This multiple-part series is from a longer work-in-progress I’ve begun that recounts my experiences in Recapture Canyon in southeast Utah.  Woven throughout the longer narrative are my ideas about language’s part in evolution, culture, and relationship–including what language reveals about and how it affects the ways we treat with people who live with what I call “brain variables”–conditions of the brain that require those of us with “normal” brains to make an extra efforts to travel beyond ourselves in order to encounter and stand with the people that live with them. As with some of my longer series, this may not be an easy read. It certainly hasn’t been an easy write.  I respectfully request that readers not download this piece.  If you are in need of any language or information in this series, please email me at pk dot wizadmin at gmail dot com to request a copy.

On Thanksgiving Eve, Sky, our family dog, died of conditions related to old age.  If she’d reached her birthday at December’s end, she’d have turned fourteen years old.  Up to four or five weeks before her death, Sky still raced my fourteen-year-old daughter around the yard, loping creakily on arthritic hips.  Running must have hurt but when she threw herself into the competition her blue eyes sparked and her mouth curled back along her muzzle into a wide, tongue-lolling grin.  During those runs she felt herself part of a pack and like a good Siberian husky jockeyed to take lead position. She’d become deaf over the last year; to draw her attention we shouted her name and clapped our hands.  She turned and looked but seemed unsure that she’d really heard anything. I suspect that in the last few weeks she’d started going blind.

Once the cold weather set in she declined rapidly.  She couldn’t keep food down then stopped eating completely. We worried that she might have cancer but the local vet paid us a house call and found no evidence of an ailment of that sort.  What was wrong with her, then?  She’s the equivalent of ninety-four years old, he said, coming to the end of her life.  During the last few weeks, when my daughter took Sky off her cable, the old dog kept up her routine of patrolling the west fence line at a tottering pace.  My daughter followed her patiently, waiting when Sky dropped to the ground to rest then lifting the old dog to her feet so that she could complete a duty she still felt intent on performing.

Sky had never been an ideal family pet. She posed danger to neighbors’ cats and other animals.  When she was a puppy, she attacked our next-door neighbor’s manx kitten. If my neighbor hadn’t struck her with a shovel he had in hand Sky would have killed that kitten, even though she was a pup herself.  Sky and that cat waged war throughout the seven or so years they lived next door to each other.  The cat came into the yard to invade her space and to torment her.  Twice, Sky caught him in the yard when she was running loose, nearly killing him a second time and then a third.  One day I heard commotion and stepped outside to find she’d treed the cat, who was panting heavily and looked to be going into shock. His wild-eyed, gape-mouthed expression suggested that she might have done him harm but he lived to taunt her another day.  She did catch and execute a feral cat that had unwisely taken up residence in our yard.  A little over a year ago, after we’d left Utah Valley for the rural life in southeast Utah, I returned from a trip to discover that she’d hurt herself, perhaps while trying to jump on top of her outdoor shelter.  She could barely walk so I told the kids to leave her off her cable.  She liked this arrangement and took to the shade of a juniper tree growing in our backyard.  I didn’t think she could get very far and let my attention lapse.  Two hours later I discovered her a block up the street, exiting a neighbor’s orchard with a freshly killed black cat clamped in her mouth. I’m not a big fan of cats, but Sky’s drive to kill them appalled and repulsed me. Our own two cats lived in the yard knowing she’d put an end to them if ever she caught them.

Still, she kept watch over the house and policed our acre-and-a-half on the edge of the desert, letting us know when something was amiss.  In the spring, we moved her house near the garden to deter rabbits.  But we could never trust her to remain in the yard or not kill other creatures.  In our agricultural neighborhood, where chickens, cats, lambs and goat kids abound, this meant that she had to stay on her cable unless one of us was outside with her to keep an eye on her every minute.

When we saw the end coming, we released her from the cable–this time, for good, because she was no longer a threat. I threw a heavy, pink baby afghan over the old dog.  We brought her inside the garage to keep watch over her.  For the next two days, I looked in on her as often as I could.  Her breathing became increasingly rough, wheezing, and irregular. Each of us took turns checking on her, but she still managed to slip away between spot-checks.  We intended to be with her at the very end, but on one of my checks I discovered that she’d died. I alerted my husband.  He hurried into the basement to examine her and declared that yes, she’d gone.  My son and I wrapped her in a sheet. He lifted her–the old dog had weighed over seventy pounds months earlier but much of that that evaporated over the course of her dying–and moved her onto a plywood board outdoors.  Then he and I set to work cleaning up the basement where she’d died.  It was a solemn duty.  The atmosphere of the house altered at her departure. I don’t know quite how to put it, but immediately upon our discovery of her death some kind of space opened.  It was as if part of our identity as a family had sheared off. At one point, my husband sat down beside me.  “There is one fewer of us,” he said.  “Can you feel that?” “Yes. Yes I can,” I said. “It’s surprising.”

The next day was Thanksgiving, but none of us felt like celebrating. Before everyone else awoke I headed for Crossfire Canyon (Recapture), my mind a knot containing several strings of snarled thought.  Sky’s decline and death was only the most recently added strand. Since July, my husband Mark had been waging a battle against mental illness that was, at least in part, the result of his highly expressive personality’s reaction to various medications he’d been prescribed since his hemorrhagic stroke in 2010.  The significant brain injuries he suffered from the big stroke itself and subsequent brain surgery and his wild reactions to medications converged, each probably contributing to his haywire behavior. The stroke has lingering effects, but increasingly, I think his introduction to common medications is the prime trigger for his really precipitous personality changes. Before his first, daily-basis dance with prescription meds, he was pretty much himself as I have known him over two decades. Since the addition of several chemical compounds to his system, it has become increasingly evident that he has developed some flavor of rapid-cycling, bi-polar or bi-polar-like disposition, .

An MRI for the 2010 stroke revealed that he had an underlying, probably genetic mutation called cerebral cavernous malformations. CCMs are malformed, often thin-walled blood vessels in the brain that are given to rupturing or seeping.  Many folks who have CCMs have one, a couple–maybe half a dozen present in their brains.  Mark has somewhere between one and two hundred. Not only had they laid him bare to the impossible-to-miss event but also they had previously caused twenty or more smaller, “asymptomatic” strokes. Last July, his mental disarray reached “King Lear” proportions. On the one-year anniversary of the 2010 stroke, I found myself parking the car along a less populated street while my husband shouted at me and out the car window, cursing and challenging God.  His speech so closely resembled the Act III, Scene II storm-whipped ravings of the Shakespearian king that I began orienting myself by that paradigm:

Lear.  Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!

Yes–it was that bad. Moments before I pulled the car to a stop, as he had been driving at me with his words, listing all the ways I had thwarted his plans over the years, he asked if I was listening.  “Yes,” I said, quietly.  “You think I’ve betrayed you.”  “You all have!” he thundered, meaning not only me but also the kids and perhaps scores of other shadowy folk inhabiting the court of his high-minded irrationality.  How sharper than a serpent’s tooth.

Following this paroxysm, he became withdrawn, though highly agitated.  He couldn’t sleep. The next day, as I sat at my computer working, he rose from a failed nap and approached me, the look in his eyes disturbing enough to prompt me to prepare for another outburst.  But he didn’t rant.  “Do you think I’m … unintelligent?” he asked.  His tone was sharp and very cold. “I think you’re brilliant,” I said, keeping it simple. It was the truth. His eyes reflected nothing but a glitter of disdainful doubt.  “Did you ever even like me?” he asked.  “I love you,” I said. “I always have.” He didn’t respond except to turn away and head down into the basement to his “man cave”.

I sat staring at the computer screen, shocked and frightened. Obviously, something had gone very wrong and it wasn’t getting better. Before these two episodes, in the wake of his first prescription and then his stroke which brought another round of prescriptions, he’d experienced a few personality shifts that were short-lived, in part because I called attention to them and he, trusting me, experimented on himself to figure out which medications were the culprits. Once he had isolated the offending drug, he quit it and shortly returned to equilibrium. But this was different. This time, I was the focus of his paranoia.  This meant that my ability to help him had weakened. Not having any close-in experience with the psychological condition that’s perhaps unwisely labeled mental illness, I had no idea what had toppled him from his throne of rationality except that perhaps he was having a late-blooming adverse reaction to one or more of the medications he’d been prescribed since the 2010 stroke.  This was not my husband who had just asked such starkly accusatory questions–it was someone as far opposite of my husband as I’d known him during twenty-one years of marriage as R. L. Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde was of Dr. Jekyll. I didn’t know what to do to help this man.

I sat mentally examining his words, turning them over and over, considering what they might signify.  Behind me on my bookshelf sat my personal journals, which, up to about eight years ago, I kept faithfully. Contained therein is a record of our marriage from its beginning, and, I thought, language that might have the potency to reach him–if any words could. I decided to go after him.  To prepare for what I knew would be a long ordeal, I took a deep drink of water, used the bathroom, and changed my nineteen-year-old, special needs daughter’s diaper. I told my son, “Something’s wrong with Dad.  I’m going down to talk to him.  I want you to stay alert. If I tell you to call 911, I want you to do it immediately. Don’t pay attention to what he says–listen to me.” I stood at the head of the stairs to the basement, hesitant. “I’ve never faced a dragon like this,” I said to my son. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.” Then I went down the stairs, mentally loosening up any imaginings I had about what could happen, limbering my own mental state.

To read part two, go here.

(Edited 1/13/2012 at noon to correct spelling, etc. errors and cut down the intro.)

(Photo found and added 1/13/2012 at 12:25.)

Strange vibrations, east of coal country.
Black sky, dusted by filmy cirro-nebula.

Rumbling on a trestle, high above the Green,
train whistles legend’s high, lonesome sound.

Highest water in a decade, but river’s
calmed tonight, lapping in a little cove.

Noses streaked with sunblock, bodies
with Skin-so-Soft, hair silted with residue

of a day on the water, we’re children
on the verge of adolescence, adults on the verge

of longing. Our black-white-&-yellow tent
is pitched near the night light of the women’s room.

Beneath the cottonwood, Coke machine’s a shining totem
—Liquid logos, little pockets of thirst, pulsing under glass.

Sipping Squirt in the dark, I see her yellow
hair—the world’s last child entering nubility.

She turns briefly; we exchange greetings. Neck
straight, eyes resolute, she moves into the night.

Next evening, safe at home, convex
glass of TV screen brings news

of two old men who earlier that day
had accidentally turned their motorboat downstream.

Confused by rapids in a canyon
they call Cataract, their craft capsized.

Past the confluence of the Colorado with the Green, they died.

_______________________________________________________________

To read more of Paul’s verse, go here, here, and here.

To read the National Park Service incident report of this accident, go here.

It’s been a privilege and delight for Wilderness Interface Zone to host a spectacular flourish of spring poetry during this year’s Spring Poetry Runoff.  In the kick-off post, I called for a show of green language, of creative élan and prospect-opening words.  I asked for poetry that contained the recombinant stuff of fertile, world-making expression that gets into others’ consciousness and gives rise to new thoughts or that perhaps resurrects a memory.  This year’s Spring Poetry Runoff Contest entries did all that and more.  Among the poets’ overall accomplishments is the intertwining of song and dance that erupted on WIZ in response to the call for spring verse—a sight that not only was worth seeing but also that was my deep pleasure to join.  It was a good crowd to work with and reminds me of a recent experience watching violet-green swallows mixing it up over beaver ponds. Not only do the birds snatch up insects, each bird for itself, but obviously, they’re flying together and enjoying it, tumbling above and below each other, every bird forming its flight off its comrades’, wheeling, barrel rolling, one bird drawing up short of collision to let another flyer pass under then swooping out of its hover into a long, twinkling glide that weaves right back into a living fabric of free-flight.

I found choosing a winner agonizing.  I feel I can’t award enough people enough prizes.  Sean Watson’s cheering section—vast as the sea and, apparently, nearly as relentless—delivered his poem “Provo” to Winner’s Circle for the Most Popular Poem Award.  Well done, Sean—you played the game with a strong hand.  Congratulations!

Now for the Admin Award.  The high level of skill and pastoral prowess that many of the poems displayed impressed me deeply and will affect me for a long time to come.  There were so many head-turners that I have cognitive whiplash.  But I did choose, and here’s the outcome:

1st Place: A tie between Judith Curtis for “Conversion” and Jonathon Penny for “Sprung Rhythm (A Pagan Hymn).”

Honorable Mention: David Passey, for his poem “March Morning, New York City.”

These are more prizes than I counted on awarding, but I couldn’t decide whether I liked Judith’s “Conversion” better or Jonathon’s “Sprung Rhythm (A Pagan Hymn),” so I didn’t decide.  And David’s poem wouldn’t let go of me.  So I stretched as far as I could.

Judith’s “Conversion” accurately and effectually recalls the experience many of us have had (including me) of “converting” to a place—taking root in a new home—as well as portrays compellingly that piquant condition of mind that comprises conversion, when head and heart release their hold on the expected and familiar and open to the unimagined, reconfiguring, and seemingly repugnant unknown.  I find her image of surrender at the end of the poem especially moving, invoking, as it does, classical-brand surrender of and to love.  Love’s surrender is passionate business, and Judith does a stunning job of recreating in words the depths of that passion.  Congratulations, Judith, and thanks for bringing us this poem.

I liked both of Jonathon’s poems, “Thorns and Thistles and Briars (An Easter Poem)” and “Sprung Rhythm (A Pagan Hymn)” very much.  I chose “Sprung Rhythm” to share 1st Place with Judith’s poem because every time I read “Sprung Rhythm,” I find it great fun.  Jonathon mixes the formalistic control of the sonnet delightfully with the occasional letting-down-of-the-schematic hair to give the reading mind a wild and satisfying ride.  The poem is as tightly packed with images and energies of spring as a Jack-in-theBox is locked down inside its container on its compressed coils.  At the poem’s end, instead of Jack’s springing out in startling fashion, we get the release of a softened and lyrical couplet that ties the poem off neatly.  “Sprung Rhythm’s” musical composition is especially intriguing.  All lines in each quatrain rhyme or near-rhyme, with all three quatrains carrying the long “i” sound through ‘til the couplet, when the poet introduces a new rhyme scheme, almost sigh-like in effect.  Very classical, requiring of skill and an ear tuned to the musical possibilities of the English language.  Impressive, Jonathon—I look forward to seeing where you go from here.

David Passey’s “March Morning, New York City” is a finely tuned, imagistic poem displaying a different side of the city—charming, elegant, marked with gems of natural beauty, where turns of light really are just as native as they are in the open vistas of the West.  That’s one of the aspects of this poem that I really like: It opens my mind, allowing me to place rites of spring familiar to me from where I live in rural Utah—“sparrows / flickering and dancing so quick”—within the unfamiliar cityscape of New York City.  The poem’s music is quite good, too: “… a scaffolding of glad candles,” “Today a bustling bright parade.”  The poem’s last stanza turns my mind a different direction every time I read it.  Thanks so much, David, for adding “March Morning, New York City” to the Spring Poetry Runoff.

Sean, Judith, and Jonathon will each receive her or his choice of Mark Bennion’s Psalm and Selah: A Poetic Journey Through the Book of Mormon (Bentley Enterprises 2009) or Kimberly Johnson’s A Metaphorical God (Persea, 2008) or Philip White’s The Clearing (Texas Tech University Press 2007).  David will receive a $10 Amazon gift certificate.

Many other poems in the Runoff deserve high praise and acknowledgement.  I hope in the future to be able to offer a collection of Runoff poems to all participants.  Thanks so much, everyone—readers and writers, both.  This was an especially enjoyable and inspiring Spring Runoff, and I’m deeply grateful for everyone’s participation.  Good fun, all, and such beautiful language all around.  What a great vernal bash.

Publications

I’ve received publication announcements for two of Wilderness Interface Zone’s frequent contributors.

First, Karen Kelsay’s new book of poetry, Dove on a Church Bench, was released in April.  You can find it on Amazon by clicking here.  Congratulations, Karen, and best wishes for success with your book of verse.

Here’s a sample poem from Dove on a Church Bench:

Violet

by Karen Kelsay

Husband, I want to ripen into
a woman like your mother,
one who wiggles an arm
into the nook of a son’s elbow,
feet twisting obscure angles
across frosty streets, refusing a cane.
Whose only hope from tipping
over in the lane with a dizzy spell,
is not a bottle of pills, but a bag
of boiled sweets.
A stiff-upper-lip kind of lady,
who jeers at heart attacks
and broken hips, and raises hell
when trapped in a ward with old people.
One who still makes tea each
morning over the burner, even though
she catches her sleeves on fire.
A woman with no riches, but a few
baubles of costume jewelry
and collection of miniature brass
animals, given her one Mother’s Day,
that glint in the sun like a row
of diamonds.

Second, Steven L. Peck’s novel The Scholar of Moab has been accepted for publication at Torrey House Press.  Torrey House Press’ website describes The Scholar of Moab as “a dark-comedy perambulating murder, affairs, and cowboy mysteries in the shadow of the La Sal Mountains.”  I get sand in my teeth just reading the description.  Scholar of Moab’s tentative release date is October 2011.  To see more about Steve’s novel and about Torrey House Press, click here (scroll down).  Look for an excerpt from Scholar of Moab to appear at WIZ in the near future.

Creative projects

Sean Watson produced a mini-film titled Birth based on his poem “Provo” published as an entry in this year’s 2011 Spring Poetry Runoff Contest here at WIZ.  Sean describes the film as  “…piece designed to be written by the viewer’s experiences.”  To see Sean’s film Birth, click here.

Contests and publishing opportunities

Torrey House Press extended its deadline for its creative nonfiction contest from May 31 to September 30.  For this contest, Torrey House is looking for writers “with a passion for the environment, issues, people, history, and cultures of the Colorado Plateau and the West.”  Explore their site for more information on the creative nonfiction contest as well as for other contests and publishing opportunities they offer by clicking here.

And … I received a call for submission from Moab Poets and Writers soliciting work for their first annual literary journal Desert Voices, “a literary voice for our desert home and those who feel a connection to it.”  This new journal seeks original writing on “any subject matter, all genres, poetry and prose,” though my experience with this group suggests they’re especially interested in work about the Colorado Plateau.  Desert Voices seeks short pieces, poems not exceeding 40 lines and prose pieces up to 1200 words.  For more information, visit their website here. Deadline: July 11.

Few things would thrill me more than to learn that Wilderness Interface Zone readers and writers found homes for their writing at either of these places.

Also, any contributor or follower of WIZ having announcements they’d like aired here, please send your blurb to pk.wizadmin@gmail.com.

Michael, think of an apple, how its taste
saturates all memories of first fruit.
Probably before you grasped the word, “apple,”
a pome caught hold of you, flavor and firm body
biting through your thin skin.
Don’t you still recall “apple” by charms
more defined, more seasoned,
more round ripe than the word?
Agitation by a few grains from another blossom,
bulb of pale flower swollen in streams of light,
it bobs for weeks in the weather, distilling.
It sweetens in cool cellars of the moon.
It shapes into all that you remember:
Taste verging on fragrance; crisp, wooden meat;
and color like you like to imagine a heart has—
life-red and glistening, wet.
Your hand is no stranger to apple-hearts.
Somehow that clarifies what your mind knows,
apple not just as word but as living full savor.

Michael, don’t carry in pocket the word only;
keep the whole fruit ever at hand.
Nor should you rely upon the name,
an apple doesn’t answer to its name.
Nor do we, but to the quick of the season,
immanent, juicy, red-freckled, standing our senses
on edge, now.  Forget the word, “apple.”
From such vagaries people walk away hungry.
With out-held words and ripe, swaying language,
make apples to fill the brain’s deep belly, having first
filled your own hand, cupped your own palm.

Recently, my husband and I were in the City Market in Moab buying supplies for my special needs daughter’s formula.  For fun, we sifted through the motorcycle skullcap rack, looking for a skullcap—with skulls—that my husband might like to wear in addition to the one I bought him following his recent brain surgery.  That one is a black tieback cap ornamented with grey and white skulls clenching their crossbones in their teeth—defiant pirate regalia.  It goes well with his salt and pepper beard.  I glanced toward my next destination—the laundry soap aisle—and noticed a man there, early-to-mid sixties, prowling restlessly up and down in front of the soap.  He glanced at me briefly then returned to studying the shelves.  I thought I detected more than a little bit of address in his glance, and indeed, when I entered the aisle, he whirled around and accosted me.

“Excuse me, Madame,” he said.  He had a French accent: “Madame” was meh-DAM.  “I wish to buy soap for my laundry.  But I do not know what to do.  All these say they are ‘essential,’” he said, indicating an Arm and Hammer container bearing the word Essentials, “but I cannot tell if they are or not.”

I had launched into the aisle looking for a specific product.  As a practice, I mentally dodge the hundreds of other brightly colored and heavily worded bottles and boxes groping immodestly for my attention.  This man’s question breached my fortified serenity. The distracting and mendacious language on the labels of every one of those bottles roared to full volume. I saw through his eyes the visually and linguistically confusing clamor in its entirety, added to by a din of perfumes.  For my own peace of mind, I had learned to ignore the hyperventilating American English that advertising sharps and whomever it is that names motor vehicles has inflicted upon us all.  But the man’s question punched through all defenses, and I stood, staring at the embarrassing columns of forced meaninglessness—a parade of cartoonish nihilism.

One Gain detergent advertised itself as “Original fresh,” another as “Joyful Expressions” scented “Apple Mango Tango.”  Surf, naturally, harvested from the sea for its image: “Sparkling Ocean.”  Xtra had one scented version dubbed “Tropical Passion,” and another product in its “ScentSations” line advertised itself as smelling of “Spring Sunshine.”   The Arm and Hammer product in question not only had tagged itself “Essentials,” but also had aligned itself with natural forces: “Harnessing the Power of Nature.”  Ultra Purex had an especially complex label, promoting its “Natural Elements,” describing itself as “Naturally Sourced,” and claiming to be scented “linen and lilies.”  Tide Total Care had branded itself with the trademarked, shape-shifting phrase, “renewing rain.” Quite the potpourri of natural imagery, everything in the world but actual, open-to-the-eye information that might help the gentleman choose the right product for his needs.

Sadness overcame me.  Was the Arm and Hammer detergent—or any of the soaps asserting necessity—literally “essential”?

I shook my head, ashamed.  “No,” I said.  “They are not.”

“Which one do I buy then?” he asked.  “I want only a little, something cheap.”

What a dilemma.  Responsibility for improving or confirming the opinion that the entire French nation (or Quebec—Je me souviens) holds of Americans dropped heavily on my shoulders. I scanned up and down the shelves, mind spinning at the impossibility of deciding based solely on label descriptions and price.  I was about to shrug apologetically and inform the gentleman he was on his own in the suds jungle when Sun Products Corporation came to my rescue.  Their 50-ounce bottle of All detergent, #1 dermatologist recommended, with its comparatively simple label design, happened to be on sale for a bargain $2.99.  All Free and Clear is the default laundry soap in our household.  I snatched a bottle off the shelf.

“This is what I use,” I said, holding it out to him hopefully.  “It has no perfumes or dyes, and it’s on sale—it’s cheap,” I said.

He inspected the bottle closely.  “You use this to pour into the laundry?” he said, indicating the plastic cap.

“Yes,” I said and started reading the instructions.

“I think I can understand those,” he said, taking the bottle from my hand.  “Thank you.”

He turned on his heel and fled the aisle, swinging the bottle as he walked.  Palpable waves of impatience and—was that disgust?—rolled off his person.  If it was disgust, no doubt it was magnified when he reached the checkout counter and discovered the $2.99 sale price applied only to those carrying a City Market Value Card.

Wish I’d remembered that …

To read part three, click here.

The feather was a natural object, shed by a canyon resident.  My second found object was in a way the feather’s counterpoint: a container of commercially produced bottled water, over three-quarters full, dropped along a steep part of the illegal ATV trail that has caused such a ruckus in these parts.

I knew right off that the bottle wasn’t mere litter.  People rarely toss away water that they bring into the desert.  Looking at the ground, I saw tracks suggesting a story.  Travelers on horseback had come down the trail, which is very steep, narrow, and somewhat rough along this section, especially for folks astride beasts of burden somewhat averse to going downhill.  Only hoof prints surrounded the bottle—there were no boot prints at all except mine.  I think that one of the horseback riders dropped the water accidentally.  She or he isn’t to blame for not retrieving it since there’s barely room for horses walking single file, let alone space for a person to dismount onto the sharply pitched and loose-rocked downhill grade.  Doing such a thing would have risked an accident, and all just to retrieve a cheap water bottle.  It was my job as the next person who came along to escort the bottle from the canyon, and I was happy to do so.

Walking along, I began idly examining the container, which I supposed to be far less interesting than the turkey feather.  But as I read the label, I felt increasingly uneasy.  The bottled water is a Nestle Company product.  We needn’t go into what if any socio-environmental troubles might trickle down from purchasing a Nestle Company product, especially one in a plastic bottle—disposable plastic bottles now being health and environmental no-nos.  What interested me was the stick-on label’s wordage.  The registered trademarked name of this product is “Pure Life”—a high-minded cognomen indeed, sparkling with ambiguity.  Such a name attempts to stake brash claims on meaning, especially for water sourced from the public water supply in Denver, Colorado.  The lowly tap water selected from this common source is elevated to the status of “purified,” which the label, as required by law, explains is done “using reverse osmosis or distillation.”  The process adds calcium chloride, sodium bicarbonate, and magnesium sulfate, no doubt essential components of purity’s vestal flavor.

The words “Pure Life” scroll across a banner surrounded by a halo of blue and white rays.  Down at the banner’s right-hand corner stand three human figures, dwarfed by the banner and bearing no distinguishing features except differing colors and sizes.  The largest figure—colored green, an illness and money color—appears to be male, if we apply the traditional associations (larger than the other two and wearing, we suppose, trousers).  Immediately behind Green Man is a smaller homunculus, as yellow as sunshine—possibly a child.  Behind the child is a blue figure wearing, apparently, a dress.  A woman?  If so, why so blue?  Might this featureless trio represent a family?  The images are, of course, wide open to interpretation.  The important detail of this portrait of the nuclear family of man is that all three figures stand with arms spread wide as though expressing joy at the sight of the radiant banner or as if to embrace a Holy Grail that they’ve searched for and at long last have found—“Pure Life”.  Indeed, if you give the water bottle a quarter turn to the left from one of the “Pure Life” banners, your eyes, if they’re sharp, will fall upon this trademarked imperative: “Embrace the Pure Life.”

I knew that picking up the bottle itself before it became unsightly and perhaps dangerous detritus was the right thing to do.   Once I awoke to consciousness of the images and language stamped on the label, I felt especially happy to remove it from Crossfire.  The canyon is already cluttered with rhetoric as vying parties marshal words for control of its landscape.  Bits of advertising copy caught on prickly pear spines benefit neither the discussion nor the canyon’s ecosystem—although I can imagine the label slogan “Embrace the Pure Life” dung-glued into a pack rat midden, melting into the fond embrace of ureic acid, water, bacteria, and enthusiastic insects always up for a little canoodling.

To read part two, go here.

The Park Service has erected
A pavilion on the rim.
Beware, it says.
Quicksand.  Flash floods.
How to Resuscitate Lightning Strike Victims
One warning tells.
It pretends helpful information,
But it is another white skull.

On a sideboard, the complete caveat—
A man pierced all through with sticks.
We are loath to look on it, but do:
It alone rates five full skulls.

Thirty-five-year-old male, it says.
Not enough water.
Disoriented.  Delirious.
Collapsed.  Convulsions.
Core body temperature one-hundred-and-eight degrees
In an air-conditioned ambulance.
Expected to recover, but—
Suffered liver and brain damage.

I don’t understand.
Did he recover, or didn’t he?
Ah—that is not the point of the skulls.

In the old Tarzan movies
The skulls, the shrunken heads,
The bad juju, B’wana,
They mean, this could happen.
To you.
We hope.
The tribe that inhabits these parts—
The fierce Park Service—
They maintain all hearts of darkness
Beating in these wilderness.
No doubt they know already
We are here.  B’wana,
They have much bad juju.

Yes.  I can see that,
And I wonder what I have brought with me
To ward off potent spells flung at the feet
In the first few steps of a journey.

I breathe:
Flash Flood.  Come.
We have met many times and parted
Always on good terms.
I would like to see you again,
Old friend, Flash Flood.

Quicksand.  Come.
We are no strangers.
You caught me by my ankles,
Then retracted your claws;
I remember
Your tongue’s rasp.
Perhaps we shall wrestle again,
Mud panther,
Quicksand.

Lightning—
You I am not so sure about.
When your gray matter thunders
And your synapses
Fire between heaven and earth,
Let me not be found in those corridors.
Fall elsewhere, flash elsewhere, Lightning,
And I will tell all
Of blue quarrels bolting cloud to cloud,
Of electrokenetic harpoons
Havocking lone junipers.

Thus I shoulder my pack
And pass by all skulls,
Speaking soft words
Of relation.

________________________________________________________________

*”Gramarye” is the old spelling for “grammar,” meaning a primer.  But it is also an old word for “magic.”

Originally published in Irreantum (Summer 2003): 20-21.

Traditionally, haiku express insight into the movement of a season across the face of a landscape.  But since the form is of a meditative mind, its nature can be stretched to explore particulars of a variety of conditions.  In a recent conversation with greenfrog, topics of awareness and dishwashing flowed together.  The prospect of dishwashing haiku arose.  Well … and why not?

So for WIZ’s next winter while-away open invitation, the name is dishwashing (which I happen to find especially pleasant in wintertime); the game is haiku.

To begin:

Warm tap water, cool
Winter light pouring in streak
Plates in kitchen sync.

Let the One-liners begin.

As we arced along a curve, the vehicle’s lights splashed against something moving on the road.  A small cottontail had emerged from cover, probably looking for something to eat where the unusually heavy and long-lingering snow had melted back from the asphalt’s edges.  Seeing and hearing the truck, the rabbit bolted unsteadily toward us.  I hit the brakes.  “A bunny,” I said.  As our vehicle slowed to a stop, we saw another flash in the headlights, high up in the air to our right.  A great horned owl dropped out of the darkness into the swath of our lights, swinging its talons toward the rabbit, working its wings to correct its trajectory.  “Whoa!” we said, surprised by the sudden drama. The cottontail feinted right, seemingly away from the owl but still heading toward the car.  The owl hesitated mid-air, quite possibly blinded in our headlights, then tumbled to the ground a good two feet off its away-scampering target.  For a moment, the bird sat the roadside, staring after the rabbit.  It looked like it considered giving chase but, glancing at us, seemed to decide the risk wasn’t worth it. The opportunity had passed.  With another flash of wings it lifted away, back into darkness above the highbeams.

I don’t remember who said it, but one of us said, “Wow, that was something.”  I asked, “Is the bunny under our car?”  It would be a grief if the rabbit, having escaped the owl, suffered death beneath our tires.  My husband grabbed a Maglite and slid out to look.  “No bunnies under the car,” he said, getting back in, and we drove the very short distance home.  “A bunny lived a little longer and an owl possibly went hungry because we were there,” I said to my husband.

Probably many of us have had this experience—happening to be somewhere then seeing our being there affect some outcome, perhaps powerfully.  It actually occurs more than we might realize.  Sometimes just choosing to walk out your door is enough to engage you in a phenomenon; sometimes your involvement in an incident occurs only in witnessing it, which is no small thing, since, one way or another, witnessing an event inevitably changes it.

Example: One day I was walking home from BYU when a commotion in a hedgerow caught my attention.  I heard small birds’ panicked shrieking, then a kestrel flew out of the hedge clutching a sparrow in its talons.  The image of the silhouette of that sparrow rising toward its end, its head hung, its beak parted, has stayed with me for years. While I think that drama was well on its way before I arrived, my being there to witness it became part of the event and it entered my life.  My telling of it now expands its occurrence.

Here’s an example of my more direct yet unintentional involvement in a similar experience.  After we moved to SE Utah, one morning I walked out my front door in a routine act of departure.  A flock of juncos rummaging the yard for seeds took to flight at the sight of me.  Perhaps because they’d invested attention in me and/or were involved in reading each other’s movements, they didn’t see the mid-sized hawk arrowing toward them till too late.  The hawk struck one bird in flight, knocked it senseless, then snatched it up as it floundered against the ground.  It all happened too fast for me to even be able to identify what kind of hawk had benefited from my unwitting assistance.  Lesson (still being ) learned.  I am grateful that I was aware enough to see what happened; many times, I’m not.

Back in the bad old days when I lived along the Wasatch Front, I went on my usual morning walk through town on a route that took me past an elementary school.  As I started up the hill, ahead of me on the opposite side of the street I saw a boy of about eight or nine years old chucking fair-sized rocks at a girl following him that I’d guess was kindergarten age or maybe first grade.  As I processed what was going on, the boy pegged her a good one on the leg.  The girl’s face contorted.  She sat down on the sidewalk, grabbed her leg, and cried.  The boy picked up another rock.  “Hey!” I yelled from half a block away. “Stop it!”  The boy turned, saw me, dropped the rock.  Unsure of what to do or what I was going to do, he stood, fidgeting, ‘til I walked past.  After I’d proceeded up the road a bit, I turned to see what course of action he’d chosen.  He’d crossed the road, leaving the girl sitting in a sulk on the sidewalk where he’d stoned her.  I don’t enjoy giving orders, but the moment seemed to require it.  “Go back and help her cross the street,” I said.  Obediently, the boy turned back, helped the girl up, led her to the corner and across the usually-busy-but-then-empty road.

The obvious effects of my “happen stance”—of my happening to be there at that moment and becoming involved—was that the boy stopped throwing rocks at the girl for the time being and then saw to her safety as he helped her cross the road and led her to the school.  The less obvious effects?  Who can say.  But they include whatever impact the incident had upon me, that changed me, and that now carries forward into whatever meaning the telling of this story gives rise to.

It really is a beautiful, terrible, endless, destructive/creative, full-bodied participatory world, where events echo and continue to unfold moment-to-moment.  Where they arise in language, such as in the telling of these stories, they likewise “happen,” engaging readers in the continuity of events by of their choice to drop by WIZ today.  I’ve said this before, but human language is every bit as active as any other action and not merely passive expression or the diluted by-product of an action.  It is.  It does.

Many is the time I’ve gone out into nature, become involved, and surprise and confusion stripping me of favorite clothing of suppositions, found myself wondering, “What just happened?”  I might not have achieved much during the experience itself, but as I considered my actions afterward, I took another happen stance—that of self-appraisal, of witnessing the movements of my own body and mind across the landscape of an event and then choosing differently.  Such after-the-fact choices might only affect the outcome of the enlivening event in how they change me.

The incident of the cottontail and the owl has carried forward in this blog post—given rise to it, in fact.

Is life just too much, or what?

Anyway, it’s always more than we know.