Falling victim to our odd non-winter, one of my irises lost track of time and bloomed far too early. Its madness stokes my mania for spring. I’m restless and unfocused, tempted to open my windows despite the cold. Should I trust the iris? Perhaps it is a more reliable prophet than a sleepy groundhog…
The Cat
In my house is a one-eyed cat
Poised for luck on a windowsill
Her remaining eye is cataract clouded
Clarity lost in a dark instant
A distant wound salvaged
By surgery, her blind futures averted
She is pure patience perched
On a shadowed brink of world
Blurred by screen and mystery
Unaware of her own tragedy
Unruffled, the cat is vigilant
Staring down lawn with one imperfect eye
Lest light slip past her window
Tragically unobserved
Before I Knew
Before I knew pleasures
Should be guilty
I climbed trees
Forfeiting homework and chores
In search of the beginning
Of wind
In those days shadows danced
Proved the sun moved around the Earth
(Did Ptolemy climb trees?)
Before I knew history
Was more ancient than myself
I hunted arrowheads
Scouring new plowed furrows
I exhumed fallen masterpieces
Of war
In those days summer ruled
Proved we would live forever
(Was Einstein once a child?)
Before I knew memory
Shaped the future
I dreamed easily
Dozing among the branches
Bare feet thickly shod
With dirt
In those days apples beckoned
Proved the universe was infinite
(Did Newton also dream?)
Published in The Powhatan Review, Vol. V, Number 1, Summer 2005
I once believed that I was not suited for any landscape outside of Tennessee. I was a green and rust girl, addicted to leaf-litter and streams, katydids and quail. How could I learn to love anything other than what I had known?
When I moved to eastern Virginia, I found everything too vast. Too much sky, too much ocean, too much horizon. The sand, pine straw, and salt marshes shifted unpredictably underfoot. There were no katydids. If there were quail, I couldn’t hear them for the gulls.
Virginia was blue and beige, flat and salty. It felt barren, a virtual moonscape compared to the ridges and hills of “home”. And I felt jaggedly out of place, a coarse river-stone rolled loose by some sudden flood and washed all the way down to the sea.
Fourteen years later, the coast has grown on me, and in me. I’m still a girl of green and rust, but no longer frightened by sky. The sand has polished me a bit. I’ve discovered that a little salt in the water does not equal poison. Best of all, there are green places here, too, where I can feel at home.
My camera reveals a small, shy, distant world that I cannot enter on my own. The zoom and macro functions transform me into Alice, and I crawl eagerly through the tiny lens, emerging in a land of wonder.
Rae Spencer 