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.

Two days earlier, as I cleared my desk and bookshelf, I was happy to find an old-fashioned booklet containing photographs of me when I was a toddler.  About a year ago I took possession of it from my mother, who kept it in a box under her bed.  I promptly lost it in my muddle of a workspace.  Three of the booklet’s eight photos document an event I don’t remember but that show opening steps in my lifelong dance with others’ not only expressed but also acted upon concern for the quality of my life—a dance that swept me up before I could walk.

The first picture shows me sitting in the kitchen of what I think is my parents’ apartment in Hopewell, Virginia.  I’m about a year and a half old. That’s my Aunt Pat there on the floor.  You can see the large bandage covering most of the left side of my face. Aside from the 1950s-era apartment kitchen floor plan, appliances, and related artifacts, that’s the most interesting feature of the photograph.  (For larger view, click into photo.)

Next photo.  That’s cute me, sitting in the high chair shown stage left in the previous pic.  I’m dipping my left hand (interesting because I’m right-handed) into a bowl of cereal or some other finger food on the chair’s tray. Again, the focus of the photo appears to be the bandage on my face, held in place by white hospital adhesive tape applied voluminously back then.  Check out how the tape wraps over my nose and under, leaving a slit so I can breathe.  Wonder how removing that felt.

In this third photo I’m wearing the same shoes, possibly the same shirt and socks as in the other two pics.  I’m touching my head—those thin baby curls—bandaged left side of the face camera-side once again.

So what’s under the bandage?  A surgical wound medical science inflicted in an attempt to remove an eye-catching nevus flammeus—“flaming birthmark,” also called a port-wine stain or blemish—before I grew old enough to suffer because of it.  It was a generous effort undertaken in my best interest, covered by insurance and encouraged by doctors intent on improving the quality of my life.  Since I was two years old or less and completely unaware of the problem, others with unblemished experience made the decision for me.  And so the bandage covers the spot where they’d frozen my face with nitrogen and then tried sandpapering off the port wine stain.  Sandpaper!  Am I a piece of wood?  I must be, since the doctors resorted to crude carpentry to try to raise in my face a more aesthetically pleasing grain. My mother remembers that doctors at the Richmond, Virginia hospital bound my arms in splints to prevent my pulling at the bandages.  I like to imagine that made me look even more like a wooden doll.

Unfortunately for nearly all the school photographers to come, the doctors’ attempt to un-blemish me failed.  The sea of dilated capillaries that gives the birthmark its red color extends well beyond skin deep.  Faced with a highly-colored (blond hair, blue eyes, red birthmark) and apparently visually confusing subject, several school photographers, without asking, tipped my clean right cheek lens-side and took my photograph in near-profile. I find these pictures interesting for what they try not to show, my oblique history with school photographers and their standards for not only what is photogenic but also for how to arrange subjects.

The usual pose

During my senior year at Oil City High School, I received the proofs of my senior class portraits and received a shock.  The portraits were taken at a local studio in Oil City, Pennsylvania, where my family transplanted itself in the mid-70s.  The proofs showed me looking to one side of the camera, like many of those portraiture shots do.  The birthmarked cheek was turned away from the lens to match the pose of my classmates, all of us focusing on something to the lens’s right side—our futures, perhaps. But somebody post-sitting performed photo-surgery on my portrait, removing the birthmark without my knowledge or consent.

Senior portrait, birthmark removed by photographer

It’s obvious to my eye that other touch-up work was done here, too.

As I examined the baby photos for signs of what I might have been feeling at the time, I thought about abstracts for medical articles and other pages that I’ve read arguing the virtue of one treatment for removing birthmarks over another.  Some birthmarks are associated with syndromes and do require treatment.  The extra color I sport on my face is not dangerous, causes me no pain, and poses no health risk.  Yet many articles presuppose suffering in all cases of visible birthmarks and some assert that a child’s birthmark should be removed before she or he becomes conscious of it and begins to suffer because of it.  Some articles document how children have suffered.  From what?  Bullying.  Public humiliations of various sorts.  The trouble of standing out in a way that startles people, prompting them to act badly before they can stop themselves.  In other words, where a child’s birthmark does not threaten health, any discomfort the child feels rises from the actions of others and those actions’ effects upon the child bearing the mark.  Which means the birthmark isn’t the problem—others’ responses to it and how the bearer feels about what happens combine to give rise to trouble.

I have myself enjoyed the blessings of many unsettling moments.  I’ve experienced profiling—almost literally, in the turning aside of my birthmark so that a cleaner profile showed to the camera lens.  Also, I’ve experienced Dick-Tracy-style criminal profiling by floorwalkers in stores.  (If you don’t know who Dick Tracy is, try Batman, where criminals all sport deformity highly tinted with insanity.)  I’ve discovered that people suppose me to be miserable or unbalanced; some have told me that I must be.  Some have assumed I’m of low intelligence, if for no other reason than that I haven’t had the mark removed or buried it with makeup.  Children (and some adults) accost me in stores, asking in alarm, “What happened to your face?”  I didn’t date in high school, I thought—stoically—because my birthmark rendered me unattractive.  The funny thing I see now is that I never lacked male companions.  It was just that dating seemed like the yardstick of desirability, and spending half my life with boys in my backyard or theirs wasn’t dating and didn’t demonstrate in obvious ways social appreciation for what I looked like.

As a newly minted Mormon, I remember in my teens learning about prayer—ask in faith, nothing doubting.  I did.  I petitioned God to remove the birthmark out of his no doubt great concern for the quality of my life.  He did not, perhaps out of the same concern.  When I was about twenty, I heard a lesson in church about blacks, skin color, and mark of Cain. Privately, I asked my Relief Society president if she thought my birthmark meant I had done unacceptable wrong in the pre-mortal existence and been similarly branded.

Very few doctors have shown enough restraint to pay the birthmark no heed and stay out of my face.  Most have hounded me with this question: “Does that thing hinder your social life?”  I suspect some of the disregard for my observations and the outright hostility I experienced talking to doctors about my brain-injured daughter happened as part of their responses to my coloration.  Dermatologists have shown no thoughtfulness at all—all have been at least as bad as those school photographers who tipped my face out of the light to hide its truth.  Before embarking on a second pregnancy, I went to a dermatologist for a skin problem I wanted cleared up.  The doctor was completely uninterested in the rash.  Without so much as a “May I?” he lifted my chin with his fingertips and rolled my head to the side, saying, after brief inspection, “Too bad we don’t have any special programs going right now or we could get that taken care of for you for free.”

“Even if you had a special program that would take care of it for free, I wouldn’t enter it,” I said.  He seemed not to hear, caught up, perhaps, in a dermatologist’s ecstasy.

There’s lots more, but this is sufficient to explain the questions that rose to mind as I looked at the baby photos: Did I suffer?  If so, was that bad, or was the suffering severe enough that my parents, their doctors, or later, my self ought to have taken every step to prevent it?

I suppose I did suffer, but not as deeply or as often as others imagined.  I can’t recall the suffering itself. It doesn’t flood back when I revisit the memories.  The suffering—if that’s what it was, rather than self-pity or some other breakdown of imagination on my part—has faded into the background of an adventurous, often highly unlikely and still wildly unfolding life—a life made possible, in part, by that pesky birthmark of which so many people have tried to relieve me, including, in occasional fits of madness, myself.

Me, age 14, birthmark caked with makeup, ick

Life has been such a success overall that when I look back on what seemed the many embarrassing, frustrating, humiliating, frightening, painful, violating and intrusive moments associated with my coloring, I interpret them differently from how I did back then.

Instead of seeing myself alone, in unhappy state, a victim or target of others’ bothersome behavior, a more complex picture emerges.  I see myself in intimate situation with others displaying their fears of pain and isolation that the nonconformity of my appearance touches in them.  I see discomfort wrestling with wonder in their unwillingness to look questioningly into another’s eyes, because offering themselves in question feels risky.  What if the answer is not what you expect?  What will the difference ask of you in return?  I realize now that many faces bore the strain of the belief that exterior conditions could be arranged like furniture to satisfy their pursuit of self-safety, static comfort, and the aesthetics of the familiar.  I ought not to have been there, a bolt of the unexpected, clashing with what’s agreeable.  Desperation—that’s another one.  Before some could quench it, desperation sparked in some peoples’ faces over mysteries in their own hearts.  I fell into the habit of averting my eyes politely to give people privacy to reflect.

The past consists of events plus the meanings we ascribe to them.  Reach new understanding of an event, shape it into newly seeing language, and you change the past, even to the point of redeeming it.  Because I see matters differently now, in every single one of those old moments, my past, with its black-and-white stills and seemingly fixed meaning and pushpin fate, breaks out into free-wheeling and open-ranged destiny, a still-moving story that has already exceeded anything I could have imagined to ask for.  No one—no one—is taking that away.  The choice to hide or lighten the birthmark or to keep the whole of my to-the-eye appearances remains.  But if doctors had succeeded in cleaning me up, they would have stripped out of my life tremendous adventure—one that came with some suffering, yes.  There’s nothing wrong with a healthy portion of suffering.  Fear of suffering, aversion to it—those lead to exertions of control, to the writing of one’s life story, and apparently others’ life stories, into safe corners.  In my own life, nowadays, the deep feeling and the chaos and pain of suffering have come to signal a rising surge of energy and accompanying strenuous movement forward into something new.  Come what may, I’m keeping the story open—the birthmark stays, for everybody.

So as I looked at the pictures that day, tilted as they were into shadow cast by the overhanging doctor’s appointment for M’s SSI physical, I mused on the presumption of suffering as reason per se to alter or end one’s own or another person’s storyline or to impose other controls in order to reduce suffering. “Suffer” has become a money word, a word that sells solutions that may or may not work to quell problems that may or may not exist.  Many of us freely bandy about the word “suffer” when we fall into “quality of life” chatter in water cooler estimations of someone else’s condition.  What we don’t speak of knowingly is how circumscribing in such language the viabilitly of another person’s life reflects back to us our own anima—fears we don’t wish to face, the nervous strain of avoiding movements in our own soul that we don’t wish to give in to, and risks we strenuously avoid taking, including the call to adventure Joseph Campbell rightly says results in grave illness should we strenuously avoid answering it.

Very often, in judging another’s quality of life to be to one degree or another Lebensunwertes Leben, “life unworthy of life,” we are inextricably judging the quality of our own existence, because quality of life is not the mere matter of individual condition.  Life is the whole nerve mass of our connections to each other and to the world around.  Each person’s “quality of life”—such a slick phrase!—is not the simple sum of how much he or she can or can’t do and how much he or she suffers or doesn’t.  We live in the depths of relationships entwining us—how far we are able to reach to touch and hold with each other, body through soul.  How far we can go into being with others.  In these constantly turning, changing, and unfolding places between people and the states they give rise to, such self-limiting and controlling  phrases like “quality of life” fall to the wayside of actual living language.

These thoughts crossed my mind two days before my husband and I took our daughter to the doctor for Social Security’s mandated examination.  They are part of the reason why his question struck so deeply.  It was not a new question, not for the family of man generally and not for me personally.  We still live in an ancient mindset where a child even like the one in the photos is believed bearer of some form of evil eye or simply too big of a draw on the community’s resources and so is abandoned on the grassy hillside of God’s will or is in some other way driven off or killed.  The language with which we mark each other out is the blood we paint on the boundaries of how far beyond ourselves we’re willing to go or how close we’re willing to allow approach. I’ve heard that doctor’s question a hundred times, in different forms, in sympathetic tones of kind concern or in presumptuous ones—directed at me.  It’s a question that turns my attention sharply, where in the asker’s eyes I catch sight of common hunger to end it all rather than take just one step more and see where it leads.

Age 16, my favorite school photo

Many readers know I have a severely disabled daughter.  A virus crossed the placenta when I was pregnant with her and destroyed about a third of her brain. Doctors said it found her brain stem especially cozy digs.  Like bad renters, when the virus particles moved out, they left behind a trashed interior space and my daughter at extreme risk.  In a last guffaw, fate—or destiny—pricked me into labor on the evening of April 21.  She was born in the early morning hours of Earth Day, 1992.

This past Earth Day “M” turned eighteen.  She receives Social Security benefits, so her eighteenth birthday triggered an intense round of filling out forms with the same information we’ve provided every year.  This year Social Security required a doctor’s say-so that her degree of disability still rendered her incapable of gainful employment.  The regional SS headquarters, located in Durango, Colorado, automatically scheduled an appointment at a doctor’s office in Grand Junction, Colorado, a five-hour round trip.  My husband Mark negotiated, winning permission to take her to a local doctor here in SE Utah on the day before her Earth Day birthday.  All that was needed was a doctor’s (re)confirmation of M’s status as permanently disabled, a conclusion easily reached upon the slightest inspection of her frail person, distinguished by severe microcephaly accompanied by stunted growth, scoliosis, bouts of clonus (the rapid contraction and release of muscles that characterizes cerebral palsy), and other obvious problems arising from a “severe insult to the brain.”

Taking M anywhere in the car poses challenges, so on Monday we began preparing for the Wednesday appointment. We bathed her—always a difficult project because of her cerebral palsy.  We collected the necessary paraphernalia.  We planned and mentally braced ourselves for the six-mile drive to the clinic.  When the time for the appointment arrived, I asked M if she wanted to go for a ride in the car.  She shrieked in delight.  Her body went rigid with excitement, triggering a round of clonus.

Mark carried her to the car.  With much awkward shifting and rearranging we buckled her into the car seat.  I climbed in back with her to help keep her calm.  When the car moved she startled repeatedly and went rigid, splaying her arms as if she felt she were falling.  I laid my arm across her chest. “It’s okay, I’ve got you,” I said.  She relaxed a bit and smiled.

At the doctor’s office, we were led into a tiny exam room that barely fit, Mark carrying M.  I noticed the arm M pressed up against Mark’s chest turning blue from its circulation being cut off.  “Let me hold her,” I said. “Her arm’s turning purple.”  Mark handed her to me and the nurse helped me settle myself into a chair.

The doctor entered and began asking questions.  At the sound of his voice, M, already anxious, went rigid, setting off several powerful waves of clonus.  Under those conditions she becomes stronger than I am.  I was forced to stand up.  Despite her frailty and small size I could barely hold her.  Could she speak, the doctor asked, could we communicate with her, so on and so forth.  Was she on a feeding tube?

“No,” I said. “I feed her by hand three times a day.”

My arms ached from strain and burned from the lactic acid buildup caused by trying to hold a wildly spasming child.  I handed her off to Mark.

“Has she ever aspirated stuff and developed pneumonia?” the doctor asked.

“No.  She has an excellent choke reflex.”

“If she ever does develop pneumonia,” he said, “have you thought about what you’d want in the way of intubation …”

“Intubation?” I asked, perplexed.

“ … intubation and respiration and …”

I realized what he was saying.  “You’re talking about end-life care,” I said.

“Yes.”

* * *

The grammatical structure we call the question is sui generis in human language, not only for its inbuilt invitation to engage and respond but also for its sexy qualities as an all-terrain vehicle for uncertainty and seeking.  Lively inquiry is right up there with metaphor for its boundary-crossing fluidity—for how it transports us.  Like a good metaphor, a good question can be a provocateur of consciousness.  It can elicit a wide range of responses—in a single person.  It opens matters up.  A good question can get us across.

Experiences with M have suggested that the brain is encoded to recognize the music and inflection of spoken queries.  Back when she began making her way out of to us past her cerebral cave-in, my questions to her were the first language she responded to vocally and consistently.  She didn’t understand my words, yet her badly injured brain registered that the musical phrasings with a rising lilt at the end that marks most uttered questions called for her reply.  She answered—reflexively?—with soft, affirmative hoots to nearly every question I asked, even ones asked within her hearing not directed to her. I found ways to build on those responses, eventually offering her choices and teaching her to make her preferences known. Now she displays an impressive array of affirmative answers.  The hoot endures, but when she’s feeling especially interested, she’ll speak, in a soft, breathy voice, a very lovely, very generous, “Yeah.”

Working with M’s answer tick has raised other questions.  Suppose an ability to recognize questions and a compelling urge to answer are indeed built into our brains.  Could this suggest that interrogatory language opens a door to our attention that we might find difficult to close at will?

Also, I found it intriguing that M’s default answer to any question was affirmative in tone.  Are we wired to say, “Yes,” perhaps as a basic reflexive confirmation of our listening presence? Possibly, many of us feel a strong impulse to answer, even when we don’t find the query per se very interesting.  Which might cast light upon why so many sales pitches open with questions, especially ones that amplify a listener’s natural “yes” response: “Do you want to save hundreds a year on your car insurance?”  “Would you like to help a kid stay off the street and out of trouble?” The question—particularly the spoken-aloud question, which travels on a strong current via the ear to a person’s consciousness—might just have a straight shot into the human mind, laying it wide open.

* * *

Our trip to the doctor was supposed to answer a simple yes or no question: Does M still qualify for Social Security benefits?  Somehow, that question had tipped over into one having no bearing on her eligibility for benefits.  It also queried conditions not in existence. Where had it come from?  My mind suddenly found itself teetering on a tightrope of responses, one of them rapidly focusing, very cold anger.

Distracted with trying to keep M arranged comfortably, my husband had missed this bit of conversation.  He started talking about something else.  “He’s talking about end-of-life care,” I explained, alerting him.  To the doctor, I said, “Naturally, we want to keep her alive as long as possible.”

The doctor pressed the issue a bit more and Mark took up the matter.  At that point, I lost focus on what either was saying.  I rubbed my arms to relieve the pain from holding M and sighed, “Gosh.”  The longer the discussion went on, the messier, the more painful, and the more precarious I knew it would become.  “We can’t make such a decision until the circumstances arise,” I said, ending it.  Mark asked the doctor a few more questions about meeting Social Security’s requirements.  We gathered M up and got her out of there, both Mark’s feelings and mine chafing rawer by the moment.

In the car, I wondered, “Why doesn’t anybody ever ask us the good questions?”

To explain what I mean by “the good questions,” allow me to reveal a fantasy I have, an imaginary conversation with a dream doctor.

Just like this real doctor, my fantasy doctor asks, “Is she on a feeding tube?”

I say, “No.  I feed her three times a day by hand.”

Rather than saying little to nothing about this important bit of information, my fantasy doctor says, “That’s rather unusual.  How does that work?”

Me: [da-da-da-da-da … explaining how it works]  “… Then when she was about three and a half, she lost her swallow reflex.  She came very close to having a tube implanted.  But I discovered a way to re-stimulate that reflex and got her swallowing on her own again.”

Looking really interested, the doctor asks, “How did you do that?”

Me: [da-da-da … explaining how I did it.]  “… At first, it took about two hours per meal to get enough into her.  Gradually, we worked out a routine and she started taking her formula at a faster rate.  Now we’re down to about half an hour per feeding.  Oh, plus the wheelchair rides I give her before and after each meal to prepare her mentally to eat and to aid her digestion.”

This very attentive doctor says, “You said, ‘formula.’  Is she on a completely liquid diet?”

Then I explain, “Yes, one my husband developed.  It uses high-quality ingredients, including cream-top, live culture yogurt.  She used to suffer severe reflux, often throwing up her last meal in frightening, middle-of-the-night episodes.  But the live culture yogurt put a stop to that.”

Doctor says, intrigued: “But why a liquid diet?”

Me, excitedly: “It pretty much eliminates the risk of her choking and aspirating solid food.  If she did that, she’d almost certainly have developed pneumonia by now, possibly more than once. I think the liquid diet also helps avoid other serious problems.”

Completely fascinated now, the doctor asks, “Back to the reflux—you were able to stop her reflux without the use of medications?  Just yogurt?”

Me: “Yes, it worked for us.  My husband thought about the problem and wondered if live culture yogurt might help.  He added the yogurt to her formula and the nightly vomiting episodes stopped immediately.  She still has occasional mild trouble, but nothing at all like those awful, middle-of-the-night episodes.”

And then the doctor says, animatedly: “Interesting!  Some of what you say could help other patients.  Would you mind if I ask more questions?”

Me, hungrily: “Please do.”

“Has she ever suffered seizures?”

“When she was a baby she seizured several times a day—petit mals.  But we found a way to control and then stop them …”

On and on.

The real life medical professionals we’ve encountered have not proven to be anywhere near as attractive as my fantasy doctor.   When the ophthalmologist pronounced her blind and I countered that she wasn’t, rather than ask me to present evidence, he said, angrily, “I’ve been doing this for a long time” and threatened me with home monitoring to “find out what’s really going on.” One of her primary therapists declared, “She has no interest in interacting with others” and dropped us from the physical therapy program, just as M was beginning to form a bond with her—her first outside-the-home relationship.  Medical techs and other interested parties told us firewall folklore that rationalized abandoning her in the wilderness of God’s will. Once, when Mark reported my observations of M’s behavior to one of her doctors, the doc confided to my husband, man-to-man, that “Mothers are the worst observers of their children’s conditions.”  Some of the questions we’ve been asked have been accusatory: “Are you keeping her from returning to her Father in Heaven?”  And now: “Have you considered what stance you might take in ending her life?”

None of these care providers wanted to stir one toe beyond whom they already were and what they thought they already knew to engage with her.  M, on the other hand, crossed great distances under nearly impossible conditions, bringing with her exhausting but inexhaustible gifts of insight and awakening.  Her circumstances provoke, frustrate, take my husband and me to the very edges of our known universes and then beyond.  Again and again she has opened up my thinking, drawing me past my own bounded awareness.  In turning to meet her, I’ve gotten past and over and over and over myself.

In other words, she is a great question.  She’s a brilliant question, of the sort that, asked of the right people, gives rise to the development of new vaccines, surgical procedures, and rehabilitative therapies.  She’s a poser that, confronting alert and interested minds, could draw back the curtain on the nature and development of human consciousness.  She is the adventure that that changes everything and that costs us our lives as we know it.

Before heading home we took her on a drive along the highway to give her a taste of speed.  As we approached sixty mph, I saw her focus turn inward to the sensations she experienced as her center of gravity tipped and rolled gently and shifted into turns with the movements of the vehicle.  She was interested and engaged.  Little smiles flickered across her face.  Through my arm spread across her chest, I felt her body relax more than it had at any other time during the outing.

“Do you like going for a car ride?” I asked, just to touch her with my voice and to feel her touch in response.

She hooted a soft “yes.”

So wonderful to see her at ease.  My body, on the other hand, bound up tighter as I brooded over the doctor’s question.  My arms and hands, stiff and strained from holding M during her spasms, shook uncontrollably, as if they’d absorbed her palsy.

We went home, unloaded M, and sorted and settled everything out.  I looked for Mark and found him sitting at his work desk.  “I want to scream,” I said, walking into his office.  He said something that I couldn’t hear. But he reached for me, and I understood that.  We met in an exhausted embrace, him weeping against my sweater, me crying into his hair.

To be continued …

Constable Pedley (Wendell Corey) is a good Mountie looking forward to a furlough.  Instead, he’s sent into the wild North Country to bring Jules in for Brody’s murder.  The faithful Pedley sets out just before the weather turns nasty.  He catches up to Jules when Jules stops his flight to the wilderness to care for half-frozen Father Simon (Morgan Farley) who’s hiked out to convince Jules to turn himself in.  Father Simon’s crazed and depleted condition, leading to his death, portends the trouble to come.  As Constable Pedley and Jules start on a perilous dogsled journey back to civilization, the trapper bides his time, knowing that in this corner of the world Pedley is out of his depth.  He plays head games with the Mountie and allows him to become lost, expecting to escape when Pedley loses control of the situation.  Harsh weather, lack of sleep, getting caught in a bear trap, and becoming lost do indeed push Pedley to the edge, but when a pack of wolves attacks the two men and Pedley is nearly killed he loses his mind.  At last, conditions are perfect for Jules to escape, but knowing he is responsible for Pedley’s unfortunate situation Jules risks everything to take the helpless man he has been calling “Bébé” to safety.  Even after they make it to town and join up with Jules’ Indian companion and the kitten, Constable Pedley remains in their care in childlike state, unable to live life as a whole man.  To make things right, Jules once more risks his freedom—and his life—in a dramatic bid to snap Pedley out of shock.

Filmed in Idaho and released in 1952, The Wild North is a very engaging wilderness adventure with surprise twists and turns of a quality you don’t see much anymore.  That is, rather than being manipulative of the audience, the plot turns arise naturally from the main character’s menschlichkeit.  I liked this movie a lot, especially for the human nature story it tells.  Constable Pedley’s unsettling fate runs counter to the usual “always gets his man” Dudley Doright Mountie stereotype and might strike some as odd. But having read Canadian prairie literature from the early 1900s, I find Pedley’s succumbing to the relentless pressure of natural forces in line with common themes of the times.  Many stories from that era display the trouble British-stock settlers ran up against trying to tame the wildlands and voice their dismay at how they felt it dismantled them, their minds as well as their domiciles, brick by brick. The kind of hysteria that grips Pedley can be compared to Adela Quested’s becoming unhinged in the Marabar Caves in E. M. Forster’s Passage to India.  But what Jules does to help Pedley—enemy to his freedom—makes for a stunning story about the human adventure—how bravery and human decency can get people across rugged psychological terrain as well as practical know-how and confidence born of experience can get them across trying physical ground. Viewers will enjoy the many fine touches put to the script and filming, including intriguing scenes where the kitten appears.

Not bad at all for a 58-year-old movie.  A good application of human drama in a wilderness setting, with animals in several supporting roles–just how I like it.  Granger and Corey both do excellent jobs with their roles, Granger as the Frenchman who knows a good adventure when he sees it and Corey as the Mountie who knows his duty but faces overwhelming odds carrying it out. The Wild North is a good idea generator for nature writers looking to write fiction about humans in a natural setting.  And it’s more invested in the audience and the human condition than many modern flicks.  Kudos to the German shepherd who plays the evil, skulking wolf who brings down Constable Pedley.  Or maybe I should say, “Cujos”.  I’d like to see this one remade by a director/filmmaker who has can grok the happy complexities of Jules’ a-few-notches-higher-than-Everyman character and avoid stripping him down to a post-modern, isolated, conflicted, Dark Knight of the North.

Late afternoon came floating down the creek.
Appalachia’s air chilled gradually,
The valley’s likenesses on deeper pools
Shivering as mayflies burst the watercolor
Skins, and theirs, taking to air, trailing
Papery past selves after them in flight.
Brown trout missiled the sylphs, arched and slapped
The surface, falling back, while I cast toward
A trembling pool, slowly wound my line in,
Looked up. He was wading toward the nearest bank
Where yellow tiger lilies thrust their heads
Above mad tangles of grass trailing the current.
Feeling through many years of wandering round him
The gravity of some intent, I followed close
And broke the silver ripples of his wake.
“Let’s take the path.  We’ll cross again above,”
He said.  I understood just where, and so
We clattered on the gravel with empty creels.
In an abandoned orchard, adolescent
Apples swelled, stone green, not yet much burden
On their boughs. We plucked wild blackberries
Dripping among thorns, filling our mouths
With fruit still warm from standing in the sun.
A stalk of goldenrod, its bud crown forming,
Jutted shoulders and head above the rest.
One of its leaves dipped lower.  There, beneath it,
A butterfly hung folded for the night.
Here was something to show; I called him round—
“Watch this”—and putting out a youngster hand,
Which shook, I slipped a finger through its legs
And so became its leaf.  Its filaments
Shuffled for a hold upon my skin,
And there it dangled, groggy-sensed, and free.
“The thing is holding me.”  I thought of all
The butterflies I had kept caged
Inside that hand, beating wild against
My skin, and I, wounded, sprung my finger
Bars at blows softer than sleeper’s breath
And watched the insects stagger, fear-drunk, to the air.
Then, left looking at my dusted fingers,
I shamed my motives and hungered by that shame.
“Here, hold.”  He reached out his work-etched hand.
The fumbling creature hooked its spurs and clung,
Still, like dew.  The valley’s dusk set deeper.
We set the insect beneath its shelter-leaf.
“Come on,” he said.  “We’ve got to cross the creek.”
We crossed the creek, me feeling the way after
Through flowing shadows, a waterway turned velvet
Dark of forest face and leafy, long
Reflection, and he an image fading off the stream.

The winner of the Spring Poetry Runoff’s Admin Award is Gabriel Aresti Jr. (aka Ángel Chapparo Sainz) for his poem, “Nospringland.” For his prize, he chose to receive Warren Hatch’s Mapping the Bones of the World.

All the poems submitted to the Spring Poetry Runoff form a stunning garden of springtime delights and more than fulfill the celebration’s intent to welcome spring via communal voice.   The fine language of many of the poems attracts my attention sharply.  But I had to choose one.  I chose “Nospringland” for the Admin Award for its heart, its sentiment, and—against all its appearances of being a simple poem in language and form—the intricate way it threads into a complex tapestry—the Basque separatist movement in the poet’s homeland.  “Homeland,” of course, is the matter the conflict holds in question.  Also at the heart of the conflict—preservation of the unique Basque language.  The poet’s choice to write and send an English-language poem reflecting the conflict’s effects upon him personally is itself a complex act, not the least of it being the sharing of heartfelt experience with an English-speaking audience.  Furthermore, given the Basque language’s importance to the decades-long conflict and to the poet’s identity, seemingly obvious lines such as “There is no more poetry for your fight” acquire iceberg-like ironic depth and weight.  As I mentioned in the comments on that poem, the use of punctuation—another seemingly simple pattern of choices—also intrigues me for the effects it exerts on the poem’s tone.

While “Nospringland” ran counter-clockwise to the general tone of the Spring Poetry Runoff, I found the poem’s language a deeply moving and necessary reminder that spring does not appear the same to all eyes.  What I might take for granted as a season to gather in communal festivities can in another invoke, in the changing of light and flowering of warmth and spring colors and in shared language, painful ironies of separation and the continued intrusion of the killing season into a celebrated time of rebirth.  Thanks, Ángel, for sending that poem.

Gabriel Aresti Jr. for his three poems, “Spring-Eh-Field,” “Nospringland,” and “What the Mormons Taught Me About Spring and More”

Travis Burnham, for his poem “The Morning View”

Tyler Chadwick, for his three poems “Te Kore,” “Pacific: Mateu, Matem,” and “Across the Hokianga (Tanka)”

Harlow Clark, for his found poem “Easter Sermons”

Nani Furse, for her two poems “Spring Outing” and “At the Enterprise Reservoir Dam”

greenfrog, for his spring haiku

Warren Hatch, for his poem “Pruning the Blood Plum Tree”

Arthur Hatton, for contributing his song “You’re Better Than That”

Karen Kelsay, for her three poems, “Handmaidens of Spring,” “In the Sweet Alone,” and “Waiting for Spring”

Lance Larsen, for contributing his poem “Rough Translation”

Mary-Celeste Lewis, for her poem “Happy”

Nathan Meidell, for his poem “Softer Joy”

Alan Mitchell, for his poem “Winter Relapse”

Angela Morrison, for her poem “Sonoran Atonement”

Davey Morrison, for his three poems, “February,” “Like Urban Tumbleweed,” and “You Rustle Me”

Jon Ogden, for his poem “Seasonal Ritual”

Polly Parkinson for her poem, “milkweed”

Sandra Skouson for her three poems, “Beginning to Rain: At Monument Valley,” “Girl Without a Mother to Her Big Brother,” and “Naming Spring”

It has been an honor and delight to meet and work with each of you.  Feel free to continue to contribute nature-themed work to WIZ and to visit often.  Also, tremendous thanks to WIZ’s readers, to those who contributed haiku to the haiku chain, to commenters, and to all those who participated in the voting.  Come back anytime and throw another log on the fire.

The 2011 vernal equinox arrives Sunday, March 20th.  We’ll be running next year’s Spring Poetry Runoff Celebration starting on or around Friday, March 18th,  so keep that date in mind and plan to join next year’s versefest, either as contestants or non-contest contributors.  Music and other work poetry-related will also be welcome.  The contest will never be a formal affair, its intent being to provide a place for a communal celebration of spring’s arrival rather than apply the starch of an academic event.   Perhaps one day I’ll have more blog members to argue with over choices of winners, but ’til then it’ll just be lil’ ol’ me.  My hope is one day to be able to offer more prizes and other incentives for participation, as per the Navajo tradition of gifting all participants with thank-you baskets and other goods.  Currently, WIZ is on a (very limited) budget, so we give what we’ve got.  This year the poets were the ones spreading a generous and shining banquet.

Excellent work all, and a wonderful show of public interest and support.  As I believe the condition of human language to exert important influence upon the condition of the Earth, I appreciate the creative, engaging, possibility-producing qualities of the words offered here as good acts of stewardship on each participant’s part.  Very heartening.

But here at WIZ, our nearly six-week flow of sparkling verse has finished.  The last poems have posted, and voting to decide which one wins the Spring Poetry Runoff contest will begin Monday, May 3rd,  and run through Friday, May 7th.  Poets, please come back and vote, and let your friends and family members know about the voting, too.

I’d like the thank–happily, exuberantly–all the poets who contributed to the Spring Poetry Runoff not only for participating beautifully but also for exceeding my expectations for the number of poems submitted.    There really was a spectacular turnout, and I’m in awe of the quality of the poems.  Very well done, folks.

The poll to determine the winner of the Spring Poetry Runoff Popular Poem Award will close Friday. May 7, but winners of both the popular vote and the Admin Award will be announced Monday, May 10th.   So keep an eye on WIZ to see how matters settle out.  Also, clean off your reading glasses.  Twenty-one poems qualified for the voting, any one of which can cause you to linger.   Another matter to consider: Each voter will be able to vote for his or her three favorite poems!

Again, good work, participants.  Stay tuned.

The Rancher Speaks

I was in the sheep business for years.
Sold off my sheep and got into the cattle business and now I have friends.
The cattle men talk to me.
I suppose what finally drove me out was the predators.
The eagles swooping down and taking newborn lambs
and there was nothing we could do about it.
We tried noisemakers and other things.
Finally we heard about Great Pyrenees dogs.
You put 2 in the pen and they protect the sheep.
Well, my cousin and I drove up to Idaho
and the fellow wanted $500 apiece for them.
We each bought two.
We put them in the pens and they started right in doing what they were supposed to.

Bringing the sheep in from the spring field we found 30 head and a dog missing.
We had a higher pasture so my wife and I drove up there.
We found the 30 head and the dog
– limping and thin and shaggy.
It was apparent he had fought off some predators,
and he had worn out his feet.
I put him in the back of the truck,
but he wanted to get out so I tied him in,
and my wife started down to the lower pasture to put out food and water,
and I walked the sheep,
but she stopped.

The Great Pyrenees was hanging over the edge of the bed.
Well, I tied him in tighter,
but he started hanging over the side of the bed and he managed to slip out of his collar.
He wasn’t going to let anything keep him from his job.
When we got down to the lower pasture he barely stopped for a drink,
then went back to his sheep.
He died a few days later.
I was a sheepman, he a shepherd.
The cost to be a good shepherd is everything.

II

The Rancher’s Wife Comes to the Pulpit

Not a shepherd? Perhaps, but let me tell you about his ducks.
He bought a new batch of chicks and ducks, keeps them out in the garage.
He’s really good about keeping them fed and watered and the box cleaned out.
He had them in the same box but the ducks weren’t being nice to the chicks.
He told me one day. “I’m worried about this one. Its feet are cold.”
When he worries I worry.

Going down to the basement I heard water running in the bathroom.
He was washing the duck’s feet.
I thought about the Savior washing Peter’s feet
And how at first Peter didn’t want it.
Sometimes we let our pride get in the way of what the Savior needs.
When Peter understood this he said, “Lord wash all of me,
Hands, head, feet and all.”
But the feet suffice to warm the duck.

________________________________________________________________

Harlow Soderborg Clark grew up in Provo, spending many an hour on the living room carpet listening to a couple of Smothers Brothers albums.  He thinks of their character, “poor, dull, mediocre Fred,” as an alter ego. He also has an altar ego writing a fiction called Sacrament Meeting in the Alzheimers Ward, which includes a character who turns peoples’ talks into poems. Harlow is on hiatus (soon to end, he hopes) from blogging on AMV about Book of Mormon textual changes. He thanks Leslie Norris for ideas about simplicity which allowed him to recognize this poem when he heard it.

*Contest entry*

The midnight rain ended soon,
Leaving clean the outside world
I glanced through a crack to catch a glimpse
Of  Nature’s hallowed view.

Crisp, Clean, Calm the scene lay before my eyes.
Each tree that stood was a glory to itself
Unstained by human hands,
They did not need nor did they want
Help from tainted man.
Their holiness from nature came
To that I could not add.

The air itself was pure, pristine
I could see it had been cleansed.
To be outside would be bring great joy;
To be rapt in that;
To be in Nature’s arms
I feel would clean me too.

The mountains loomed, lords of all,
In fearful, frightening stare.
The driven snow adorned their caps
Unsullied by man’s cares.
To be in their view held me in awe;
The giants of the world.
They had naught to be ashamed
As pure as the snow they bore

I looked upon this scene and wondered:
Could I find something such as this?
How can I, tainted as I am
Embrace this holy view
That I might hold forever,
That I might grasp and make it mine,
That I might have it too,
To be washed clean from filth and dirt,
That I might be pure too?

Then I looked at my child
This Innocence in my arms.
I realized then I had something
That the World refused to find.
Her purity can not be matched
Except by one small Lamb;
And I can hold her innocence,
And love her all I can.

_______________________________________________________________

Travis has always wanted to write poetry and prose but never seriously did anything about it until he took an Introduction to British Literature class and read the Romantic, Victorian and Modern era British poets. Inspired by Wordsworth, Hardy and others, he finally began writing while he continues to finish his Bachelors in History. His current project is an epic poem written specifically for Latter-day Saints, which he hopes to have published within two years. He currently resides in Montana with his wife of 6 years and two children with a third on the way.

*Contest entry*