writing

Watershed

Rae Spencer6 Comments

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

Rae Spencer7 Comments

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

Photo Failure, Tufted Titmouse

Rae Spencer2 Comments

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.

Little Mysteries

Rae Spencer6 Comments

(First, I apologize for the green fence. I blame the weather.)

Second, there’s a rabbit in the rose bed. It’s been there most of the morning, and I have no idea why. It isn’t grazing, just sitting in the rain as if waiting for something.

Third, there’s a squirrel on the fence above the rabbit. A full-alert squirrel, complete with full-alert scolds, waving its tail in agitation.

Fourth, there are yellow-rumped warblers. Flitting and chirping in nearby branches, the warblers add credibility to the squirrel’s alarm. (Because birds are more credible than squirrels…)

But there’s nothing to explain the rabbit’s vigil, or the squirrel and warbler alarm. It’s just a scene, a few moments cut from the yard’s mysterious context.

I feel like a child, plaintive in my need to know. I ask, again and again, “Why?” And the yard, like a distracted mother, answers with silence.

On the Learning of Things Small

Rae Spencer1 Comment

On the Learning of Things Small

Eve understood her sentence
The source of such expansive pain
Which blossomed in her womb
Seeded by an excess of knowledge

But her children
Though given the tale
Lapsed into miniature schemes
They hungered to harvest

New fruits and found suffering
Weaves through the smallest gaps
Like atoms and genes
Twined into a fitful scale

Until detonated, when
They unwind their blinding
Flash in every flesh, then
Mushroom into brilliant loss