cold going into the joints.  When I notice their condition, I realize that my whole body is bunched against the wind.  Glancing south, my eyes alight on the Chorizo Mountains sixty or so miles to the south in Arizona, framed between Crossfire’s canyon walls.  New snow lies in creases between the mountain range’s highest ridges.  Behind me, I hear a woodpecker, tickbird of the trees, tap-tap-tap-tap-tapping.

This winter packed the Abajo Mountains and Cedar Mesa just north and west of here with a record heavy snowfall.  Crossfire’s head is an important water valve for the southern flanks of the Blues.  Here it is, the end of a cold April, and already the creek has gained water muscle mass.  The stream crowds to the edges of beaver dams, the main current pulling itself together to curl over the earth-and-wood structures in white chutes and spray, its leavings eddying around rocks and curling into the sides of push-up ponds.  It really is ingenious how the beavers garden the creek, harnessing the current so that ponds form but the watercourse trots along at near normal flow.  Alas, poor beavers.  This year, they’ll have their work cut out.

But maybe they know that.

Beavers have been back in the canyon just three years.  A neighbor tells me they were a constant there once but suffered wash-out in the late nineties during a flood.  Since their return, they’ve changed the canyon’s look and sound dramatically.  The creek used to flow rather quietly, its existence bound to springtime.  July’s heat pressed into the canyon and sopped up creek water, a dry sponge dabbing sweat off a brow.  I haven’t lived here long, but before the beavers returned, I saw the creek sink back to just a few spring-fed puddles during the hot months.  Everything else turned to mud then baked hard.

Another neighbor, an older man who works as a groundskeeper for the local LDS ward and stake houses, used to ride his ATV in the canyon with his family before the BLM closed it to off highway vehicles.  He hadn’t been down to the creek since just before the beavers made obvious their intentions.  When I told him they were building dams again, his face lit up.  “Beavers make the canyon beautiful,” he said.

They’ve certainly rewired it. Under the beavers’ influence, snowmelt and spring-fed waters last a little longer into the summer and flow a little further, much to the benefit of many species living in Crossfire and the cattle rancher who summers a herd of catlle.  At the height of the runoff in past years, the dams filled the canyon with a sound like water turbines as the beavers channeled the current to constricted points along the dams’ lips then sent it falling in a roar two to four feet into the creek bed below.

I told a friend, another long-time local resident, about the beavers’ return to Crossfire.  He expressed pleasure at the thought but cautioned me to prepare for tragedy.  ATV riders, he said, would likely dynamite the dams when they backed water “over their precious trails.”  Fortunately for the beavers, the BLM closed Crossfire to OHV travel just as they began damming the creek, greatly reducing that risk of their being undone via explosion.

Years ago, I watched a TV documentary about the history of Yellowstone Park.  I can’t remember the show’s title, who produced it, or really much else.  If I recall rightly, it focused on the history and development of America’s national parks. As I remember, the documentary told how during the park’s earliest days it suffered a series of incompetent park supervisors ill-equipped to consider the intricacies and majesties of the park’s environment.  These men committed strange acts upon the land.  In one case, park management decided to remove beavers from some of Yellowstone’s streams, thinking their presence somehow detrimental to the landscape’s aesthetic appeal.  The idea was that the actual draw for tourists—the money-making draw—was the sight of Yellowstone’s big mammals: moose, bison, elk, and bear.  The beaver dams were thought something of blemish on the face of otherwise stunning vistas and prospects.

Getting rid of them was a cosmetic decision that brought down trouble.  Once the beavers were cleared away, the waterways’ condition altered dramatically.  Streams silted up, threatening native fish species. A chain reaction occurred. Elements of the changes in streams’ lotic systems resulted in adverse effects upon others of the park’s animal populations, big mammals included.  Somebody somewhere worked out the error. Yellowstone management backtracked and reestablished the beaver population.  It turned out that the buck-toothed, paddle-tailed, tree-felling, overgrown water-rat-like critter kept matters open for everybody else.

That’s how I remember the show.  I’ve searched the Internet trying to find the reference and check memory against script but so far haven’t succeeded.  Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, point me to a source, or contribute additional information.

So.  Here I am now, sitting at the edge of how far I can bodily go.  But visually, cognitively, I’m able to extend presence of mind to the beaver ponds below, whose broad, smooth faces draw my eye.  Softened by grief and sharpened by anger, I let events of the last couple of days and loose thoughts about the ponds wind up together.   I’ve understood for a long time that people cannot achieve better behavior in the natural world as an isolated concern—as a special “treat your Mother Nature well” gesture.  What human beings do in natural environs is merely extension—sometimes more extreme, sometimes not—of what they do to each other.  The boundary between nature and the man-made, hardly more than imaginary in the exterior world, dissolves completely in the interior landscape of the human soul.  On the map, we might be able to draw or point to a line: This is where city ends and countryside begins; here’s where Old Man Smith’s spread ends and BLM begins.  But within us each of us there is no here or there, no north or south, no true better or worse.

If I’m disposed to exploit or control others, arrange them in my thinking to my liking, either to shore up my wanting life with comfort and wealth or to protect myself against loss or fear, I’ll be that same person when I enter the most breathtaking canyon and find myself face-to-face with nature’s “resources”.  I won’t look to see what’s in front of me but to determine what it does for me.  If I’m unable to look across at other people to see what’s there and meet it, I’ll filter each spectacular natural view through the same aversions, fears, and longing that I do when I glance at family members, friends, strangers and acquaintances.  I’ll look for the same opportunities and avoid the same questions that I do when I’m at church, at the mall, at work, or engaged in my favorite cause.  I’ll stamp my own image upon the land, using it to buttress my beliefs, seeing even a favorite place in my own terms.   If I’m inclined to hold my aesthetic sense against others I deem to fall short of “what’s beautiful,” I’ll confirm my thinking in every vista, forest grove, or cluster of claret cup cactus blooms and ignore or rephrase aspects of extraordinary truth that don’t support my usual take.   If I’m a nature writer, I’ll carve my initials into growing trees and old stone faces with the language I use when I write about place and about other species.  Whatever language it takes, I’ll hold tight to my position, ignoring evidence that there is anything—in me, in the human world, in the natural world, or in the divine—that lies beyond my sight or the grid I’ve imposed upon heaven and earth.

The wind picks up,  more pressing, cold, and constant.  My body wants to move to shake the chill.  The sun breaks through a chink in the cloud ceiling and a flash flood of warmth drenches the cliff.  I stay until the next cloud shadow arrives.

When I finally start for home, I come across a lightning-blasted juniper tree, just its wooden bones.  The bolt rent it years and years ago.  Its fallen limbs radiate out from a blackened, hollow trunk.  Juniper tree wood, contortionist by nature, has a sinuous, silver beauty when bared.  Looking at it, you can see the twisting currents of its growth.

Raindrops still glimmer in ground-hugging phlox, this time, a purple-tinged bunch. The sight of the blossoms—their pale, lilac petals sporting lucent beadwork—further cools my mind.  Feeling around inside, I can tell I’m not so sensitive to the touch of my own thoughts.  Movement feels good.  I’ll recover.  But there is no way I’m going to let those words alone: “If she ever does develop pneumonia, have you considered what you might want …” In her condition, as disturbing as it is, this child is a lodestar of cosmic event, an oriel opening onto so many mysteries.  And here was the doctor, the only prospect visible to him the prospect of her death, speaking to us as if we were entertaining the idea of remodeling a room and he a salesman inquiring into our preferences in language marked with the polite hunger of a sales pitch.

The words came too close and for no good reason.  I’ve heard variations on them for as long as I remember from folks trying to wrest away part of me.  They’re common and persistent and dress up as sympathy and concern.  They assert interest in human welfare and dignity.  They trim themselves in ornamental rhetoric meant to draw the eye of our deepest interests: “only thinking of what’s best,” “prevent suffering,” “for your own good.”

It’s the language of imposition.  Sheltering itself, as Martin Buber says, in disconnection and separation, the mind pressing it seeks to hold every matter to its own level, especially those extreme questions that ask too much, like my daughter.  A relationship with someone like her constantly springs leaks that let in the unimagined and the unsettling.   The mind that advances itself by way of  such words attempts through them to exert control upon the endless face of expression, whether it be nature’s face or the changing face of mankind.  Such language paints every window opening onto mystery with a silver back, making its pane over into words that can only mirror, the better to see its own, plain-faced image everywhere as being beautifully what is.

But that doesn’t really work, either.  Somehow or another, what’s out there shoulders its way through.

Spieglein, Spieglein, an der Wand,
Wer is die Schoneste im ganzen Land?

Frau Konigin, Ihr seid die Schonste hier,
Aber Schneewittchen uber den Bergen
Bei den sieben Zwergen
Ist noch tausendmal schoner als Ihr.

My translation, applying poetic license:

Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
Who is the most beautiful in the whole land?

Oh Queen, you are the most splendid here,
But Snow White over the mountains
With the Seven Dwarfs
Is yet a thousand times more splendid than you.