Worm Hole

I try to convince myself

this is the good time--

the music has stopped;
there is the rattle
of ice, the dangle of
                                 conversation.

There is you--

in that soft pink sweater
and dimpled smile,
eyes all a glitter,

but it's only sparks of light
dancing the surface,
everything below
is stone blue ice
that looms towards
my Titanic heart.

I'm jealous--of everything:
of your density,
that everyone here
knows you as well as I.
You, my wife,
the stunning white weight
of my life.

I'm jealous
of these painters,
these poets,
these writers
who flock around
your jeweled presence
to take refuge from the blue
abyss that is
our lives.

I hate how my words never
come together
with enough force
to implode
the lies.

Yet, I know
there is an unseen wonder--
a small but significant canyon
just beyond the endless suburban
sprawl and nylon skies
where a hawk
still does fly.

And there is a narrow wash--a slot
canyon carved through time.
A great myth is buried there
under the coral sands--the song
of a great flood, of a great
sacrifice, of a great love.

If the right poet
were to find it--the right
rhythms, the right breaths--
capture the terrible currents,
the great horror,
the tremendous sacrifice, especially
the Christ-like love displayed
in the aftermath--

well maybe, somehow
these empty evenings
of articulate conversation
would mean something.

Therefore, I
like the others
hang on & grasp
for the right line
to end the endless arctic
of our lives.

© Steve Brown 2016

Recently, for whatever reason, I've begun to dream alternative lives.  This poem came from a dream I had last night.  It evolved as I wrote it, so it isn't the dream, but it's not too far off.  The dreams are always centered around an imperfect world with lots of pain and heartache, but I always wake up feeling that everything is alright, it's just life. 

The Myth of the Dot ("Little Wonders" by Rob Thomas).

Photo by Rio Brown

 

Spring fever and heavy cold is not a great combination.  To make things worse, my brother asked me to go on a long drive deep into nowhere, but I have deadlines and commitments.  Not quite ready to face them, I went looking for a poem about unquenchable desire, what I used to call the forever search, captured magnificently in Bob Seger's "Fire Inside."

I found some old poems that focused on that theme to be sure.  My life was once driven by the need for escape, a constant hunger for something else.

But somehow I've stepped through that door and into another reality.  Sure, I still sometimes want to hit the open road.  I still long for quiet, dark corners of an empty bar, even though I don't venture into such places anymore.  Coffee always has a hand on my shoulder while it whispers in my ear, Go ahead have just one sip, which I don't do because I honor my religion.

But the void no longer calls me to fill it.  There simply isn't that much left to fill.  God has taken residence and I am satisfied.  So instead, I was drawn to a poem I'd completely forgotten about:

The Myth of the Dot

It's a dark and rainy day.
A line of twenty or more ATVs
roars up Canyon Road,
headlights dancing
off the splashing rain.

Everyone wears matching
green and yellow
fluorescent plastic.

Everest and I go outside
to watch the tourists
ruin our way of life.

When they are gone,
he shows me his bug bite.

"You got bit by a mosquito."

"No, it's just a dot."

"How did you get it?"

"It just floated down from the sky
and got stuck.

Then someone glued it."

The poem was probably written the summer of 2004, and so Everest would have been four.  O how I loved our long job-free summers at Dry Creek.  Some of the magic was removed when we moved here, as it is now our standing place in life rather than a carefree retreat.  Still, the magic of small wonders remains.

Such Is the Life on the Edge of a Ghost Lake in the Middle of Nowhere: A Great Basin Journal Entry

Everest and I measured cold on our way back from his doctors appointment:  -4 out in the valley, and that was at 5:30 in the afternoon.  When it reached -1, I joked how it was warm enough to go to the beach.  And then, to his dismay, I realized we were on the beach--the 15,500-year-old beach of Ancient Lake Bonneville, which just happened to lap at the edges of where our little town now sits.  The boys get sick of it, but isn't it great, that while sitting on the edge of a cold, vast desert valley, our town is really a beach town? If the town had any imagination, we'd have a light house and oyster shops along a board walk.  But I seem to be the only one still living along the shores of a ghost lake, watching woolly mammoths graze. Everyone else is interested in growing alfalfa while weighing the pros and cons of occupying the BLM office or the national forest station.

By the time we got to town, it was zero.  As we approached Dry Creek, we stopped to say hello to Harold, Everest's "pet" eagle and his mate.  It was too dark to take pictures, but there they sat, regally looking out on the last of the sunset.

Harold - Photograph by Rio Brown

By the time we got to Dry Creek, it was 3 above.  I parked the van and went inside to get some warm water to thaw out the chickens' water dish.  Unfortunately, I found out their heat lamp was out.  I hoped the bulb had been knocked loose or that they'd somehow unhooked the lamp from the extension chord.  No luck.

I had to plow my way through 18 inches of snow to the trailer, where it's plugged in.  I found where the two extension chords meet, buried beneath the snow.  I unplugged it so that I could plug it into some Christmas light to check where the power failure was.  Again, no luck.  So I plowed through more snow to the outside of the trailer, where the plug had been knocked out.  "Easy enough," I thought, and plugged it back in. Wrong. No lights came on.  So, I decided to go inside the trailer and check the breaker.

Let's just say that it isn't easy to open a storm door out into 18 inches of snow.  The shovel, unfortunately was back at the house.

I returned with the shovel and did my best not to curse while shoveling the stairs and porch, and I did pretty dang good until I realized the trailer door was locked and that the keys were back at the house.

This time, I returned with the keys.  Luckily, the electricity was still on in the trailer, so nothing froze inside.  I checked the breakers, flicked a couple on and off, and checked outside.  Nothing.  Then I remembered that the test switch on the plug in the bathroom also controls the outside plug.  It had been tripped, and when I reset it, the Christmas light outside came back on.

I unplugged the Christmas lights and realized the connecting chord was buried in the snow.  More digging. The entire process took more than an hour.  All that work to get heat to chickens who no longer lay eggs because Rio's dog--let's just call him Satan--won't stop barking at them, and so they're in a frantic mess all of the time.

Such is the life on the edge of a ghost lake in the middle of nowhere.