“Their pallid, subterranean ways,”
the chapter in the botany book begins,
“make them incomprehensible.”
It continues, though, by expounding
on the contrary, the common
sensibleness of their jobs – to anchor
the plant in soil, absorb water
and minerals, store food. The narrative
continues with more technical matters,
never to follow up on the enigmatic
opening line. Or maybe the author,
a many-degreed botanist, was suggesting
an alternate realm of meaning, or lack
thereof, divorced from roots’ habitual work.
But it struck a chord with me, for how
can we but be in the dark about roots
in the earth, burrowing, spreading?
Deep or shallow, they are too deep for us
to follow where they lead. There is no sense
seeking full disclosure, for what replies
they grudgingly may offer would bear little
resemblance, at bottom, to the unrevealable
truth, no matter our bootless digging.…
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July 2017. As we depart from O’Cebreiro and enter the forest that wends down into the Navia Valley, Lou casts her daily intention into the dimming stars.
“Today I walk for my mom,” she declares into the darkness.
S. and I acknowledge it silently as Lou’s mom materializes in my mind. If it is the village that raises the child, she is in every sense my auntie, my elder, my second mother. On the cusp of her retirement in January she had received an initial diagnosis of cancer, but the prognosis was only confirmed a week before Lou left to join me—her cancer is endemic. Chemotherapy will prolong her life, but never save it.
I look up through the dark arms of the Evergreen Oaks and Portuguese Oaks, marveling at the silent intelligence of the trees. …
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I remember as a young girl when it was possible to behold a million stars at night, now I’m lucky if I observe only six at any given time. But that was then, when I lived far away by the sea and the stars burst throughout the cosmos as far as the eye could see. Now I live the city dweller’s lot, with artificial light impairing my view of the universe. Excessive use of manufactured luster with polluting glare, skyglow, trespass and clutter shifts my attention is shifted towards a neighbor when lights are on and shadows are no longer cast. I see them roving about and I wonder what goes on behind their walls where I cannot hear their words or sense their thoughts.
For instance, the family next door in the apartment facing my kitchen window.…
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In the narrow space between the side edge
of the granite bathroom vanity and the wall,
a speck of a red spider built a tight web
that trapped no more, it seemed to me,
than puffs of talc, soap bubbles, moustache
hair. Catching sense of my looming shadow,
it would tuck itself into the gap. We co-existed
thus, for days, and eviction never crossed
my mind. The morning after a weekend away,
I saw, in its place, a web vaster and more flaccid,
hosting a gray spider, many times the size
of my unobtrusive and likely digested friend.
Catching wind of me, the new squatter tried
to wedge itself in the corner by the back wall
away from the conspicuous web but its rear
rear abdomen and trailing legs stuck up, flailed
and wouldn’t fit. …
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In the early 1990s on a frosty winter’s weekend, I attended an international school job fair at Queen’s University. I had only been teaching in Canada for a few years, but there had been a freeze on salary for teachers in the Province of Ontario. I had taken loans to return to university to complete my Honours Bachelor of English & Drama degree. Due to the pay freeze, I wondered how many years it would take me to pay off those loans, that seemed to hang over my head like the Sword of Damocles. I drove from London Ontario, where I was living and working, to Kingston, and the attractive Queen’s University campus. I was nervous and excited at one and the same time at the prospect of possibly being hired to teach at an international school.…
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Rita reminded Irving of the female leads in the after-school movies he had watched fifteen years before at his babysitter’s house (Rebecca: she was on the high school track team, her mother owned a travel agency, and her father lived in Montana). However, unlike most of those characters, Rita showed no interest in remaking herself—Irving had the satisfied sense that she would not be exchanging her thick glasses for contacts, amplifying her straight, shoulder-length hair into unnatural heights, throwing out her jeans and T-shirts and replacing them with mini-skirts and an inconsistent array of jackets and halter-tops, not in any scenario he could predict, at any rate.
They met in their last semester at college, in a seminar class about autobiography. He was taking the class because it was the last English literature seminar that was available, and he needed one to fulfill his graduation requirements.…
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It was long after school ended and most people had gone home. Only the volleyball players were left running drills in the gym and a few of us sitting around campus waiting for our rides to come. I dozed on a stone bench by the pickup curb listening to whatever came out of the gym door. the squeaks of sneaker. The smacks of serves, saves, spikes and returns. And, of course, the thuds of defeat.
Then, as if manifesting herself from an amalgamation of these sounds, she startled me from my sleep.
“Are you free tomorrow afternoon?”
At first, I ignored her, thinking her words were meant for someone else. Even though I recognized her voice, we had hardly spoken to each other.
We were in the same grade in high school and had gone to the same schools since elementary.…
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