My Summer Reading List

Usually I see them traveling north on Oracle Road here in southern Arizona, carrying heavy backpacks and wearing the essential hiking hats and boots. They look like they are on a purposeful journey. Sometimes they are on bicycles loaded with gear and sleeping rolls, pedaling uphill all the way. I have seen one quite inventive bicycle – parts welded together to make a platform for a dog who rode comfortably in style under a rigged roof which held the luggage. It provided shade for an old animal who could not be left behind. Last month it was a young man and woman pushing what looked like a garden cart loaded with their stuff. Four dogs, medium sized and extra small, looked happy to be included in the pack on a long road trip with their people. These travelers have stories to tell, I am sure, of why they left and where they hope to go. What a book it would make, contributing to the canon of the Great American Road Trip.

I will be traveling soon – back to Colorado for the summer and well into the fall. Closing down a house and deciding what you can’t live without for six months takes just about every brain cell I have. One of the first things I pack is my book bag so I know how many I can fit in and if there is a tiny little slot left for one more. This old, rectangular burlap gardening bag has served me well. When I come back to Arizona some books will be left behind and new ones will take their place. Here is a list of what I am hauling on the road this year. Are there essential books that come with you when you travel?

Ford County Stories – John Grisham, 2009. These stories take place in Ford County, MS. and should be considered part of the genre of Southern Gothic. Excellent stories which could join the company of those of Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers and James Dickey. I have already read this book but am bringing it for my husband to enjoy.
Rainbow Pie, Joe Bageant, pub. 2010, Portobello. This is a real life memoir of “redneck America” (see above). The late author takes on a subject not written or talked about very much – the white, working poor of American.
The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, 2009, Ohio University Press, edited by David Yezzi. I have met Mr. Yezzi who is the executive editor of New Criterion Magazine and a poet as well. I trust him.
In The Bank of Beautiful Sins, Penguin 1995 and Beautiful Country, Penguin 2010, by Robert Wrigley. I picked up these books at a bookstore going out of business; what a find. I love his poems. Check out “The Bramble” in Beautiful Sins – a walk into the woods for berries (“my back flayed like a flagellant’s”) where he discovers a gruesome scene from long ago.
My Reading Life, Pat Conroy, 2010, Talese/Doubleday. Many readers may know Conroy’s novels “The Great Santini” and “The Prince of Tides“, both made into major movies. This book is a memoir about mentorship, reading, book collecting and the influence of his mother on his becoming a great reader. He writes so well that this book is worth a re-read which is why I am bringing it.
My Wars Are Laid Away In Books – The Life of Emily Dickinson, Alfred Habegger, 2002, Modern Library. I took a literary survey course this winter and this book was recommended as one of the best biographies of the Belle of Amherst. I think it is time I read more about her.
Dickinson – Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, Knopf, 1993. A little book, just the right size to stick in a bag for bringing along when you have to wait somewhere or spend the night in a crummy motel.
American Hybrid – A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, edited by Cole Swenson and David St. John, 2009. This book presents its poems as a synthesis of traditional and experimental styles, thus “Hybrid”. It includes biographical information on each poet.
Winter 2012 Prairie Schooner, University of Nebraska Press. Stories, poems, essays and reviews, including a portfolio of Native American poetry and prose curated by Sherman Alexie, one of my favorite writers. This book was forgotten on the bookshelf last year and I happily found it this year.
Crossing The Yard – Thirty Years As A Prison Volunteer, Richard Shelton, University of Arizona Press, 2007. I have read Richard Shelton’s “Going Back To Bisbee” and it is time for another look at his work. This memoir of a creative writing professor documents his role in starting a writing program at Florence, AZ. State Prison. Some of his students went on to become published writers.
Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet, Christian Wiman, Copper Canyon Press, 2007. This is a re-read for me since I want to absorb more carefully what he has to say in his book of memoir and essays on poetry and poets. Wiman is currently the editor of Poetry Magazine.
The Open Door – 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine, edited by Don Share and Christian Wiman, University of Chicago Press, 2012. Another re-read for me since you can’t read a poem just once.
The Oxford Book of American Poetry, edited by David Lehman, Oxford University Press, 2006. This is a big book at 1,085 pages and has traveled back and forth a couple of times now. I find that if I read a poet somewhere I can usually find more of his/her poems in this book. I do not have an MFA in poetry. It would be nice to have but for the time being I have taken on a course of study on my own and every good book helps.
What Light Can Do, Robert Hass, Harper Collins, 2012. Essays on art, imagination and the natural world. Hass is a poet, essayist and Pulitzer Prize winner. I picked up this book at the Singing Wind Bookshop in Benson, Arizona, a jewel in the middle of the desert.
Bookbinding – Techniques and Projects by Josep Cambras, Barrons, 2007. I studied hand stitching of books and papermaking in college and would like to tackle at least one project this year. My reverence for books extends to making them.

My book bag is full but “Cather, Stories, Poems and Other Writings” is peering down from my shelf, making me think I might be able to wedge it in. I loved Cather’s “Death Comes For The Archbishop”, “My Antonia”, “The Song of the Lark” and “O, Pioneers”. Time to revisit her, too.

Related articles

• Jolts From Life: Christian Wiman Talks About ‘My Bright Abyss’ (artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com)

Water Finds The Empty Places

We lived below a mountain in a small village in New Mexico on what was once river bottom. The river had long ago become shallow, tame, lowered into the high banks that we would carefully walk down to dip our feet or stand above to watch it wind around the base of the mountain. What was once river bottom was where our house sat and the land was packed with rounded river stones. Cottonwood trees which had fallen as they tend to do, had drifted north and caught on the rocks or tree roots along the banks.

Opposite our house, next to the road leading to the village, were high mesas of sandstone and granite, embedded high up with layers of river rock and huge boulders. Hundreds of years of monsoon rains had eroded the soil into deep chasms littered with the huge rocks that had tumbled into their depths from the force of water. Soil had been eroded from the cliff faces to expose the underlying boulders, too small a word to describe their size. They hung precariously and always seemed on the verge of falling onto the road. Once, after a good rain, a man working on our house caught sight of one sliding a few feet down the slope to rest against a juniper where it stayed for the rest of our years there. There was talk of engineering a barrier to hold back a particularly threatening boulder looming over the highway but nothing came of it. I kept a pair of binoculars on the windowsill to keep an eye on things in general and that rock in particular.

Our meek and burbling river, which shrank to almost a rivulet in dry summers, started in the Sangre de Christo mountains to our south. It gently meandered its way to the Rio Grande about a mile north of us, with diversions along the way to fill the irrigation ditches and passed under a road and highway on its journey to the big river. Every July we waited for the monsoons to come and make the river look like a river again.

One day, after a steady downpour which tapered to a fine rain, I turned to the window in my studio to see that the river had become a muddy maelstrom and had risen to the top of the banks. Outside, the odor of mud was the first thing that hit me, as if I had fallen face first into a black swamp of decaying organic matter. The author, Craig Childs, has written about this phenomenon so beautifully in his book “The Secret Knowledge of Water”: “…a raging dun-colored water that smells of all the villages and lives upstream that have been consumed.” (p. 173).

I ran to our bridge, a solid wood and iron masterpiece that was our only way out from the property, watching as gas cans, beer cans, drink bottles, plastic jugs, tires, sheet metal roofing and fence posts were carried along in the brown insistence of water. Enormous tree branches and trunks were like twigs tossed up and down in the turbulence. A cottonwood trunk, about 15 feet long, heaved under our bridge missing the cross planks by a foot. I could hear the clacking sounds of boulders like giant dice being rolled under the water. Within twenty-four hours the river had gentled enough for us to survey the damage and the changes the water had brought with it. Once familiar boulders were gone or re-positioned downstream. New sandbars had appeared. A big cottonwood log which had been tangled in the roots of another tree for years had been torn away. Corrugated metal roofing and cans had to be cleared from the river and sandbars. On a sandy bank I found a pair of eyeglasses.

After a deluge, cars would be backed up on the road leading into town, waiting for the water to cease flooding the arroyo and the metal culverts and flowing over the small bridge that spanned the arroyo. They also had to wait for the road graders to push the mud and rocks back to the edges of the mountains and mesas.

A young man, a father, would not wait and pulled around the line of cars to cross the bridge. He and his passenger were instantly swept over the guardrails and into the arroyo. He did not survive the water and mud that tipped the small car and buried him. When the engineers rebuilt the culverts and bridge after this incident, they worked carefully around the small cross and plastic flowers – a descanso – marking the site of his death. For days afterward, we would see the half-buried car lying on its side in the rock and sand below when we drove past.

If there is such a being as God, we are told he is willing to forgive us if we ask. People who love us will forgive us many times over the course of our lives and we take it as a gift. We even must forgive ourselves for our hurtful ways which is a more difficult gift to accept. Water, with all its unpredictable power, does not forgive the choices of the uninformed or  impulsive to test its power against themselves. It has no regard for the innocent and undeserving or the foolish who underestimate it.

Water changes the land, changes what is familiar to us. It diminishes the mountains through erosion, carves new channels, deepens old ones, rearranges landmarks, opens sinkholes and washes away cliffs. The boulders of ancient riverbeds and the chasms in mountains are manifestations of water. The descansos on the side of the roads and the arroyos, which will fill and flood again, are the memory of people whom the water changed forever.

NB: I owe a great deal to Craig Childs, an explorer and scholar of the Southwest and its history. You can check out his books, writing and photographs on his website: http://www.houseofrain.com.

Monsoon, monotype.

WHEN THE SHARKS ARE CIRCLING, JUMP.

I live in the desert but often think of the ocean; if not the ocean then I think of lakes, waterfalls, rivers, ponds, monsoons. I rejoice at the appearance of rain and the occasional snowfall. I know what I am missing – salt air, the sound of sea birds and waves and beach combing but not enough to go back. Going back now is in the memory of ocean days.

My husband and I were on vacation, those few hoarded days of summer that are gone nearly as soon as they begin. We are on Paines Creek Beach on the west side of Cape Cod, facing the Bay. We have heard or read that at low tide there is a sandbar out there, covered in giant clam shells and that you just have to wade out a few hundred yards and pick them up. Well, who doesn’t need giant clam shells? They make cute soap holders, receptacles for beach glass and smaller shells and decorative additions to the garden. In addition, we were curious about how big these clam shells really were.

The tide was out and we began wading to the sandbar we could see in the distance. The water was soupy-warm from the heat of the day and its shallow depth. As we pulled ourselves along the water depth varied from mid-calf to waist deep, depending on the troughs and berms of the ocean floor. It really didn’t matter how shallow or deep it was because soon we hit the floating sargassum of seaweed, slathering our legs, ribboning around us and surely hiding creatures who wanted to glide against our skin, take a bite and dart between our legs. Were there baby sharks with teething issues or even bigger sharks cruising under the green scum? Did we actually feel something touch our leg in passing? We thought about what our feet might step on – broken glass, rusted metal, sharp dead things.

I have always tried to persuade myself to not be afraid, to almost force the issue by walking into dark rooms, staying alone in old houses, picking up the phone in the same old houses and hearing whispers but not giving in to fear, whoever they were. We all have experienced that sensation of hair rising on our necks if we see a movement out of the corner of our eye when we are supposedly alone or hear a strange knocking sound at night. Our most basic defense mechanisms are our senses which tell us something is not right even when our minds aren’t paying attention. I did not like the feel of the seaweed and even more so not being able to see what might be underneath but I wanted those giant clam shells. Fear would not win.

My husband was only a few yards away from me. He is tall with enviably long legs. He began doing a most embarrassing but delightful thing to watch. He would lift one long leg at a time and leap from one opening in the seaweed to another clear spot where he would momentarily be free of its slimy swirl around his legs. He looked like a giant crane taking off in flight. He looked like Ichabod Crane at the seashore avoiding all those heads floating around on the bottom.

We made it to the sandbar, scooping up the giant clam shells only to drop them for even bigger ones just a few steps away. We then headed back, our hands now loaded with shells and my husband resumed his crane dance through the seaweed. I think his rationale for this behavior was based on simple physics: the more time he spent in the air, the less contact he would have with the green blob.

I could draw all kinds of allegorical conclusions here such as “it’s the journey that counts”, “keep your eyes on the prize” or “confront your fears to reach your goals” but I won’t sink to those depths. The only lesson to be learned here is how the crane dance is a good survival tactic when confronted with dangerous seaweed and that no matter how much you embarrass yourself and your wife, do what you have to do.

Everything Looks Different Now

My brother, George, dealt with poor eyesight since he was a young child and wore glasses for most of his life. Occasionally he would have to hand off those glasses to a friendly bystander when he was forced to fight the neighborhood bullies. There were quite a few when you were a skinny kid with thick glasses. My brother was in his forties when he was diagnosed with cataracts. He had probably had them for a long time. Surgery to remove these blurry veils allowed him to see things as he had never experienced them. He said he could see the world in radiant color and the individual leaves on trees astounded him. This was a man who loved nature and being outdoors; gaining the ability to see it clearly must have been like having old bandages removed from his eyes.

The loss of George weighs heavily on me. His scarred soul and damaged heart could exult at fresh snow, a rainbow trout spotted in a stream or the flight of a hawk. When I see a great canyon, a herd of elk, aspens in the fall or vast horizons of mountains, I think “George would have loved this.” This poem is for my brother who shared what he loved with me.

GEORGE, 1952-2009

When I look back at the six of us
in the summer of 1963
we are still together then,
framed in a faded photo of imperfect colors.
The hardpan dirt of our backyard
with its ragged strands of grass
is our marked territory
among the old brick houses
whose tall chimney stacks reach for air.
On this barren square of earth
a chapter of our suffering is caught.
Brothers and sisters are told to smile
and you smile, George, innocent, obedient
in this alley of junked cars, sagging fences
and chicken wire enclosures for hunting dogs.
Your shoulders are broadening
as you start your climb to over six feet.
Maybe you lost sight or sense of that height
when you unfolded under the iron sink
in the back room off the kitchen.
Above the shaved patch of your head
black threads hold the skin together.
Your thick glasses are not there -
the ones you would be teased about
for most of your tattered life.
Those will be broken too,
becoming ashes thrown to the wind
like you when you couldn’t smile.

 

Look Me In The Eye And Tell Me I Am Not Beautiful

We get up every day knowing that the sun will rise and if not shine brightly then at least lighten the sky behind the clouds, fog or snow and mark the passage of the hours. The moon is full or not full, we do not remember if the stars were out last night because we didn’t look. We assume we will live out our day doing the routine things that have to be done and plan ahead for doing something not routine. We drive, shop, eat, report to the office, do laundry and one day blends into another so that we wonder where time has gone. We don’t have time to look up at the sky to see it change or look down at the ground to notice that a bit of green is showing in the clumps of dry grass or tracks mark the passing of an animal. We don’t notice those few seconds of absolute silence when there is an absence of noisemakers – planes, trucks, people, wood chippers, leaf blowers, store music, televisions blaring in Wal-Mart. If there is noise in those end-of-the-world moments, it is the songs of birds which fit into the universe like they really belong.

Once in a while something happens which forces us to look, to “be in the moment” with no chance of distraction by other things. So it happened this week when this wild creature appeared at my doors and windows, cold and hungry and making it clear he wanted in. I followed him from room to room from inside and with just the glass between us, got to look into the face of a beautiful bobcat. Again I realized, as with so many of the other wild things that cross my porch, graze in the field and slither along the walls, that I live in their world and they live in mine.

His low growls and padding from door to window to door, wanting to come in and looking so lean, tested my willpower to not throw him the chicken in the refrigerator. Feeding wild animals around here is not helping them; they become dependent and when you are not there, they become lost. So no, I do not feed the wild things but they feed me.

Thank You And Goodbye, Gordon Nash

It has been raining in the Sonoran desert for the last few days. The dust is washed away and the seeds of spring flowers are receiving the good soaking that will bring them into bloom come March and April. Mt. Lemmon, seen from our windows, has a layer of snow but with the return of the sun it will sheet down the rock faces and chasms, glinting like distant waterfalls and rivers. We love to see snowpack on the mountains in the West, water stored for the water-starved here in the valleys.

In my last blog, “Swimming in Stew”, I wrote about my near drowning in a pond and being rescued by a young friend. The story is continued today in a different place, a few years later.

It is early spring, probably March, in Hamilton, Ontario. I am with a new boyfriend. His name is Gordon Nash and we are both innocents in the dating game especially since we met at an evangelical church and we are young, fifteen and sixteen years old. He is a poor, working class teenager like me, being raised by his father after his mother died a few years earlier. Gordon is not my dream boyfriend – he wears glasses, decent but utilitarian clothes and is not yet handsome in his gangly frame and boyish face. He is friendly and sociable though and he owns a little motorbike. Gordon is quite happy to take me for rides since he has a girl behind him, holding on tight. This is as close as we ever come. We never kissed although I wish we had since I at least owed him that.

Being Canadians, we were not deterred by snow or cold and had adapted so well to it that outings in winter were routine and enjoyed. On this day we are hiking part of the Hamilton escarpment which we call “the mountain”. Its equivalent would be a high, long mesa in the southwest. The escarpment is part of a huge limestone and shale formation running from New York state to Wisconsin and its most famous feature is Niagara Falls but there are many smaller falls that pour over its edge. Gordon and I are with another young couple at Websters Falls, one of the most popular in the area. I remember a fairly good snowpack as we followed a path below the falls, full of newly melted snow and cascading into the river below, moving with a fast and powerful current over the rocks.

Perhaps I wanted to distance myself from Gordon; perhaps I just wanted a closer look at the spectacular water running beside us. I started to walk to the edge of the ravine but my boots would not grip the wet snow and I started to slide down the embankment towards the river. I managed to stop a few feet away, half lying down in the snow and feeling the fear of clinging to a precipice from which I could not move unless it was over the edge. Gordon, gallant Gordon, seeing my dire circumstances, held onto a sapling and slid toward me with his hand extended and I was able to grasp it and be pulled to safety.

His was one of those purely selfless acts that people do for another in danger, in this case a teenage boy saving his girlfriend from a freezing and certain death in fast-moving water. I have searched my memory for any selfless act of bravery on my part and found none. As a former nurse I performed CPR on many a dying heart but I was never in any personal danger and it was not a choice but an expected part of my job.

I broke up with Gordon a short while later since my feelings could not melt for him. I don’t remember if I thanked him and I don’t know what happened to him but wherever you are, Gordon Nash, goodbye and thank you from the rivers of my heart.

Return To The Turtle

I think writers and artists have a special affinity for storing imagery, sounds, smells and atmosphere for their future use. Sometimes a notebook comes in handy but you won’t see a flash mob of poets and artists around you, pulling out a notebook and pen to record impressions at every opportunity; it’s just not convenient. So we hoard in our minds those moments that have happened to us and they become a resource bank. I make it sound cold and analytical but it’s not, except to the extent that we are not always “present in the moment” when we are around people – we are thinking of them and the circumstances as a resource too.

In my last blog I mentioned snapping turtles as being one of the reasons I don’t go into ponds anymore. Since I live in the Sonoran Desert I have practically guaranteed that won’t happen. We do have horned toads here though, as well as Gila monsters, lizards and desert tortoises. Animals that still look prehistoric fascinate me. They have evolved to a certain point and then stop because there seems to be no need for further improvement. They are a connection to a history when we didn’t exist, a living relic of the age of dinosaurs.

About 25 years ago I stopped by the side of the road to watch a snapping turtle cross to the woods and pond on the other side. I got quite close, crouching down beside it to take it all in – the enormous claws, heavy, dun-colored shell, the algae on its back and its musky odor. This was not one of those polished-looking painted turtles sunning itself with a group on a log but a turtle so primitive and armored it looked like a tank. They are not to be interfered with by amateurs since their neck can stretch back to their hind feet to snap with powerful jaws. It is still a vulnerable creature because it does not have a retracting neck but if all goes well it can live for many decades, possibly for a hundred years.

At that time I always carried a camera with me since I was studying photography as part of my college art curriculum. This turtle took its place in my mental filing system with the  help of the camera but without a photograph I can still recall every sense of the moment. I later did a watercolor of the turtle and many years later – 25 years later – I took the experience to the next step by writing a poem about it which refers to the mortality of the turtle and of me.

The Turtle

On an old road roughly paved,
corridored with dark woods
hiding black pools filled with the ghosts
of all the leaves that have ever fallen,
I stopped for the great turtle
hauling his heaviness again
to those sunken sediment waters.
He would lay low until spring
unless spring did not come again
to warm his bones, his heart, his blood
enough to lift his armor out.
Slathered with algae where flies gathered
he smelled of a womb of mud.
I could not help with that inch by inch crawl -
he was a snapper with bone-crushing jaws.
That and the age of his shell
gave him the right to his own pace;
his life already longer
than the one I had yet to face.