Prose
In the Ozarks
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- Parent Category: Prose
- Category: Other Prose
[1981]
When I look at these mists that separate trees near from trees far, I realize how much in my life are separated the things up close from the things afar. Though my heart holds steady to the things far away and my mind, like a ship guided by an unknown captain, follows closely after—the tread tread tread of my feet bring me forever back to nearness. The eyes see far, as also they see near, but feet must be always nearby, stomping at the here and now.
So we come back to the old reality, that life is now; it is what happens right about our faces. What we see far off—that we can never have. For even when the hereness of our feet manage along to the far away land we once saw—it is a changed land, once again the old familiar here and now.
And when I look behind me, at the nearness of this green hill as it suddenly rises from where I stand, how I am struck by its closeness, like a clairvoyance. It almost leaps at me. Reality wanders afoot, across the short, living space.
And the stars—there are no stars tonight, as dusk disappears—but last night, stars, vivid and near at hand. For on a dark night, when one is removed from the rampage of the city, distance disappears. The sky peels back, like an orange. The stars shoot down upon us, close, close, we can almost touch them, they are so near.
So the farthest away things, stars, become here and now in our faces.
Leaves
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- Parent Category: Prose
- Category: Other Prose
She took the kids to Briarwood park hoping she wouldn't meet anyone she knew. She needed to be alone—and think. In summer she had brought the children here to swim, so she knew there was a small playground with monkey-bars and swings near the woods. It was a park frequented mostly by immigrant families.
No one was around. She sat on the railroad tie while her kids climbed and slid. It was early November, a warm sunny day. The trees were yielding halfheartedly to the short days and coming winter; they still clung to a lot of green. Yet the ground was bathed in brown withered leaves.
Her heart felt like the leaves. Absent-mindedly she scooped some up and crushed them into brown flakes, almost powdery. She watched the breeze waft them away. It seemed like her heart was disintegrating.
Despite the threat of winter, the sun was bright and cheerful, the sky a mystic blue. Her children jumped and laughed behind her. She peered into the shadows of the woods and wished she could lose herself. She wished she could disintegrate into the soil, into the loam under the layer of fallen leaves, while the trees grew silently above her.
Drop of Summer
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- Parent Category: Prose
- Category: Other Prose
Tonight the wolf moon stares across the night and howls its low & mournful, mid-winter howl. Darkness, and winter still, and a moon-howl of cold still on its way.
But the afternoon!
The slow, unwinter-like hours of sun-flakes wafting down. The pregnant, lazy warmness. As if a day of summer had dripped into January.
The word for today was languid.
Languid warmth that drifts slow and summerlike on the air.
Birds that chirp soft and lazy and languid as they wing in lazy arc across the warm-rimmed trees.
Languid, easy folds of her hair wrinkled on the grass. Sly invitation of her eyes. Warm lips as you bend over her, kissing her long and languidly in the afternoon air.
Not for me!
Not me, chained in my cubicle. Unfree face and hands pressed shocked against the inside window, looking out.
Looking at the languid day.
Unbearable
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- Parent Category: Prose
- Category: Other Prose
Another beautiful day, almost unbearable to have to be inside. But I escaped at lunch and strode down the road a mile, and back. So luxurious to be walking on a day like this.
One walks, and cars, buildings, sidewalks disappear. No longer exist. Just day, and air, and languid summer, and me. Trees waking up, warmth stirring around in the breeze. And, distinctly, the faint scent of farmland.
Then driving home the moon glowing low in the east looked like something painted on the sky. I could see the brush strokes that fastened it timelessly against the dying blueness, even a thin drab cloud someone had dabbed across the moon-face. Impressionistic. Painterly even.
It seemed so motionless, like something severed from time.
Man from Botan
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- Parent Category: Prose
- Category: Other Prose
[late 1970s]
UFO's and aliens, it would seem, have got popular. Especially saucers that come leaping down to pre-appointed spots, removing the small band of faithful off to the appointed stars.
This alien visitors business has been all through the movies, of course, from Close Encounters down to Alien itself. A week doesn't go by but some friend of mine (usually an intellectual I thought quite “safe”) suddenly drops a hint that, oh yes, he too is a “believer”.
Or I discover grown girls (can't call them women) up in strange states like Illinois who eschew sexual relationships with men, saving themselves instead for their future alien abductors who, in a detail apparently so much more sexual than any man could possibly hope to match, look an awful lot like amphibians or big-toed reptiles.
Forbidden Apples
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- Parent Category: Prose
- Category: Other Prose
"See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" is not God’s way. We learn this from Genesis. We learn it as we observe naked Eve and Adam wandering about blissfully in God’s garden of Eden. In that self-same garden God placed the serpent, and allowed it not just to be seen but to be heard as it spoke its words of deception. God never warned Adam and Eve about the snake. Never told them not to associate with it. Never prepared them for the ideas the snake might present. Not a bit of "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" in God’s garden.
God was quite willing to let the snake have its say: its beguiling promise that Adam and Eve could become god-like. God didn’t even offer a rebuttal. He let evil have its say without response.
Not surprising, therefore, that two innocents like our naked Eve and Adam fell head first for the serpents’s guile.
We call it guile, evil. But in fact the serpent did not lie.
Dark Sea
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- Parent Category: Prose
- Category: Other Prose
Another sweep of cloud over the moon, and the darkness starts again.
I climb the promontory and hug my Buddha, and sit and face the darkness of the sea. Dark, peaceful, quiet and only the wave in my ear.
A few shore lights lean across the bay. Torches line the lagoon in front of the resort.
People, buildings, trees are stilled. Caught motionless in time while beyond the real world churns.
Yet here by the statue of Buddha the wind and water are alive.
Buddha looks seaward.
And I, facing the sea, meet the delicious darkness.
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Subcategories
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Ozark Novel
- Article Count:
- 6
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Other Prose
- Article Count:
- 15