Louise Erdrich’s novel The Round House is first and foremost a good story. If I was to recount the basic narrative in less than a page—as you would if someone asked you, “what was that one about?”—I think you’d find it interesting even then, and for me it would be hard to do so without wandering off into some enticing narrative thicket. That’s not something we can say about every book that toys with literary […]
The electric yellow moped caught my attention because it was bright as an eye exam, despite the distance, and because it was tracing a gentle line through space, humming its way along a cock-eyed geodesic around the hill. My focus collapsed, and I lost myself into a cloud of blank-faced calculations. When I came back from wherever it is I went, I was convinced the small vehicle and it’s intriguing cargo were very likely inbound. […]
I walked out into a field of grass and golden light to place my hand upon the sky, and spun the heart wheel. The world blurred into songs– the old ones, the ones that can fly– then became the memory of human heads nodding in the darkness as the truth was shared one to one. Knowledge poured out of me to join with the Directions. It told me that every tear will be wiped away, then […]
Something is happening but I can’t see what it is, because the day sky is an impenetrable scattering of color, and the night sky is too deep to see the bottom. The moon isn’t a reliable reference either, because it’s just one point, and clearly an outlier. You can’t leverage it at all. Though the particulars are being worked out, I still take comfort in this vague arrival– in its presence– whatever it is. I […]
A cardboard tube can make all the difference, and I’ll tell you how. Walking through a flavor of solitude in which I find myself sometimes, covering my face to ward off the trace of distant putrefaction, and squinting into the heat to see if my suspicion is correct about the horizon stockpiling behind its dusty curvature all the sad carcasses not fortunate enough to receive a proper burial– I’m wheezing in the fumes of my […]
The distance, receding. The sky so full of feathers, it’s obvious the gods tore open the clouds, shook them out over the land, and tossed their empty skins in a pile by the river. We’re back in the Dreamtime. The cold has come alive, the sky become an arctic fire, her sparks fluttering in a swirling dizzy of ballerina embers, and the hawk’s vision is still again, flooding my skull, impaling my every thought, studying my […]
Snow is carefully disguised propaganda dropped by spring a few moons in advance of Her campaign, a dusting of crystalline apples and bergamots, acorns and pomegranates, perfect white kernels of new life. Snow is a fresh coat of time-delayed beauty sprinkled onto the land that muffles every footstep and rounds off every corner, dissolving every edge into a pure continuum, while augmenting the whack whack whack of unimpressed woodpeckers. Pay attention they say. whack whack whack […]
I don’t know who or what God is anymore. Each time I say this, my Loving doubles. Once I stepped into a room with block walls and old, worn carpets to sit in the circle with a prayer in my heart while the man who travels through worlds was bound at the center. Light was extinguished, and darkness soared. Singers joined us from the air itself. The drummers poked holes in our boundaries. Lightning tickled the […]
The title to Peter Kingsley’s Reality is about one word short in my opinion—that word being “Check”—but is otherwise perfect on all sorts of levels. It is at once ambiguous, provocative, presumptive, tantalizing, engaging, slippery, and so-simple-it-stuns, much like the work itself and the classical Greek philosopher-shaman-necromancers whose timeless wisdom Kingsley brings to light therein. My favorite aspect of the title is that its simultaneous ambiguity and depth act together as a self-limiting rhetorical throttle. […]
A glowing vector shot across the sky, the last, illumined fragment of a shattered world, screaming in octaves of fire and dissolution. I peered into the majesty left behind, into that gathering field of stars and distances beyond measure, of potency and shimmering songs, feeling its Invitation draw the life within me to the surface the way the moon pulls the water up through stone beneath the land, the way tears rise to the surface […]
Embracing Forever 