Today's free-write was pretty good and I felt like something new is coming out of the writing. I seem to be moving into new ground for these characters. These will all still become poems, not prose or fiction, but for now the free-writes stand alone as is. Here's Wednesday's below and then today's below that.
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August 6, 2008
"big whispering sound all over. Geese by the thousands. They blacked out the moon."
"language older than the spoken word."
both attributed to Cormac McCarthy
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When the locusts came it was a great sound throughout the woods, a crowd gathered at the church waiting for the sermon to start, but gossiping and storytelling all the same. Their insect voices chanted and hummed and hem-hawed around the worries of the farm folk. The noise drifted in through open June windows as they dreamed in their beds, and frowns furrowed their faces, of tall weeds which blocked the sun and snakes striking ankles. Wake into the loud orchestra and sigh into the fear. They were incessant and insistent. What could Jake do with the land? Sell it? Farm it and hop next year's crop happens? Let it field rot and let the family sink into debt? And the locusts just kept singing their humdrum song.
One morning in August, after a fight that stormed the porch and left down the gravel road the night before, she swept the porch as she cried. When she had gathered it all into a blue bowl and set it down on the big table, she walked out into the field and plucked the petals of the black-eyed susans for the bowl.
When Jake came home, the house was empty save for the blue bowl of yellow petals. It smelled sweet but sharp -- under the petals he found the dead locusts. She must have swept them from the corners of the porch.
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August 9, 2008
love is memory. "...being earth and water of existence, memory." - Truman Capote
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When Spring came with its rain, long Spring rains that brought in the morning light in silken colors, soft like the lamp light in a woman's room after her life has been spent traveling the world, traveling this field, searching for bits of self in the shadows where the moon had shone the night before. When Spring rain came, the field barely absorbed it. The dry earth became a muddy sludge that ran down to the house, under the porch, over the bottom steps. The longest storms made the house an island in a field lake.
But as she sat on the top step, the rain still coming down, and she looked out at the water, she could see him storming off down the gravel road and she felt the old run-away fear. She saw herself walking with barely anything -- She had buried all her belongings under the moonlight, everything in the house except the blue bowl. She took it all and buried it. If she could not have him alone, he could not have even the memory of her: the blankets, the skillet, the pillows, the dresses she had worn when they used to lay on the far side of the corn field looking up at the stars and moon, the overalls he wore on Saturdays when he came back from the bar... Everything buried and, she had hoped, forgotten.
But here she sat on the old porch, the windows broken, the shingles half gone, and stubborn weeds forcing themselves between the floorboards. No telling where he is now, gone. But all those memories resurfacing in the earth and water, all those things threaded and stained have turned in their shallow graves and sought sunlight as Spring flooded the top soil away year after year.
And that's when she remembered the apple tree. She raised herself from her top-step perch and walked out into the rain and field lake, the muddy water mid-calf, and walked to the far left side. The apple tree now full with limbs and beginning to green. The rain will bring the blossoms. The fence cornered the tree, the place where her mother had died now will bear fruit, apples yellow and spotted, but sweet and soft, and so many that the ground would be littered with the apples, and the earth would bury them, take its own back into the soil and give them back, reborn.
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Writing Prompts, August 9, 2008:
"...for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilac openings, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all the seasons, memory, yes, it being earth and water of existence, memory."
p. 141-142, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Truman Capote
"...there was always between us something muted, hushed; still our silence was not of a secret kind, for in itself it communicated that wonderful peace those who understand each other very well sometimes achieve..."
p. 143, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Truman Capote
"...this was not a hotel; indeed, had never been: this was the place where folks came when they went off the face of the earth, when they died but were not dead."
p. 118, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Truman Capote
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