My poem “We Talk of Trains” and my photograph “Train in Round Rock” were published in the latest issue of ouroboros review. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a really classy poetry and art journal. You can read the magazine online or purchase a copy through the site’s bookstore. Whichever way you go, you’re in for a treat. I’m honored to have my work, which can be found on page 24, included with so many fine writers and artists.

Check it out. Go. Now.

It’s hot here.
I don’t mind.

Was it in Memphis?
Hot?

No. You know. Where it happened.
Not Memphis. No.

Where? If you don’t mind.
Tucumcari.

Tucumcari?
Yes.

You thought it would be somewhere else,
but things can happen anywhere.

You left there and came here?
Pretty much.

Is it true you won the lottery?
Just a scratch-off.

But you did win.
It was cursed.

Don’t laugh at me.

Sorry. Cursed how?
I see people as they really are. Their true faces.

What do you see when you look at me?

What?

Please.
Is that really what you want?
You’ll understand what… happened…
better than you might really want to.

Tell me.
Can I tell you a secret first?

—

This was inspired by the latest image prompt at Read Write Poem (prompt #81). To see the photo (”XX” by nwolc), which is really cool, follow the link to the prompt or go straight to its Flickr page.

One of my favorite places in the neighborhood is the little stream that runs north along the trail and feeds the pond. It’s about 1/8th of a mile from the house, but it’s a lovely little shaded place to sit and watch or listen to birds. There’s a little wooden footbridge over the stream, which is where I took this picture late last summer.

Late Summer 2008

About 2 weeks ago a monster hail storm rolled through our neighborhood. No tornadoes, but the center was rotating when it went over the bridge on its way to our house where it broke a window and ruined the roof. It also took a bunch of trees. The picture below is the same view, standing on the bridge. Despite the fact that I shot it with a much wider lens than the one above, the trees over the water make it seem tighter.

After the Storm, June 2009

The stream still flows beneath all that and the grackles at least could be heard bathing and nuk-nuking under the fallen tree.

For another view, here’s one I shot last winter. I used the same lens — all the way wide — for both of these shots. There isn’t much shade left there now.

From the footbridge on the trail in winter

These aren’t great shots, but I saw this butterfly while walking along the trail last week and I had to stop and try for a few pictures. I should have opened the lens a bit to widen the depth-of-field and improve the focus.

I looked it up in my butterfly fieldguide, and it appears to be a Queen, which is a member of the Milkweed Butterfly family and is related to the Monarch. As I’ve been doing my weekly bird counts along the trail by the house I’ve been trying to learn the other creatures that live out there. Butterflies are not too hard since they’ll often let me get close so long as I move slow. Perhaps next year I’ll try to learn some of the wildflowers and trees.

I find butterflies fascinating and it’s quite peaceful to watch these little creatures whose lives are so short and transitory. Watching this guy sitting on the leaf, slowing opening and closing his wings as if breathing, was to fall for a moment into a different rhythm as breath synced with wingbeat. When I moved on, I felt as if I was waking up.

I’ve been writing a bunch of poems lately about vultures and grackles. One of those, “My Tourist Yard,” was published at Bolts of Silk today. Check it out and have a look around while you’re there. Lots of good stuff to read.

I took a walk along the trail down to the pond today. It was only about 95°F outside, so I counted it a cool day. Still, I figured I’d see what birds were out, do my weekly count for my Pond Trail Big Year and have a look at what the hailstorm did last week. I forgot to charge my camera battery, so no pictures.

The storm ripped up and beat down most of the undergrowth so walking off the trail was easier, though it was weird with all the leaves that shouldn’t have fallen until autumn on the ground instead of still in the trees. Several trees had fallen across the little creek near the footbridge so it was a lot more open in an area where I’m used to deep shade this time of year.

The reeds near the pond were decimated, and I didn’t see any Red-winged Blackbirds around. That’s where they had been nesting so I wonder if they’ll be back. The herons were away as well so I wonder if their nests got flooded or destroyed in the storm. This was this first time all year that I didn’t see any kind of water bird around the pond.

As to birds, I saw the usual suspects for this time of year: grackles, Blue Jays, mockingbirds, cardinals. In the non-avian category, I saw a rabbit and some kind of a garter snake. Nothing special to add to the bird list, but here’s the updated list for the pond trail, about halfway through 2009:

1. Black-bellied Whistling Duck
2. Gadwall
3. American Wigeon
4. Blue-winged Teal
5. Northern Shoveler
6. Northern Pintail
7. Ring-necked Duck
8. Pied-billed Grebe
9. Great Blue Heron
10. Great Egret
11. Little Blue Heron
12. Green Heron
13. Black Vulture
14. Turkey Vulture
15. Osprey
16. Accipiter sp
17. Red-shouldered Hawk
18. Killdeer
19. White-winged Dove
20. Mourning Dove
21. Black-chinned Hummingbird
22. Red-bellied Woodpecker
23. Ladder-backed Woodpecker
24. Eastern Phoebe
25. Western Kingbird
26. Blue Jay
27. American Crow
28. Purple Martin
29. Barn Swallow
30. Swallow sp.
31. Carolina Chickadee
32. Black-crested Titmouse
33. Carolina Wren
34. Ruby-crowned Kinglet
35. Blue-gray Gnatcatcher
36. Eastern Bluebird
37. American Robin
38. Northern Mockingbird
39. European Starling
40. Orange-crowned Warbler
41. Yellow-rumped Warbler
42. Black-and-white Warbler
43. Common Yellowthroat
44. Chipping Sparrow
45. Song Sparrow
46. Northern Cardinal
47. Red-winged Blackbird
48. Common Grackle
49. Great-tailed Grackle
50. House Finch
51. Lesser Goldfinch
52. American Goldfinch
53. House Sparrow

We grabbed sounds from the air,
stuck them together, draped
language around actions,
tethering ourselves to history
inscribed in vellum, barked
and trumpeted for all to hear.

All this tonnage… it seems like magic.

We learned to tell convoluted
tales, twisting facts like
movements in a bellydance,
sapient and seductive.

What is that mist out there?

We carved the world like onion slices
to be devoured one-by-one,
ignoring the other passengers’
wrinkled noses.

Hold my hand.

Thumbing through the final pages, I skimmed
the moribund bibliography of My Heart:

Bark, Vellum K. Tether the Bellydancing. New Drape City: Moribund Hand, 2003.
Trumpet, J.J. “Tonnage.” Devouring Convoluted Onions. Mistburg: Sapient & Sons, 1993.

Fasten your seatbelt.
The plane will be landing soon.

—

This is for Read Write Poem’s wordle prompt (#79). The idea is to write a poem using a given set of words. All of those words comprise the bibliography portion of this poem.

Another of my “small stones” (obervational micro poems) is up over at a handful of stones: Turtle stone. Check it out.

Whispers flicker in the void, explaining
each color present and how it combined
absent light with permanent darkness.

Overpowering and blinding,
a quasar burns static and noise.

Here, we don’t need sound;
we imagine music and try to sing.

That radio sun burned out ten years ago.

Or so they tell us.

—

This is for Read Write Poem’s Opposites Attract prompt. The idea is to write 2 poems each dealing with opposing elements, experiences, memories, or whatever. Then alternate the lines between the 2 poems to create a single poem.

This was an interesting exercise that went in an unexpected direction. I started with the ideas of darkness and light. Sound crept into both freewrites, thus creating a third layer of opposites. When I combined them, it seemed that the opposing forces in the poem shifted to light and sound rather than light and dark. After combining them line-by-line, I started fiddling with the lines to get a smoother flow from one thought to the next.

Below, I’ve included the original drafts so you can see how the poem developed.

Darkness draft:

In perfect darkness
Whispers flicker in the void, explaining
the absence of light, the permanence of darkness
a radio sun, burning static and noise
we hear music and try to sing

Light draft:

In perfect light
Each color present, combines
Overpowers and blinds
Here we don’t need sound,
The radio sun long ago burned out.

First Combination:

In perfect darkness
In perfect light
Whispers flicker in the void, explaining
Each color present combines
the absence of light, the permanence of darkness
Overpowers and blinds
a radio sun, burning static and noise
Here we don’t need sound,
we hear music and try to sing
The radio sun long ago burned out.

Update: Changed the first line from “Flickering whispers fill the void” back to the original “Whispers flicker in the void.” I think I like that better. Thanks Julie for making me think about whispers and flickering.

Carlos Castaneda’s A Separate Reality appeared in the Season 5 episode of Lost: “He’s Our You.” It’s the second book in Castaneda’s allegedly nonfiction series that begins with The Teachings of Don Juan. I actually own this book, though I had never read it. I picked it up at a garage sale in a volume that also contains the first book and the fourth, Tales of Power. Why the 3rd isn’t included, I don’t know.

I read The Teachings back when I got the book in the mid-’90s, and while it was interesting, I never intended to keep reading. The books are about Castaneda’s supposed apprenticeship with a Yaqui Indian sorcerer named Don Juan Matus. The Teachings of Don Juan was Castenada’s grad school thesis in anthropology, though many now believe he made up the whole thing.

A Separate Reality tells of Castaneda’s second apprenticeship in which he attempts to learn to “see” the world as “a man of knowledge” does. Seeing is more than looking. It is a heightened perception that allows the warrior or the sorcerer to truly know the world as well as perform seeming impossible acts. Being a rational and scientific-minded man, Castaneda finds this to be quite difficult, though he does make some progress on his journey.

Ultimately, it is about the need to shed a hyperrational world view in order to come to terms with the mystical/spiritual side of our nature.

This, of course, is the story of Lost.

The tension between the rational physician Jack Shepard and the spiritual seeker John Locke drives more of Lost’s plotlines than any other conflict on the show. In Season 5, we see Jack beginning to shed some of his rationalism and begin to have faith in the island and his destiny. Jack is, like Castaneda, a long way from becoming a man of knowledge in the mystical sense, but with Locke seemingly dead/evil/possessed, I suspect Jack’s ability to reconcile the opposing forces of reason and faith will decide the fate of the island.

The book is passed to an imprisoned Sayid by a young Ben Linus in “He’s Our You.” It seems appropriate that a book that deals extensively with the shamanistic use of psychotropic plants should appear in the episode in which Sayid is made to “talk” by being fed psychedelics. It also calls to mind Locke’s use of island psychedelics in Season 1 and Season 3. Both times, he partakes in order to commune with the island.

Through most of Lost, we are meant to see Locke as a man on a quest to become that man of knowledge. This makes it particularly interesting that it is Ben Linus who is the book’s owner. I suspect Ben sees more than we think and may even be more of a man of knowledge than Locke or anyone else suspects.

I have no great theories at this point, but there is a quote worth noting from A Separate Reality:

The world is incomprehensible. We won’t ever understand it; we won’t ever unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat it as it is, a sheer mystery!

Toward the end of the book, don Juan goes on to emphasize that one must break free of the prison of reason to become a man of knowledge. Trying to understand only prevents true seeing.

I suspect we’ll never really understand everything we want to know about the island, and quite frankly, that’s okay with me.

—

This will be my last Lost Book Club post until January when the 6th and final season commences. I am caught up with the exception of Flannery O’Connor’s Everything that Rises Must Converge, which appeared in the season finale. I’ll read that and report back as I gear up for the Lost season premiere in January.

Check out the rest of my Lost Book Club posts. I’ve read all 37 of the books references or shown on the show with the exception of the O’Connor book. It’s an amazing list too.

And for the best theorizing around, check out these two excellent Lost blogs and their analyses of the end of Season 5:

Lost… and Gone Forever

EYE M SICK (which also has a cool 3 sentence theory challenge)