Blind squirrels. I’ve got three pieces published in the latest issue of the Santa Barbara Literary Journal. Small offerings, one on the night of Elvis’s death, another a slant telling of an old favorite, and the last, a prose poem to the world of the avocado trees at night. Owls and trees, wolf spiders and sleeping workers.
The magnolia tree buds in the bare back yard. In the empty space beyond, the discarded Christmas tree dries out in the winter sun. Around the fallen tree, footprints—skunk, possum, crow.
Nature, rain, the old roof beginning to leak more, aging. Underground, next to the blood orange tree there are a thousand yellow jackets at rest. Their dormancy won’t last if the dog wanders too close to the nest in search of the thrown tennis ball.
Finding inspiration and wonder in Luis Alberto Urrea’s Wandering Time: “Anyone who has ever engaged an aspen in any meaningful dialogue at all recognizes its optimistic and generous nature almost immediately.” These notebooks from around the year 2000 are a much different tack to his fantastically humorous novels, particularly, Into the Beautiful North from 2009. Would my own notebooks sounded so well-wrought.
Now and again my pen stops, mid-word. There’s an essence of discord in the air. People I know well are off their game, thrown into unsettled ways. The planet has lost its grip on stable rotation and we are feeling the unsteady ground beneath our feet shift multiple times daily. It does us well to return to the small acts of kindness between people. Listening to Naomi Shihab Nye read at Campbell Hall the other night, I was struck by her facility to capture an ordinary moment so brilliantly with her poetry. It is in these unsettling times she reminded me how important it is to find the beauty and the joy around us, to share a word, a meal, a moment with a stranger.
There is nothing ordinary about this time, this world, this unfolding. All more reason for escaping into the trees, discovering a nest, noticing a flicker’s orange-tipped feather, a half-chewed avocado with teeth-marks scoring the flesh, and finding comfort in the simple truths of nature and the wild world.
The Wrong Corner of the Sky 