Yellow Ocean

I was born with the ocean

tossing spit balls over the rocky California beaches

into my windows.

I was just a baby

when Mom and Daddy loaded everything in the car and we drove

over mountains and through wheat fields

and past the sunflowers dancing along Kansas highways.

I was crying

when the air got heavy and the wind drooped with salt and

Mom and Daddy parked the car in Florida.

I was a stranger there.

Palm trees and swamps and millions of people crowded me in for eighteen years.

But I was a stranger there.

I was all grown up

when Mom and Daddy loaded me onto an airplane

and I flew over mountains and past the Kansas sunflowers.

I was laughing

when the air turned fresh

and the wind teased the mountains

and the hills that rocked like a thousand marching camel humps.

Yellow wheat rolled and swayed like ocean waves:

I was in a new sea.

But

I was home.

The Fish

A prose adaptation of Elizabeth Bishop's poem.

I wriggled my toes in the water sloshing in the bottom of my canoe and a beetle bumped against my foot. A green spider scuttled along the hot aluminum, wobbling like it was dancing with the burning metal. When it hid in the shade under my seat, I baited my fishing hook and tossed it into the green water. Then I closed my eyes and let the sun flicker orange over my eyelids and freckle brown across my shoulders. Dangling my hand out of the boat, I ran my fingers through the lake water and felt the weeds slither through my grasp like water moccasins. 

            Suddenly my fishing pole moved and I snatched it and reeled in fast. A tremendous fish jumped out of the water and landed on my foot. He didn’t wriggle or flop. He just stared up at me with eyes that were bigger than mine and tarnished, like dirty tinfoil. I reached to pull the hook out of his lip and found that it was tangled in four or five pieces of old fish-line. They looked like medals hanging from his bloodied lip, and I stared and I stared at them floating in the water and the victory in the bottom of my canoe. Then the sun caught the edge of the hook—stuck in that old fish’s lip—and light glittered over his tinfoil eyeballs and sparkled on the hot aluminum canoe until everything was “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow. And I let the fish go.”

Florida in the Summertime

This is a trochaic poem (at least, I hope it's trochaic...) I wrote for Rhetoric class.  As much as I love all this snow, a warm, Florida thunderstorm would be pretty nice, too.  

Black across the sky appear

Clouds as dark as growing fear

Crashing thunder, lightning bright

Shapes revealed in shining light

Pounding rain is harsh and yet

Children dance with rivulet

I am driven out to play

Hands and fingers meet halfway

Sticks and stones in water race

In the gutter they embrace

Splashes, screams and shouts we make

In the road we find a snake

Actually, it is a worm

Poke—and watch it twist and squirm

Covered in a gooey slime

Florida in the summertime

Calvin and Hobbes

Not that I would ever do this, or anything....

Barnacles

I wrote this for Rhetoric Declamations yesterday.  It was nice to think of a warm summer's night as cold crept through my doors and windows and plopped itself in my lap.

If you turn a flashlight on at the beach at night, you can watch the light bob along on the backs of all the crabs swarming around you. There are these places at the beach called jetties, where all these big rocks are piled up like someone tried to build a road out to sea. One night I climbed out on a jetty with my friends. Barnacles nipped at our toes like snapping turtles as we tip-toed along the boulders slimy with algae and fish guts. When we got to the end of the jetty, we nestled in with the barnacles and sea shells and watched the waves come in. At first they were pretty small, just splashes on our legs as they rolled to shore. But as the tide rose, the waves grew until we could see the water start to swell up hundreds of yards out, as if a monster was going to burst from the depths. Then the swell moved toward us, growing bigger and bigger until the top of it turned white and it looked like hundreds of miniature sheep were getting sucked into the sea. And then it was all over us, slamming our faces, our stomachs, shoving us into the barnacles. As it went back out, it tried to take me with it. My friend grabbed my arm as I was yanked off the jetty and threw both of us against the rocks, back with the sea shells and the barnacles.

Spirits of the Earth

The weather here is as indecisive as a fat kid in a candy shop.

Yesterday I walked a farmer's field, the muddy stubble rising in hills beneath my feet, the green grass poking its sweet head in between the furrows.  In caelo supra valles, sol lucet clarussior quam feminae ornamenta.  (In the sky above the hills, the sun shone brighter than a woman's jewels.)  The sky was bluer than the ocean on a still day and in the distance, I could see Moscow Mountain, its peak white with snow.  It was cold, but as the sun set it hung close to me, warming the world in a dusting of golden light.

This morning I sit cross-legged on our gold velvet couch; across from me stands my Charlie Brown tree: slightly bent but cheerful strung with popcorn and cranberries.  The world is white now, swirling in furies of snow falling hard, fast, crooked.  It began less than an hour ago, but the red car in the neighbor's drive is now topped with white and the road is thickly dusted.

As I walked those hills yesterday, my shadow bobbed along on the next hill over, waving back when I lifted a hand in greeting.  I could feel fairies and dryads all around me.  The world is surely magic, full of spirits and the spiritual.

Snowfields

Snow has turned the fields outside Moscow into wilderness.  It makes this place treacherously beautiful.  When I was sledding, snow streaked across the old farmer's hill we were on; everything glowed orange in the falling white.  Trees in the distance stood fuzzy, like an old photograph--and just as quiet.  It felt as if we had been displaced: like we, laughing in our wool hats and wet gloves and ears full of snow, were the only creatures alive in a land of whiteness.  

It was magic, being alive just then.