feral

Saturday, October 8, 2005

It rained half the night. It's the second time this week it's done that, and yet each time the ground is bone dry in the morning. The only evidence of rain is the puddle I have to empty from each llama feed bowl before dumping in the oats. Early this morning too frozen droplets refracted the sky's blue light from the undersides of the fencewires.

I found the body of a huge wood rat in the garage today when I went in after hay. These are beautiful creatures, with their milky-white bellies, but I'm glad it's not one of them living in my bookshelf. I'm a species-ist. For shame.

This is the limboest limbo I ever knew. I think every day that I can't possibly make it to the end, but I know we're almost done, even if I have to bash in the glass with my own hammer.

Tonight the sky is clear. As I sit at the keyboard (7 p.m. PT) the waxing near-quarter moon glows at me through the office window, clean and milky as a woodrat's belly, but brighter. I've made fire number four for the season in the woodstove, of lumber scraps and two lengths of dry cut juniper limb gleaned from the roadside. Brian and I have grown expert at spotting these this time of year, firewood fallen from overfilled pickup trucks. We have our own wood, but I don't want to dig into it until it becomes absolutely necessary. I'm turning absurdly frugal.

Well, I've had the photos up half a day now and the silence is alarming me. Come on, folks, chide me! or reassure me! Or something! By the way, I've found the perfect excuse to use the color I chose for the store walls.

The three dogs lie on blankets in front of the stove. You can hear a bit of the fire's crackle if you listen hard. The angles and curves of the sleepers' graduated forms reflect the orange flicker in the dim room. Could anything be more still?
7:19:40 PM comment [] trackback []

Folke Isaksson, (1927- )

THE SEA IN MY WORDS

The sea is always in my words
in my blood in my breath
in these tired sad eyes
I who never saw the sea
was never rocked to sleep
by a pounding wave
I who saw only strips and edges of the sea
coasts gleaming from a
distance plains crocheted with gulls
a solitary brig on the rim of morning
the boatlike island with the beacon
(heading toward deeper expanses
dawn over a snow-crust over eel-colored lowlands
over the freedom the pitiless indifferent oblivion of the sea)

I who have not seen the sea
hear the roar of the surf and the delirious joy
as murmuring seashells are heard on sandy paths
memories of broken masts and sudden death
of scurvy and despair in the clutch of the autumn storm

I who have not seen the sea
am myself closest to the sea
island or rock pointer or portent
reaching out to thought and hand
I am myself cape island or eye
shrouded by the smoke and thunder of the storm
by its intimacy and its abandon

(Now a memory: the leer of the wind
one day in icy sunlight men at the prow
a ship crossed ours
coil of smoke against smoke
that rose into the void
of voyage and venture
of storm and stillness
And a snowstorm of gulls)

The sea is always in my words
in my aims and in my undertakings
concealed and unsuspected
and like the writing that will not shine through
until the letter is burned to a crisp
Until I am hardened and formed
shaped into a star
into a triumphant arch

From The Forest of Childhood: Poems from Sweden, ed. and trans. William Jay Smith and Leif Sjoberg (Minneapolis, MN: New Rivers Press, 1996).
4:32:17 PM

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