The patterns on some turtle shells immitate sunlight spattering on vegetation or leafy pool bottoms.  The carapace of the spotted turtle, Clymmys guttata, mirrors the night sky.  The underlying shell color is deep space black, with yellow or yellow-white spots speckling the scutes, or shields of the carapace.  Some have only a few dots but many spotted turtles bear on their backs dozens of petite stars.  As children, we noticed that the smaller the turtle, the less the stars, which seemed only fair.

The water was shallow; I caught the turtle easily.  Lifting him up for closer inspection I found that all was not well.  He wore the usual stellar armor, black with a few unique constellations and star clusters.  But he lacked a front foot, one of his back legs stubbed off into a stump, and his tail doubled over on itself, the flesh between being fused.

Did this turtle lose his feet to a predator or an accident, or was he born without them?  If born without, did something go wrong with the egg or his genetics?  Was his condition indicative of contamination in his mother and/or father’s habitat?  Since female spotted turtles don’t nest until they reach their mid-teens and may not produce eggs every year, this turtle’s condition suggested something about the local spotted turtle ecology.  But what?  As a child, I imagined stories explaining his state: bare escapes, leaving a limb in the gaping mouth of a monster, or some transgression that had as punishment the humiliating fusion of his tail.

Otherwise, he seemed in good condition—no disease in the skin pockets where shoulders and neck came together or in skin flaps at the back legs.  Still, hindered as he was, I wondered how he managed to survive.  I called him a “he” because of the brown five o’clock shadow darkening his beak.  Females’ mouths are lighter in color, their tails shorter.  Of course, the length of this turtle’s misshapen tail could not be used to judge his gender.

In spite of the flush of pity I felt for this less-than-perfect being, I took him home to join my other specimens, kept in a “turtle pit,” a naval-surplus tank my father picked up at Norfolk Naval Base.  Nearly a dozen other spotted turtles occupied the tank temporarily.  A junior amateur herpetologist, I figured I could observe the new fellow for a few days, feed him if he’d accept it, and then release him with the others.

But when I went out the next morning to check on the turtles, “Stumpy” was missing.  He was the only one AWOL; all other turtles were present and accounted for.  I looked for a displaced basking rock that might have shifted too close to the wall during a turtle scuffle; there was none.  Well then, how did he get out and where did he go? I searched around the pit, thinking, he couldn’t have gotten very far away. But he was clean gone.  How a stump-footed turtle escaped an enclosure whole turtles couldn’t was a complete mystery.  I shook my head appreciatively. One lucky turtle.

A few days later I returned to the railroad tracks, located about two hundred and fifty to three hundred yards from our house.  The distance in between was made up of dense weeds, a drainage ditch with only a couple of plank bridges crossing it, and woods, thick enough to somewhat muffle the roar of passing freight and passenger trains.  As I passed the shallow pond, movement caught the corner of my eye.  My attention swung around.  A turtle dove for cover.  I waded in and caught it, only to find it was Stumpy.

He had made his way back to the puddle after my carrying him hundreds of feet in a direction I could safely assume he’d never traveled.  Furthermore, to return home he had negotiated serious obstacles, including the steep-sided drainage ditch.  Some turtles might have ended their journeys there and taken up at least temporary residence in the ditch water or worked their ways up- or downstream, but not Stumpy.  He braved the weedy jungle between our house and the forest, crossed the ditch, navigated the woods, and arrived back at his puddle.

Since I had always hand-transported other turtles to their location of capture to release them, I had never observed if they possessed a sense of direction, a “homing instinct” that guided them across unfamiliar territory.  Wondering if Stumpy’s presence at the pond was a fluke, I returned him to the pit.  Compared to other turtles he was only medium-sized.  I couldn’t see how he could possibly escape if bigger animals couldn’t.  Even standing against the wall on his good back leg with his arms outstretched he was too short to reach the rim.

But the next morning it was the same story—Stumpy had escaped in the night.  He took no companions with him—all other specimens of Clymmys guttata remained behind.

What was it about that Stumpy?  Was he a turtle Houdini?  A turtle Godel? Did he stack up his companions, like Dr. Seuss’s Yertle the Turtle, only to different purpose, clambering over them to freedom?

Did he teleport himself by means of that star chart spread open on his back?

I headed for the little pond by the railroad tracks.  Not there.  Returning home, I looked for him along the way, glimpsing neither scute nor star.  I decided to give him more time.  Some days out from his escape, I returned to the puddle and voila!  There he was: Stumpy come home.

This time I left him alone.  By magic or ingenuity he had earned his solitude.  Twice.

Conning the con is not Turtle’s preferred manner of being-in-the-world.  Usually, Turtle acts in this role only to help less imaginative creatures protect precious resources—water or food, for example—or to correct social imbalances, or perhaps to mete out comeuppance, which is also a way of restoring order to the world locally and at large.  Someone must show the clever ones that they don’t, as they suppose, run everything.  Someone has to teach the Anansis, Jackals, and Coyotes that there’s more going on than even they, the wry ones, can imagine and restore them to their proper places when they become too destructive or powerful.

In one African tale, all the animals in a village labor to dig a water hole to relieve a severe water crisis.  But at night, Jackal, who didn’t lift a finger to help, sneaks in from the desert to drink at the well. Then he muddies the water so no one else can use it.  The other animals complain but don’t know what to do to.  It is Turtle who solves the problem.  Smearing a sticky substance on his shell he submerges in the pool, and when Jackal sneaks in to steal and foul the water, up comes turtle from below and bumps against him.  Poor Jackal!  He sticks to Turtle’s carapace like a fly to sap.  Turtle parades the stuck Jackal before the others who laugh and jeer at him, then he delivers him to Lion’s den.

In a Yoruba tale from Nigeria, Anansi the Spider twists rules of etiquette to avoid sharing his yams with travel-weary Turtle, who arrives just at dinnertime.  As Turtle opens his mouth to bite into a yam, Anansi says, “In my land, we wash our hands before we eat.”  By invoking this and other rules of good manners, Anansi keeps Turtle from the yams until the spider has himself more or less eaten all.  Turtle knows he’s been slighted but understands that two can play this game.  Likewise drawing upon rules of hospitality he invites Anansi to dine at his house.  Anansi does not imagine that anyone is as clever as he is; also, he’s greedy.  Anxious to eat well at someone else’s table, he arrives at the river’s edge where Turtle lives and there faces a dilemma.  Turtle’s house lies on the bottom.  To get to the food, Anansi must sink through the water.  Anansi tries to sink himself but nothing works.  Finally he fills his coat pockets with rocks.  He sinks down and arrives at Turtle’s table where the feast has been laid.  Wide-eyed with gluttony, Anansi reaches for his first bite.  But Turtle says, “In my land, we remove our coats before we eat.”  Anansi removes his coat and floats up out of reach of the food, losing not only his meal but also a perfectly good coat.

In a Cherokee tale, Turtle and Coyote race to see who will win Turtle’s dinner.  Turtle may be slow, but he’s no fool.  He knows Coyote intends to cheat him so he turns back before the race is over and secures the meal for himself.  Thus Turtle cons the con artist.  Another good Cherokee story presents Turtle as a master of illusion.  Turtle outsmarts Rabbit in a race over five hills by locating one of his turtle relatives on each of the hills, fooling Rabbit into thinking he is seeing something he isn’t.
Some might wonder at such a stolid, slow-moving creature achieving revered trickster status, but as a former hunter of turtles I share this reverence for Turtle’s ability to gain the upper hand.  Because once upon a time, Turtle tricked me.

Always it’s the same: the woods are leaf-fatted, midsummer.  Low-growing Mayapple and ginseng creep among roots of massive white oaks whose limbs form their own green-clouded groves.  Ferns half my height unroll from fiddleheads.  Fiddleheads, with their scrolled fronds, put me in mind of unborn things—pale, web-footed, half-creatures in dark, damp places, curling over upon themselves. All around lies the litter of conversion, of life changing over to death, changing to seedbed, to mushroom clusters, to a pink shock of Lady’s-slipper orchid against decadent leaves.

My familiarity with this place is so deep that, even though I’m asleep, I know I’ve entered a region of my personal Dreamtime. Many peoples have Dreamtimes, though perhaps not so many as used to.  For Aboriginal Australians, Dreamtime is an ancestral era when totemic creatures walked the land, chanting the world into existence. Dreamtime is also a state of being.  The Australian landscape thrums with vibrations, jiva or guruwari, seed vitality, the resonant blastosphere of the present containing the past and the future; the land Dreams. Relation arcs between highly charged places—sacred places—and individual consciousness, and this, too, is the Dreaming.  For the Aborigines, Dreaming is believing.

My Dreamtime is like that, a place-time in my soul that keeps current origin images from my childhood in rural Piedmont Virginia. Where I live now, in the bone-bared west, there are no places like our old weeds and woods.

I hurry down a path, the only strip of earth not overrun with green growing.  I feel a child’s desire—anxious, anticipatory.  I come to a sluggish stream.  Sometimes it’s a small pond, sometimes a large puddle.  I wade in and peer into the water, which may be clear as a windowpane or muddy as a storm, and there are the turtles.

Perhaps the sight of them arouses the reptilian part of my brain, because I know them.  Their bone backs curved like river cobbles, dappled like the bottoms of sun-flecked pools. Their stout, scaly legs, tipped with fine claws—legs of plodding, ancient design.  Their retractable necks.

Without thinking, I catch them.  I don’t know why.  In the dreams, I don’t question my motives.  It’s not obsession or any form of predation.  Simply, the turtles are there and I catch them: spotted turtles, eastern painted turtles, and the occasional indefinite specimen, something that’s just elemental turtle.

Part of it might be a need to touch the carapaces.  To get the gist of a turtle you really have to feel the curve of the shell against the palm of your hand, filling your hand; you have to get its heft, like a stone, only alive and kicking.  Then there are multifarious shell colors and patterns. It’s as if each animal has chosen a kaleidoscopic variation on this or that motif: star clusters in deep space; flower petals mixed with loam and old leaf; algal strands and shadows.  Whorled like topographical maps, turtles’ shells seem to bear record of where they have been and how long they stayed.

Living in arid Utah as I do now I need to revisit these creatures swimming the headwaters of my earliest consciousness.  So the Dreamtime takes me to them.  When I catch the Dream Turtles and look upon their shells, I feel something beyond satisfaction.  It’s as if to touch and to gaze upon a turtle shell is to receive a Rosetta stone that keys other matter for meaning.  One thing: turtles present the domes of their backs skyward, as if waiting for the world to settle there.  So it was that some cultures believed life began or was remade on the shells of turtles.

A Hindu myth of the world’s cycle tells how water overcomes the world every millennium, destroying all but the most basic silts and elements of life.  At such times, Vishnu enters into a new incarnation, one fitting for this water world—Chukwa, the turtle.  In a no doubt suitably ornate vessel that recalls in mystical detail the backs of modern turtles, he gathers a mixture of elements necessary to re-spawn the world.  When this period of reborning is over Chukwa fixes to the spot, supporting Ma-pudma the elephant, or four elephants, who in turn bear up the reborn Earth.

An Iroquois creation story tells also how the turtle, a water creature, made possible the creation of land.  As in the Hindu tale, the world’s surface is fluid.  But according to this Dawn of Earth story, the animal inhabitants fail to build good ground until they lay their mud and sticks on Turtle’s back.  Turtle magnifies their efforts by growing and becoming North America: Turtle Island.

In a Chinese myth, a turtle is the world.

Some might think such origin tales lacking in finesse, childish, unscientific, rather uneconomical in the creation scheme of things.  But I get it.  Part of my brain engages and applies the truth in these old, old stories.  Obviously, turtles have sustained a very long relationship with the earth—older than our own, by most traditional accounts and by all scientific ones.

The “Wow-ee!” response of the scientists involved would make for an interesting study, as well as the “maybe it’s the first example of invertebrate tool use but maybe it isn’t” facet of the story.

Everything is smarter than we think and has the prospect of becoming smarter, including us, if we could just get over thinking we’re smarter than we actually are.

Here’s another octopus story.

Took Otto’s wardens long enough to figure out what was going on.

Here’s a story about barn swallows you might have seen.

My experience with octopi is unfortunately limited (thanks to a high school guidance counselor), but I’ve watched swallows for hours—barn, cliff, and violet green.  They exhibit flying skills that shout mental sharpness and high engagement with their surroundings.  Their language, too, is lovely—soaring phrases and jazzy riffs that light up whatever spaces they breeze through.  Beside white-throated swifts (and, of course, park pigeons) swallows are one of the species of birds that show the greatest tolerance for people’s presence.  Many times they’ve let me in among them while they’ve dipped and whirled very close in.  For me, watching them fly is like watching a group of mathematicians scrawl out geometrical problems at high speed on a three-dimensional blueboard.  Very satisfying for this mind to try to follow.

The debate over animal intelligence is progressing very slowly.  The holdup?  Well, that would have to be … us.  We’re hung-up on wanting to be the smartest creatures on the planet, to play the lead roles on this living, growing, prowling, blossoming, metamorphosing stage.

I’ve had enough experience with animals to suspect strongly that the “I’m smarter than other species and even smarter than others of my kind” mindset is not unique to people.  I lived with a Siberian husky that definitely thought herself smarter than other dogs (she was) and smarter than I was (yes, at times), and she absolutely believed herself physically superior, to the point of challenging me to follow her in intimidating feats of derring-do.  I’m uncertain how her rangy, forty-pound body supported such an ego.

And the coyote is not cast in folk stories’ trickster roles by happenstance.

But human beings exert more influence upon the world than dogs or coyotes, from our tool-grasping gift for altering the physical environment to our cosmoplastic abilities—our narrative prowess—and the effects they bring to bear upon all life.  That we struggle with the question of whether or not animals exhibit intelligence might speak more to shortfalls in our awareness than it does to the question of what’s actually happening around us.  That is, our wonderment over animals’ intelligence and feeling might posit some narrative failure on our part, which means it’s a failure of relationship, narrative being one of the primary approaches we take for exploring and developing connexion.

Furthermore, the slowness of our thinking about other species is not something isolated to our relationship with the nonhuman world.  The levels of imperceptiveness and bad behavior people demonstrate toward nature is but an extension of the bad behavior we exhibit toward each other. Thus any progress we make in our behavior toward nature ought to be paralleled in improvements in how we treat each other, and the other way around.

If we can figure out how better to pay attention—if we can tune our minds for deeper engagement—then learning from nature at a higher rate of speed than we do and applying with grace what we learn to humanity’s condition could work out very well for us. For some people, I know it does work that way, as well as the other way around—nature learns from its contact with us. This is not to say that we’re no different from other species; obviously we are. Perhaps we’re the farthermost extension of an entire system’s quest for greater consciousness; perhaps we’re seeking broader dimensions to creativity–maybe even godhood. We have our narratives to explain who we are and what we’re about, but those can and should change. Jesus initiated a powerful narrative shift, new language–and thus a new way–for being in the world and for being-with-others (including animals) when he broke up the unyielding eye-for-an-eye storylines of the Mosaic Law.

Perhaps we think we can get away more cleanly with careless relationships with the natural world, which we appear to believe has no law or awareness, than we can with mankind, which has an extensive and evolving set of laws governing its behavior along with somewhat heightened consciousness where the well-being of our own kind is concerned. But the abuse, exploitation, destruction, apathy, annoyance, clumsiness, insensibility and so on we display towards nature is not behavior we exhibit only toward nature. If we’re doing it “out there,” it’s happening inside governments, businesses, communities, and homes in one form or another. We may not be aware what things that we’re doing to each other are destructive, clumsy, etc. We might say, “This is the only way to handle this. Nobody knows a better way, so there must not be one.” We might say, “This is how it has always been done.”  We have reams and reams of “look no further” language arranged in unmoving narratives.  Meanwhile, Otto is shooting out the irritating lights above his aquarium with a highly accurate water pistol.

Why?

Because they’re there and he’s there, and because his circumstances changed him to the point where he figured how to change his circumstances.

Is this not one chamber of the heart of the creative mind?

The moon stretched out her oyster hand
and on the struts she lifted land.
In mercury streams the valleys bled:
the mountain shook its hoary head.
She set the rain in silver sheets
upon the ocean’s stormy streets.

The sun shook out his golden beard
and with its heat the land was seared.
The gold-gray ash, ’neath greening rain,
bristled up in heads of grain.
The trees grew up at his approach,
and closed their gowns with emerald brooch.

The moon unbound her swelling womb
and scattered the world with ruby bloom.
She shrouded its eyes with birds in flight
and veiled its face with silky night.
Then balanced the sphere on a silver scale
and lined the seas with fishes’ mail.

Then the sun and the moon
set the world in a swoon
and clothed it in meadow and wood.

And with bashful glance
began to dance

. . . and called it good.

___________________________________________________________

Danny Nelson’s “Creation” appears in Plain and Precious Parts of the Fob Bible (http://b10mediaworx.com/peculiarpages/fobbible/pppfobbible.htm#creation) and in the complete Fob Bible (http://b10mediaworx.com/b10mwx/peculiar-pages/the-fob-bible/). Nelson studies literature at the University of Washington where he has developed an interest in the many ways of spelling phoenix.

It was Satan who spoke first, after his grimaces and rubbing had finished. “You are very beautiful,” he said.

The snake stirred, blinking. “How can you know what beauty is?” she asked. Her voice was low, and modulated. “Only the gods know that.”

Satan shrugged. “I don’t know how I know, snake. I only know that I know—and you are very beautiful.”

“Are you a god, then?” Her voice was cool and musical, like a brook, and she regarded Satan with cool eyes.

He laughed, leaning back into his wings and grabbing his knees. “Do I look like a god to you?”

“You look like half a bat,” said the snake as she eased down from the tree. “The other half might be monkey, might be man. You have more hair than the other two-legs in this part of the tree-place.”

“Not a god though. That’s a relief,” said Satan. He leaned forward slightly and studied her as she moved from under the shadows of the trees. “You are beautiful—look at you in the sunlight. You’re like a living bruise.”

“What part of creation is a bruise?” asked the snake.

“A very beautiful part.” Satan’s mouth twitched into a smile.

“Only the gods know beauty,” repeated the snake. “When this tree-place was created, the gods called it Beauty, but no creature may know what that means. Beauty is a mystery of the gods.”

“It’s a mystery, I will grant you that,” said Satan. “To be honest, I’m trying to figure it out myself. It’s one of the reasons I dropped down here—I thought it might give me some ideas.”

The snake regarded Satan with deep interest. “Do you know beauty? Can you see it?”

Satan’s smile was long and white. “Everywhere, no-legs. This is a beautiful garden.”

“I see you are playing a game with words, then, because this tree-place is Beauty—and therefore beautiful.” The snake twisted herself back upon her mighty loops to rise to Satan’s seated height. “And I am part of Beauty, and therefore beautiful—this is what you mean?”

Satan laughed. “I did not expect you to coil me in my own words. But here, I’ve given you a compliment and I expect it repaid—do you think I’m beautiful?”

The snake shook her head. “I don’t know beauty. It is a mystery of the gods. I do know you are made well—as the gods made you—and therefore you must be beautiful.”

“A true compliment. Yet I can’t imagine that anything—least of all myself could be more beautiful than you are,” said Satan.

The snake blinked. “This is a new thing you have said.” She thought for a moment. “How can something be more beautiful than something else? Both things are made by the gods.”

Satan shrugged. “Personal preference, I suppose. I’m sure the gods think everything is as beautiful as everything else. I just find you more beautiful than—say, that rock over there.” Satan pointed to a rock jutting from the muddy earth, crumbling and charred-looking as a burned stick. “It looks as if it tumbled from Heaven, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t feel more beautiful than the rock,” said the snake.

“That is because you are a woman,” said Satan, “and—innocent or not—some things breed true.”

The snake blinked at him.

“Don’t worry,” said Satan. “It’s just a joke. And not a very good one, either.”

_______________________________________________________________
“Blood-Red Fruit” can be read in its entirely as part of Plain and Precious Parts of the Fob Bible (http://b10mediaworx.com/peculiarpages/fobbible/pppfobbible.htm#blood) or through the complete Fob Bible (http://b10mediaworx.com/b10mwx/peculiar-pages/the-fob-bible/). The story was written by Danny Nelson and Eric W Jepson.

Then two years ago, members of that same storytelling festival committee recruited me to participate.  I was assigned to write an introduction for the festival, a preamble that would signal to visitors that the storytelling was about to begin.  Another purpose for the introduction: To support the opening ceremony during which each of the evening’s participants carried a lit candle into the auditorium as they entered single file.  The candles symbolized the intentional passing of stories–heirloom narrative valuables–from generation to generation. 

I decided to write a story–a faux folktale–explaining where the old stories came from.  It was an interesting process, composing a story that all the cultures involved found acceptable.  I had included a reference to the German story about the wolf who ate a family of goats.  One of the Navajo committee members asked that I take that out because, as she said, “Navajos can’t hear about bad things happening to their animals.”  Navajos, of course, herd goats and sheep.

Through this revising process and that, I worked up a story that all approved of.  It’s just a light thing, addressing an audience containing children, meant to support the festival’s theme and to work in the significance of the candles.  But the festival committee liked it so much that they used it for two years in a row and plan to use it every year.  So my dream of releasing a story into the common narrative environment, free and open to effects of use, came true.

I tell about this here at WIZ because I consider language to be part of the natural world and human language to be something creation has given rise to for purposes perhaps beyond our ken and certainly beyond our grasp.   To my thinking, the condition of this planet is deeply dependent now upon the quality of human language giving rise to expression.  One of narrative’s most important energies: creating and communicating the range of possibilities from which other beings in the world might choose to create their own prospects.

Here’s the story:

Pass the Flame

A long time ago, a man and woman had many children.  They taught their children how to walk, wear clothing, and eat food to stay alive. 

But they didn’t know how to teach their children to be wise.  So the children made the same mistakes over and over, which caused everyone a lot of trouble.

The man said to the woman, “The things we taught our children aren’t enough.  We must teach them to be wise.  But how?”

“We have nothing of ourselves we can do this with,” said the woman.  “We must look for a way.” 

So the man and women set out on a journey.  After walking many days, they came to a strange mountain.  On one side was a desert with sand dunes.  On another side was a tropical rainforest.  Yet another side was covered in fir and pine.  There was frozen tundra up there, too.  The sea lapped at the mountain’s foot.  On this mountain, summer, winter, fall, and spring happened all at the same time.

The man and woman climbed the mountain and sat down to wait.  “How will this place help us?” they wondered.

They saw shapes in the distance moving toward them.  The first one was a bear.  When the bear reached them, it said, “I will tell you why I have a short tail instead of a long tail, like I used to have.” 

Behind the bear was Coyote.

“This is what happened when I stole the sun and the moon,” said Coyote. 

Behind Coyote was an Eskimo.  “This is how mosquitoes came to us,” the Eskimo said. 

“This is why my tail is bald rather than bushy, like it used to be,” said Possum.

“This is why I have big eyes,” said Owl.

“This is how I taught Anansi not to be rude to guests,” said Turtle.

“This is how me and my blue ox Babe carved the Grand Canyon,” said Paul Bunyon.

“This is how I became a spider,” said Arachne.

“This is the sad story of how I became a weather cock,” said Half-a-chick.

“This is how I tricked Raven into dropping his cheese so that I could take it from him,” said Fox.

“This is how I defeated the dragon with my golden reed pipe, thereby saving my sister,” said a boy named Bayberry.

“This is how I learned not to speak to wolves in the woods,” said a girl in a red riding hood.

And so it went.  After many days, the man and woman were so filled with stories their eyes glowed with light.  The animals and flowers and trees and people who had told the stories said to the man and woman, “Now you have some wisdom to give your children.  But for the wisdom to work, your children must in turn tell the stories to their children, and they must tell them to theirs.  If they don’t, life will go back to the way it was, with everybody making the same mistakes over and over.”

The man and woman thanked the creatures that told the stories.  They went home and told their children all of the wonderful tales they had been taught.  When the children heard the stories, their eyes also glowed with light.  It was as if someone had touched a burning candle to an unlighted wick in each one, causing wonder and wisdom to leap up like flames.

Tonight, we who have inherited these stories and the love of storytelling honor those who taught us by doing our duty and bringing our tales to you like lighted candles.  We invite you to tip your candles toward us so that we may pass the flame.

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

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

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

For Th.’s–Eric Jepson’s–bio, go here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dare?” he repeated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What–what is an artist?”

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

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

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

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

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

She was an odd girl!

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

“Well, it was funny.”

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

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

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

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

Uncle Howard,

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

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

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

                   Love,
                                   Mark

____________________________________________________________

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

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