The larks trilled their cries that
Nested in my ears in birdsong.

I saw the thaw of winter had begun.

Soon spring would rush in on her
Pastel heels bringing forth blooms.

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To read Linda’s bio and enjoy more of her verse on WIZ go here, here, and here.

the hand of winter stretched out
his grey gloves and poured snow
out of his pitcher it fell upon the
world in cold numbing waves it
washed away all the colors of fall —

it beat back my favorite lilies into
the hand of white dust like people
are prone to beat one another into
the dust for a sense of self worth. I
don’t understand why winter thinks

he needs to be such a bully he beats
his cold fiercely upon the land blasts
his wailing banshee winds upon the
zephyr and rips remaining leaf missives
from trees with such force they yelp.

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To read more of Linda’s verse on WIZ, go here and here.

I watched as the white of snow
starched the earth clean of sins —

like the Savior washed me white
by his blood.  It seemed a stark

contrast of his shedding white for
red and the earth shedding scarlet

for white, but I think He favors the
irony just as much as we do. I stood

in the bone numbing cold of winter,
letting its reflection embrace me tight.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

To read Linda’s bio and more of her poetry on WIZ go here.

In the tar-like black sky
structures float like ghosts
through the illumination from bulbs
hovering like flying saucers over
the road. No heavenly
luminaries accompany me on this lonely journey.
Only those cones of light brighten the route ahead.
Nevertheless, I must persist.
I am a modern Hebrew
fleeing the Egypt of the office, escaping to
the Promised Land of the field. There,
as I stand on nude ground,
a lunar face and stellar eyes will look
upon me from the depths of the universe
and remind me of the Creator of this grandeur.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ashley Suzanne Musick was born in Fountain Valley, California, on February 26th, 1989, and raised and homeschooled in Anaheim.  In 2010, she moved to southwest Kern County, where she lives and works on a farm and writes in her spare time.  You can read more of her verse on WIZ here.

For late November, Crossfire Creek was running high.  Usually, a few flash floods in October knock things around a bit, then bone-dry air siphons the water off into the sky, leaving the creek bed bare except where beavers have gardened two springs to create a year-round water park half a mile long.  As I stood on the bank above a pond contained behind one of the lower dams, I turned to see a young couple I didn’t know walking toward me down the trail, my neighbor’s Welsh corgi, “Goliath,” loping ahead.  November weather in the Four Corners region sometimes runs to the mild side.  The couple wore short-sleeved shirts and were holding hands as they strolled.  Seeing the dog, I supposed the pair to be relatives of my neighbors whose house lay east of mine across a city block’s worth of pasture.  I greeted them and Goliath.

Upon reflection, I’m tickled at how the couple’s relationship to my neighbors was glaringly obvious to me, not because of any physical resemblance they bore to my neighbors but all because of that small detail of Goliath’s presence.  Had he not been there, I’d have supposed nothing about the couple–certainly not their relationship to my neighbors. Stocky but diminutive Goliath is not a wanderer; I’d never seen him in the canyon before that moment.  His accompanying the couple was probably a considered choice on his part. After all, the surrounding desert is predator-dense.  Plucky as he is, on his own he’d be no match for the coyotes, eagles, bobcats, and the occasional cougar that patrol the desert looking for their next feed.  He knows that. He stays pretty close to home performing his duty of keeping my neighbors’ twenty acres in order in company with a mixed breed named Buddy my neighbors acquired two years ago.  Buddy came with a sister, Precious, but Precious developed a bad habit of chasing another neighbor’s horses.  One day, she took a lethal kick to the head, and that was that.

Seeing Goliath triggered pangs of sadness and envy, not just about Sky’s death. The apparent normalcy and leisure of the scene contrasted with my own life: a young couple, at their ease, loose in the canyon, holding hands as they strolled along, escorted enthusiastically by a dutiful dog.  Because of Sky’s chase-and-kill instinct, I couldn’t bring her into the canyon.  I missed the companionship of a dog in my wanderings.  A dog reveals the landscape in ways you wouldn’t see it were the dog not highlighting with its lively athleticism the surrounding contours. And I hadn’t felt the level of comfort in my married life that I imagined this young couple enjoyed since just before my special needs daughter was born nearly two decades ago.

The couple introduced themselves by way of announcing their relationship to my neighbor–of which fact I was already aware.  I told them I knew Goliath and where he lived.  “What did you say his name is?” the man asked.  “Goliath,” I said.  “I would have never guessed,” he said, looking at the squat, compact dog.

The topic being dogs, I told them my own had died just the night before.  The woman murmured in sympathy.  “How long had you had her?”

“Almost fourteen years,” I said.

“Oh, that’s almost as long as a child,” the woman said, her voice soft.

“It is. In fact, I have a fourteen-year-old daughter,” I said, holding back on expressing my anxieties about her. Too complicated a story.  But I appreciated these strangers’ interest in my grief.

We spoke a few more words between us then I went on my way, heading north on the trail and homeward.  Goliath started following me but the couple called him back.  Just as well. My mind being in the state it was, for simplicity’s sake, I wanted aloneness for the remainder of my walk. I headed up the steep part of the trail that I take to the rim, stopping to sit on a lichen-encrusted stone where I sometimes rest and look back on immature cottonwoods growing along a spring, where also grows, in the summer, wild mint, wild roses, watercress and water grasses, including that ancient, single-stalked plant with telescoping joints, horsetail.  Those young cottonwoods had lost all their leaves, but as I looked at them, a piñon pine standing a few feet away caught my eye.  The November light silver-plated most of the tree’s needles, almost like an ice storm would do.  The low-angled sunshine got into the depths, thinning shade and shadows that usually hang about a tree’s inner branches.  So the piñon stood, well-lit in places, clear to its trunk.  My light-tuned eye savored the shine. I remembered noticing the tree in this state last year during approximately the same pitch in the sun’s angle and wondered if this is the only time of year this particular tree–along with many others, no doubt–is so transfigured. Interesting to mentally map this tree yet again in its same place but at a different spot in the year.

Then I went on my way, satisfied and somewhat soothed by events as they’d happened, climbing the steep wind of the former ATV trail.  I crossed the spring again higher up, just a few feet away from where it plunges off a stone lip and transforms into a thin waterfall whose voice dominates this part of the trail.  Then up an even steeper section where last year I found the Pure Life water bottle .  As I breasted the last rise before the ground relaxed into a gentle slope, a hard gleam of light from a juniper tree next to the trail caught my eye.  Unlike canyon light on the cottonwood leaves, glazing pine needles, glinting on water and hanging about stones, this reflection had a distinctly artificial sheen to it. My mind snagged on it and curiosity sparked.  Did I want to know?

Probably, someone had left a pop or beer can jammed into a fork in the tree, or maybe something else. After a moment, I stopped thinking and simply followed my curiosity, approaching the tree cautiously then circling to the side turned away from the trail.  It took a moment for my mind to register what my eye saw. A camouflage-printed, latched, plastic case hung on the side of the tree opposite the trail, tipped at such an angle that the afternoon light hit it and cast the plastic glare that my eye detected. Oh, I thought, someone hid their camera here while they went into the canyon. Best not to touch. I don’t know why my mind didn’t accept that explanation and leave well enough alone. My hand seemed to reach of its own accord and lifted the case.  A thin twist of wire tethered it to the juniper.  When I raised the case, I discovered a cable running from its bottom and up into the tree.

Awareness dawned: This is some kind of monitoring device. I backed out from beneath the branches the way I ducked in and circled back to the trunk’s trail side.  Now that I knew what to look for, finding the lens peeking from beneath a stringy, mad wig of juniper bark was easy.  I stared at it grimly, looking it straight in its artificial eye.  I felt extreme distaste for its presence in a place that for me has become a sanctuary.  When I was a child, cameras were a relative rarity.  Four decades later, they’ve become prevalent, for good and for ill. The line between “security” and “intrusion” has grown increasingly hazy and is more freely crossed.  I have a unique image which I feel more inclined to protect than I do my written words, for various reasons. I had no idea how long this equipment had been planted in the tree or how often I’d passed it, unaware.

The camera contained no “Property of” statements nor any other way to identify the device’s owners, although its location on the trail twenty feet down from the carsonite sign forbidding the use of off-highway vehicles suggests it might be the BLM’s doing.  Probably, there was no sound device included, just a lens and video recording equipment. So there was no use lecturing the wired tree. But if the camera had been able to read my mind, its lens would have cracked.

I’ve hiked Crossfire since the notorious September 2007 closure of a seven-mile stretch of the canyon to motorized vehicles. Some months, I’ve gone down as often as three or four times a week. I can say with certainty that at this trailhead violations of the 2007 prohibition have been few and far between.  If the BLM had indeed planted the camera (or cameras, since what’s to stop those with a mind to monitor public spaces from installing more devices in rocks and trees) to track offenses, the low and mostly nonexistent number of ATVers who drive vehicles past that point hardly justifies the camera’s constant intrusive presence.  There simply haven’t been that many scofflaws interested in making a statement in that way. In the meantime, plenty of foot travelers, like myself, have passed the camera without knowing we were photographed or noticing the tree’s unnatural eye.  I may be old-fashioned, but in non-posted environments like this one, I think it impolite verging on violative to collect someone’s picture without his or her knowledge or permission. If the canyon were posted as being under camera surveillance, I’d at least have the freedom to choose whether or not to enter it and have my image collected.  In most other public places where cameras collect images for security reasons, their presence is advertised and obvious.  Every time I pull up to an ATM, for instance, I’m aware of the prominently visible camera and I consent to having my presence recorded.  But here in the canyon, I find the use of a hidden and undeclared camera an obnoxious trespass.

Yet on another level, the sentry tree interested me.  It’s another artifact revealing how people have used the canyon for a broad range of reasons stretching back into prehistory.  About a mile and a half up canyon along the north branch of the bottom trail is a (to me) fascinating bridge built over an arroyo to help make the crossing safer for ATVers. It’s part of the “improvements” my neighbors made to the canyon that got them into legal hot water with the BLM. Interested parties, some members of the Great Old Broads for Wilderness included, find the bridge another example of heavy-handed human intrusiveness.  I wouldn’t have built such a structure myself but now that it’s there I find it something of a delight to come across out in the middle of nowhere.  In fact, all over the canyon, scattered across the ground, is a trove of wonder-sparking and telltale artifacts: lithic flakes, pottery sherds, arrowheads, and prehistoric pueblos, fallen down or half-buried.  In some places, they’re just sagebrush-feathered lines of rocks running across the ground or depressions marking the remains of subterranean structures.  There are more prominent, tumble-down towers and other sorts of rubble mounds all over the place. Flat-rock-lined, subterranean cysts dot the trail here and there. Petroglyphs adorn the rock faces.  In a few places, you find modern graffitti carved into the sandstone.  Like swallows’ nests, cliff dwellings and masonry fill cracks and wrinkles in cliff faces. Many of these use juniper and pine support beams.

Cattlemen’s barbed wire fences and gates mark off canyon sections.  In fact, one of the men who runs a herd of cattle in the canyon recently repaired–I would even say “remodeled”–a barbed-wire gate on his fence line that has been prone to collapsing.  He reinforced one of  the two gate pillars with a green, metal fence post and strengthened both posts with taller and sturdier juniper logs, cut, I suspect, from dead junipers another man left strewn about the trail after illegally “topping” them for fence posts.  The rancher strung taut wires between the two, tall pillars to provide tension and support for the pillar logs and wove a juniper branch into the lintel wires so that horseback riders will know to duck when they pass beneath the wires. It’s kind of grand. Then, of course, there are the cattle themselves, present in Crossfire off and on from about October through May every year. Let’s not forget the beavers, who have completely modified Crossfire Creek’s character, changing it from an ephemeral stream to a series of year-round, dam-reinforced ponds, in the process completely altering the creek’s liquid voice.

I’ve heard rumor of an old trail that Ute Indians stamped into the canyon making visits to my neighbor’s grandfather way back when. Crossfire has old mines in it. There are dozens of other signs of human presence, here-and-now and from long, long ago. In the overall scheme of canyon use–especially since its closure, in the political and ideological struggle for rhetorical control of its ground–the camera was just another artifact of human utility. I might even go so far as to say that, like the contested bridge, the camera is an attempt to “improve” the canyon.  But to my taste, it maintains a far more intrusive presence on the trail than does the bridge.

I stood in front of the camera a moment or two, knowing that my discovery of it had become a recorded fact.  I waved to the lens to punctuate that record then left, considering the new dilemma finding the contraption had placed me in. Some months back, one of the neighbors who’d been convicted of constructing the trail asked if I thought the canyon had cameras in it.  I’d dismissed the idea, believing it over the top. Who would go to such trouble, and for so little gain? Now I had hard evidence that the canyon was indeed wired. What were my obligations to my neighbor and to “the truth”?

Complicating the question were a pair of misunderstandings between myself and my neighbors since the canyon had been closed to OHV travel.  Although the Great Old Broads for Wilderness published a victory article announcing their part in documenting the “damage” two of my neighbors had done widening the trail for ATV use, and other groups like SUWA have described their own roles, some neighbors believed I–a recently arrived “outsider”–was responsible for the canyon’s closure.  The narrative for what actions gave rise to what results, including the closure, is still emerging, but I had nothing at all to do with the ATV prohibition.  It was as big of a surprise to me as it was to my neighbors.

The second misunderstanding was more serious.  In the spring of 2011, I discovered that when the BLM began investigating who’d build the ATV trail into the canyon, some community members thought I provided information that led authorities to two of my neighbors, Dustin and Ken.  They were arrested in the fall of 2010 for their work on the trail, fined $35,000 in total for destruction of government property, and placed on probation.  The Blanding community still feels the burn from Operation Cerberus, the 2009 federal raid that rounded up several locals for violations of antiquities laws and that led, at least indirectly, to the suicide of another of my neighbors, a beloved community member. To this day, the town’s anger still waxes hot.  My neighbors’ arrests for their work on the ATV trail made matters worse.  I lived blissfully ignorant of the arrests until I asked one of the neighbors involved what was up with the presence in the neighborhood of all the official-looking vehicles.  He told me, in somber, cautious, but truthful tones that he and his father-in-law were being prosecuted for building the trail.  At the time, I wasn’t conscious of having knowledge that they had built the trail.  Later, I remembered conversations with one of them prior to the 2010 investigation that could well have caused them to think that I did.  At the next opportunity to speak with one of the men, I asked if he had an idea who’d turned them in.  He said he didn’t, and really, he wasn’t interested anymore in knowing. He just wanted the ordeal to be over.  I said, “Well, it wasn’t me.”  He said something like, “I’ve figured that from the conversations we’ve had about all this.”  I told Mark about this interchange, and the next time he saw that neighbor he likewise told him that I had had nothing to do his and his father-in-law’s arrests and convictions.  Mark reported that the neighbor said that he knew that now and had told other community members to “lay off”.

Damned camera.  As if I didn’t have enough on my mind.

I broke off looking into the prying eye and walked home in mixed mood.  I’d been away from the house longer than expected and had to return to tasks waiting there.  It was Thanksgiving, and I had a grave to dig in hard ground for a dog who’d lived perhaps too long.  While I was at it, I might as well lay to rest in that same plot the remains of fond hopes that life would ever turn smooth and serene. Current developments had burst the seams of those old, constricting desiderata.  If I kept trying to force them to fit, they’d only slow me down and eventually choke me into unconsciousness.  They’d almost certainly become delusional, and we didn’t need any more delusions in the house.  By whatever power, we’d been sent into deep layers of life where there are no guarantees of peace and safety, only the incessant call for prodigious effort.

Hang peace and security anyway.  I’ve tasted the lotus blossom of peace. My mind savors it a moment then spits it out in impatience and boredom.  As much of a strain as these events have so far proven to be, clearly, they’re only the opening steps of the journey.  That’s both unsettling to know and exciting. Getting anywhere from here will require loose-fitting clothing and non-restrictive language that allows for free movement and is roomy enough to suit big changes in the ways we see the world.  Rapid-paced technological advances have given the impression that progress just happens as the result of free enterprise, occasional outbursts of genius or perhaps heaven-bestowed inspiration. More compelling advances occur where trenchant events exert enough strain to compel us to abandon ontological settlements that no longer hold up.  Old narrative stances for new–that’s where Mark and I are now, trading up to a world that we hadn’t known existed and whose vicissitudes we’ll perhaps survive if we can get across the wreckage of ideals that we thought we had the right to have and hold.  And making a go of that, my friends, requires better wording–flexible, recombinant, adaptive language by which power we can make something more of ourselves.

.

Contested Bridge in Crossfire Canyon

Camera hidden in juniper tree in Crossfire Canyon

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.)

Fire in the Pasture: Twenty-first Century Mormon Poetry, edited by frequent WIZ contributor Tyler Chadwick, made its debut at 2011 end in impressive style. Tyler reports that Fire in the Pasture has “risen as high as #2 in both Hot New Anthologies and Hot New Inspirational & Religious and #12 in Hot New Poetry.”  The Kindle edition “slipped into the Kindle Store’s top 100 Best Sellers in 20th Century American Poetry.”  Congratulations, Tyler and Th.!  For WIZ readers’ information, several WIZ contributors, including Sarah Dunster, Jon Ogden, WIZ’s new contributing editor Jonathon Penny, Steve Peck, Sarah Page, and myself have work included in its pages.  Ángel Chaparro Sainz, another frequent WIZ contributor, wrote the anthology’s afterword.  It’s a pleasure to see that so many WIZ folk threw kindling into Fire in the Pasture’s multi-colored flames.  A poem by Elizabeth Pinborough, another poet published in Fire in the Pasture, will appear on WIZ in February.

Karen Kelsay, a fine formalist poet and constant lyrical presence here at WIZ, has begun a publishing company, White Violet Press. You can reach the press’s accompanying blog with submission guidelines by clicking on the image to the left.  While most publications are by invitation only, WVP will look at unsolicited manuscripts year round. White Violet Press is now open for submissions, so WIZ writers–especially WIZ writers of a formalist persuasion–please go have a look and support Karen in her new creative venture.

In November 2011, my essay, “Plato’s Alcove,” was awarded finalist status and an honorable mention in Torrey House Press’s creative nonfiction competition.  The essay tells about my first trip to the desert.  An earlier version won 1st place in the 2003 Utah’s Original Writers Competition.  The version I sent to Torrey House is a more highly stylized, mixed-genre experiment. Want to read “Plato’s Alcove” at Torrey House’s website?  Go here.

Profound apologies for the lateness of this next announcement, but Fortunate Childe Publications published its autumn anthology, Vintage, in October 2011.  WIZ contributors Karen Kelsay and Carla Martin-Wood also have verse published therein (search on their names in the search bar to the left to read their poetry published on WIZ).  Also featured in Vintage: four of my poems, including “Deer in the City,” “Closing Time,” and two poems not on WIZ.  Leslie Ellison, publisher of Fortunate Childe, nominated my poem “Deer in the City,” which also appears at WIZ, for a Pushcart Prize.  This is my second Pushcart Prize nomination. Thank you, Fortunate Childe!  To find information about Vintage or purchase copies of this lovely seasonal anthology, click on the picture to the left.  I will soon be buying a few for myself. Several poets included in the anthology recorded readings of their work that you listen to here.

WIZ will be running its popular Love of Nature Nature of Love event again in February.  To celebrate Valentine’s Day, all month long we’ll publish poetry, essays, blocks of fiction, art, music (mp3s), video or other media that address the subject of love while making references to nature.  Or it could go the other way around: We’ll publish work about nature that also happens to give a nod to love.  We’re seeking submissions of original work or you can also send favorite works by others that have entered public domain.  So if you have a sonnet you’ve written to someone dear to your heart–even and perhaps especially your pet hamster Roley Poley or faithful horse Old Paint–or perhaps a video Valentine or an essay avowing your love for a natural space dear to your heart–please consider sending it to WIZ.  See the submissions page in the navigation bar above for submissions guidelines.

Today I read your verses, and I wept.
Your loss, transcending centuries, has torched
a hole in my self-pity, scattered ash
across four hundred years, and scorched

my martyrdom into the oak-slat floor.
The sad account of how your house burned down,
your passing of the ruins every day.
Each broken brick of future, smudged and brown.

And now I know the leaving of my home
cannot compare. The maple gum and oak
will always weave through bougainvillea blooms,
a mourning dove will flutter in her cloak

of spring magnolia leaves. The window seat
and lattice will remain. My children played
their games with our old dog along this hedge.
And still, I read the words your hand has laid

across the page, that all is vanity.
I hear the crackle of your faith renew.
And realize you never asked for more
than hope in Him who hath enough to do.

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To read more of Karen’s bio and more of her poetry on WIZ, go here, here, here, and here.

If you would like to read “Verses upon the Burning of our House, July 18th, 1866,” by Anne Bradstreet, go here.

How ugly you all are,
An all-over ugly!

Iris bulbs unearthed and scythed
Of top leaves,
I lay your twisted, tuberous
Bodies across a gutted paper sack
And take a moment to grimace
At your grotesquery.

Dirt clings to your stringy reaching roots.
Not even warm water and bleach
Can pretty the rough hide of your skin.
Poor horrid hags!

But wait—don’t droop,
Shrivel dry in shame.

For I know your secret.

You keep it like a locket,
Or maybe a pearl,
Deep in the water of your flesh—
A tiara of petals, jewels of silk,
A blush pressed within paper wings.
Each spring, you rise
Slim-necked as swans and slender-leaved
To curve rainbows into blossoms.

Yes, majesty resides in these lumps,
These commoner dumplings—
Children of the coronet.

Who would guess such a spectacle
But those who’ve already seen
The princess curled within the peasant—
The goddess in the hag flower.

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Sarah E. Page graduated Cum Laude from Brigham Young University with a B.A. in English in 2007 and is pursuing her Master of Science and certification in Secondary English at Southern Connecticut State University. Her poetry has been published in Noctua Review, Mormon Artist, Inscape: A Journal of Literature and Art, and included in the anthology Fire in the Pasture: Twenty-First Century Mormon Poets. When not scribbling novels or taking pictures of the ragged aster and other weeds running rampant in her garden, she enjoys getting lost on long walks in the Naugatuck State Forest.

That industrious black-banded yellow worker, the bee, and a dragonfly soar swiftly, silently through the sky

The glowing rosy crescent rising slowly after the iridescent sunset and the stars glinting like jewels amidst a sky as black as tar

The fresh greenery mushroom every spring and the rolling hills with their lush grassy frills

The sun shielded by a cloud as if by a shroud, illuminating its edges with its beams, and the multi-hued glow of a rainbow—

When I see the magnificence of my environment–

I witness

The talent of the Great Artist.

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Ashley Suzanne Musick was born in 1989 on the twenty-sixth of February in the California city of Fountain Valley and raised and home-schooled in Anaheim.  In 2010 she moved to southwest Kern County, where she currently works on a farm and writes in her spare time.