Marred by asymmetry, she is earthbound. Vulnerable and imperfect. Even on such a day as this, under such a sky, life is a painful, messy pursuit.
nature
Watershed
Watershed
Really just a stream
What we called simply
“Creek” (in accent: “crick”)
Shallow rills for summer wading
Cold flanks of limestone spring
We ragged group of nymphs
Sisters of my youth
Bolted gaily, daily
Down the hills, pooled
Ourselves beside the bank
We harried crawdads from their dens
Gave silver minnows fairy names
We saw ourselves in damselflies
Molting toward our adult wings
While sustained by infant gills
What snakes we found in Eden
We kept all summer in our rooms
Their flicking tongues, feather light
Spoke nothing of temptation
We loosed them in the fall
As time loosed us one season
To gain the winnowed air
We gleamed in bright emergence
Damp jewels ferried on a breeze
Into brilliant scattered flight
Published in The Journal of Liberal Arts and Education Winter 2010
Reading as a Sacred Art
Reading as a Sacred Art
If the words said nothing at all
You would still read meaning
In the spaces between them
Feeling your way through tangled text
Pauses and pronunciation
Bend under your touch
Familiar words flex into phrases
As hard to know as a stranger’s yesterday
Anything I meant to say
Is obscured by what you meant to hear
And the words remain mute
Captive in the spaces between us
Unable to convey
What I am saying
And not saying
The words do not speak
If anything spoke
It could not be written
Muttering along the margin
Reciting in the tongue of Eden
The first rule of words
Which supersedes both our meanings
That innocence and truth
Cannot lie together
Now we understand
As long as we speak in Eden
Say rib and serpent and lost
What you hear
Was not written here
Could not exist
Until it was lost and found
In your own experience
And if the words said nothing at all
We would still need meaning
In the spaces between
Moss Forest
If I were a fairy, I would want to live in a moss forest.
Photo Failure, Tufted Titmouse
I’ve been hearing a tufted titmouse call for weeks. These birds have a loud, clear call that carries. (You can hear a sample here.) I find it hard to guess how far away the bird is, when I hear one calling, but it always seems to be across the road or in a neighbor’s yard or a few streets over.
Today one visited our yard, hopping through the pear tree as it sang. I desperately wanted a picture of this little bird and managed to catch several frames of it. None of them are quite right. The top photos are my best shots of the day, but I never did get “the” picture.
The following are a few of my failures. They are like many of my writing failures, suffering from poor focus, flat light, or awkward angles. But, unlike my writing, I can’t save these photos. They are missed opportunities with no chance of salvage. I can’t edit them into success.
I hope to remember these photos the next time I sigh over a stubborn phrase, resenting the work of revision.
Rae Spencer 