Skip to main content

Sighting Sound

This morning I awake to just a hint of sound. A whirring and a whisper rising carries me back some fifty years, every time. The sound is the sound of birds. Purring sounds found even in the center of a sliding car pound punctuated/workman interrupted town. The fugue fleshes out with the pour and stir of mourning doves in the backyard. I don't know how near or far they are, but I know that they only visit sometimes. Or perhaps I only rise slowly enough on rare occasion to recognize the sound.

Their melancholy brings perfectly to mind the recall of childhood naps. Naps in the cozy homes of grandparents who babysat, respites in eastern New Mexico, where the air was so dry that when rainfall did pitch the night, we scoured the gutters for the morning's treasures swept up and left there. Little could we have known that our world was coming undone as our parents grew up and outgrew each other. Still, their parents maintained a calm that was unflappable. Short naps in single beds under the protection of pheasant wings hung on the wall as shiny trophies. Or naps in a half lit room with a bigger bed and the durable perfection of grandmother's hair clips, curly and straight, on the polished vanity, closets and corners to explore, though we swore we would sleep the allotted half hour or more. Grandmother closed the door and tiptoed out to forever chores. Ah, but that I could have been patient then and listened. For today the morning hours are thin.

(in memory of Bonnie Jean Dixon Hunt, born this day/no longer with us)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shameless Early Promotion

My poetry book, The Fiction of Stillness, is available for pre-order now on Barnes and Noble. Official release date August 1st, 2024. Here's a taste: ... The table is smooth and round              symmetric         The chairs are haphazardly placed at the end of this day      I have breast cancer I say into the receiver   [communities must] pool resources   How to produce the sounds of the imaging                report into sentences that resonate with months of postponement weighty contrast on my right side   computing and comparing IM ratios for greater insight                          not sufficient to prove the efficacy of screening   ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Vessel

Inside I imagine puckered cups of butter   cookies nested    in paper that  releases a sigh   But instead there may be fiction   within   wishes never reciprocated   Playbill of redundant arguments   One black glove    found fraying   This vessel on an emptied  table   solo     temptation is labeled with  another’s name   Guarded initials as if carved in melting snow     A tool unsuited  to the task of   prying open  Not yet valentine
8 comments
Read more

Open Mic, Cafe Babar

I remember arriving, not the prettiest but appealing  to certain bards in the back room, entering through  the Castro Valley corner door, walking the postage stamp sized  Cinzano bar curated by a man from Detroit who named  his establishment after a certain French elephant in a children’s book I arrive with budding consciousness around politically correct solidarity for disheveled neighbors, entering the cigarette lit night rising to tin siding ceiling to floor thumping insistence   Bruce and Joie and David and Laura and John, their ash and sweat accumulating as I waited patiently for my place on the crumpled sign-up sheet   Today, three decades later, I sit in a Santa Fe gallery named simply Here, and a poet reads to us of roadrunners and a bear and  a continuation of the call for preservation of our environment There is an otherworldly hum outside the window of leaded glass The owner sidles up behind me and pushes the fr...
Post a Comment
Read more