by James Brush
Year: 2011
Thrown to Sea
A leopard stalks the high slopes, at home
in a thin-sky world on the blue edge of night.
She pads over a landscape of fossils, old shells
and ancient plastic embedded in stone.
Her tail is a python, pursuing her through the snow,
telling lies and trying to throw her back to sea,
but she maintains her balance, always.
It’s what she does. The sea is just a legend.
The ocean spits out plastic, faded, thin,
but whole. The great-grandchildren
of those who threw it in retrieve the relics,
invent stories and religions for their ancestors,
singing their praises only to go home
and complain bitterly that they didn’t
leave behind something more useful
than just the cast off detritus of their lives.
Not even a boat to get off this rock.
They are prisoners. The sea is the law.
It’s an odd T-shaped island. Flying over
you can’t help but look for other letters,
an alphabet afloat on the Pacific blue,
but it’s just that lone T, and the people,
they are of the sea. They throw their best
plastic in and watch the waves swallow
all the evidence that they had lived.
This is their sacrifice and preparation.
The waves call them. The sea is Heaven.
—
This is something of a mash-up. I’m rereading David Mitchell’s brilliant Cloud Atlas. The opening takes place in the Chatham Islands. I know nothing about them, but I read the Wikipedia entry where Chatham is described as a “t-shaped island.” The snow leopard business and the description of his tail as python-like came from a National G article and many nights observing my own cat and wondering what he makes of the gray snake that follows him everywhere he goes. It must lie to him because sometimes it needs to be bitten.
The sky is newspaper,
the print flown
to join the black birds
huddled against
the leeward sides
of highway signs.
The big story is air,
Arctic breath that burns
away our words.
Silent and stunned,
we gather to witness
the marvel of ice
surviving in the wild.
—
This poem grew out of this stone.
I’m happy to say that I was able to write one small stone each day in January as part of the river of stones challenge. (I posted them over at a gnarled oak where they crosspost to various social media platforms.)
There is something in finding time to stop for a moment, engage, see, and try to write, creatively, what is seen that strikes me as prayerful, a sentiment I’ve mentioned here before. It has the capacity to change—for the better—the way we see and interact with the world. There is peacefulness in it too, and I had almost forgotten that.
Starting the year with this simple approach to opening has been a joy and a pleasure, and so hats off to Fiona and Kaspa for setting the river flowing and reminding me of the importance of slowing down to witness the wonder of even the most ordinary of moments. These moments are, after all, the stuff from which lives are made, if not remembered and celebrated years later.
I plan to continue doing these each day by making it part of my daily writing practice again. That was always my intent with a gnarled oak when I started it two years ago, but I fell off over time, and weeks would sometimes go by with nothing. They say doing something for 30 days will make it a habit, so we’ll see if that’s true.
Old teeth still talk. Shards of bone and flint
blades found in Spanish caves, scraps
of DNA unravel the edges of a story—
a sentence from which to divine an epic.
What tales did these other humans tell
when their cousins came north, surrounded
them and built a new world full of strangers?
Did they know their time had come? Did they
dance with ghosts and worry about decline?
Did they imagine other isolated outposts of their kind
lonely and encircled also by these wise interlopers?
I would like to have known them, and I wonder
how the world would be if there were still
mirror humans, living in a shadow world,
hunters stalking slopes alongside us,
mysterious as strange footprints in the snow.
The sun must still have risen and set, ice receded
as the world shrank down to just a range,
a hill, a cave. Is this the way of age, this shrinking
of the landscape until we wander no farther
than the yard, puttering around our piece of earth,
no longer wondering (and just a little afraid of)
what lies beyond the blue gray mountains?
—
Inspired by the National Geographic article “Last of the Neanderthals” (Oct 2008).
We Talk of Trains
Road signs, riddled with bullet holes,
executed for the mathematical precision
with which they spell out isolation,
define and witness the desert loneliness.
We talk of oceans, beaches beyond horizons,
valleys hidden in the mountains, extinct volcanoes,
ruins and the railroad tracks following the highway.
A crumpled taco wrapper flutters up from the backseat.
Someone grabs it before it escapes out the window.
Dust devils swirl outside, wrestling earth and sky,
spinning proof that everything only wants to escape.
We talk our dreams in circles, always
winding up at the same rest stop, a teepee-shaped
gas station, the movie we’ll make when we get home.
A train rumbles alongside us; sharp-edged
graffiti decorates boxcars. We wonder about people
who painted their anger on a train in Saint Louis
only to watch it disappear into the desert.
—
“We Talk of Trains” and the accompanying photo “Train in Round Rock” were first published together in ouroboros review #3 (July 2009).
—
I’ve been going through old photographs, cleaning out the closet. This is from sometime late in 1992. I was in college, taking a photography course. I chose graves as my subject matter. I spent the semester tromping around all the local cemeteries, graveyards, boneyards and gardens of eternal rest.
I stroll the streets and dodge mangy grackles,
fluttering birds in trees, those angry grackles.
Black feet and dark beaks snap at my sandwich—
I’m surrounded by the grabby grackles!
I sit a bench and study pawns and queens
‘til “checkmate’s” called by the cagey grackles.
At dinner parties, I near drop my drink
shocked by the sins of the feisty grackles.
I hang for hours on back porches, strumming
old guitars, swapping lies with folksy grackles.
At night, I roost in city trees and sing
croaking wild songs, toasting jolly grackles.
—
This is in response to Big Tent’s prompt about alliteration. There’s some in there, but the process led to a ghazal and some grackles.
Go to the Big Tent to see what others came up with.
For those who may not know, grackles are, like blackbirds, members of the icterid family. Here in central Texas, we see two species: the common grackle (Quiscalus quiscula) and the great-tailed grackle (Quiscalus mexicanus).
This post was included in I and the Bird #142 hosted at Birds O’ The Morning.
I get antsy if too much time goes by, and I haven’t made anything tangible. Whether it’s framing a print, making a chapbook or making a guitar, I find I just need to do these things. It’s like exercise for me. If I don’t do it, I slip into a dark funk. I suppose making useful objects is intrinsic to being human and for a long time, it was considered the very thing that separated us from the apes (until, of course, we learned that apes and even some birds also make tools). But, to my knowledge, no other animal makes guitars.
The cigar box guitar I made back in August was the most exciting thing I made last year. Perhaps because in doing so I learned so much about how stringed instruments work, but mainly because I made a thing that worked and did a good job of doing what it was made for. That is an exciting thing.
When my dad saw it, he asked if I’d make him one. I thought it might be a good Christmas present and so the week before Christmas, I set out on my second cigar box guitar build determined to learn from the mistakes I’d made on the first one.
The biggest flaw in my first guitar was that the scale length (distance between bridge and nut) was about 2 inches too long. This made it impossible to string it with acoustic strings because the tension added by those extra 2 inches was more than the acoustic strings could stand. I had to use electric strings on mine and while it works, it just doesn’t sound as nice. So I cut my dad’s guitar to a more reasonable 25.5 inches or so, which allowed me to string it up with light gauge acoustic strings.
Other than that, I did pretty much everything else the same; although, I did use a much nicer cigar box. It’s thicker and made of a more resonant sounding wood. I discovered the differences in wood sounds while sitting in the humidor of a nearby cigar bar thumping on empty boxes. This one sounded sweeter and richer somehow so I bought a few of the same brand and wasn’t disappointed.
I didn’t wire it since my dad doesn’t have an amp so that made it simpler than what I did last summer, and I didn’t fret it because, again, it seemed like a lot of chances to ruin the neck and anyway, I like the fretless feel of it especially when playing with a slide.
It was easier to make this one because I knew the tools and the process and didn’t have to rely on trial and error as I did last summer. It was also not 103F in the shade either. That helped a lot.
In the end, I was quite pleased with how it came out. I still don’t have the carpentry chops to make things that look really artful, but it works, it’s playable and it sounds pretty good, I think.
Have a listen:
—
Perhaps remixing your old posts is the lowest for of blogging, but I saw this old post from 4 years ago listed in the “On This Day In” section of the sidebar and realized that my small stone for the day was to be found right here in the blog archives.
My old feet are pinprick cold these days.
I sleep in socks and dream of stars
and wear slippers all day long.
I ruined these beat old stompers
when security had me marched
down from the moon.
(Hand me that Epsom salt, would you, hon?)
It was a long road down,
and I wore lousy shoes.
The way was cold, strewn with debris,
the Earth just bluing then.
I stumbled over gravity, kicked back
the comet curtain and saw you,
so beautiful by the pale light
of my old waning moon.
I lost track of the steps I took, then.
Eventually, I quit counting all the miles.
In the end, though, they forgot all about me,
but then that’s just how it goes
for us used-up old goddesses, isn’t it?
(Oh, baby, these dogs’re barking.)
—
This is for Big Tent Poetry’s latest prompt, which suggests we write about feet. That’s where this started but then it walked off (har-har, oh I slay me) in a surprising direction when I found myself writing the line about walking down from the moon.
There are just a few gnarled oak chapbooks left. It’s a collection of my favorite micro-poems from 2010 previously tweeted, ‘dented or otherwise shared. Let me know if you want one. They’re free and I’ll ship them anywhere.
Read more feet poems here.