It’s the year we take up the land and star thistle, thistle with spikes that pierce denim to branch skin.  We wear black and blue flannel, red and black wool that winter. It’s the winter you trench the foundation, and the foundation, a stem wall, is still there after thirty winters.  It’s the season we crisscross the acres with ditches for underground lines, before sun hardens the earth.  We turn the clay dirt and it riddles strawwhite flat grasses with red like veins in a bloodshot eye.  Spring rains refine our lines.  Seeds sprout a shawl, a leafy coat.


The house wants a chimney, a hearth and I harvest rocks from the creek.  Fractured mountains make pebbles and boulders.  Fancy the mountain whole once more with a cave in its face for a fire.  Storms felled trees; you split them to feed the hungry mouth.  Red embers float, go dark.  You rescue a fledgling, yellow-eyed bird, a black and white squawker ravenous for meat, for bacon, baloney, worms, a Myna relation, loud in its life reclaimed from Mama Cat’s jowl.  It flew from you one May. 


We were three years layering logs we’d peeled from forests in McCloud.  It’s the Spring I set the kitchen on fire between sampling English peas in the garden, peas plump and sweet in catamaran hulls, and the wrong burner lit made our ceiling a sky of fire.  You whistled through re-peeling charred beams, hoisting new tongue-and-groove pine into place, scent so strong it burned the eyes.  How honeyed the tone of fresh-cut wood—and the knots, how they tended toward ruby or whiskey or Karo’s dark corn syrup.   We are twenty-one years one dead, one not.  Our ceiling a sky of fire.  Pebbles round in the creekrun, jumble and rub and roll with whatever water instructs.  Bickering trickles in Spring.  Hiding in roils of flood.


I hide and surface.  The oaks on our land want to break out in fists of brazen green for fledgling nests, but wait, wait for their bark to ease.  The digger pine lean with the burden of last year’s cones, resin-heavy and sodden.  The stem-wall foundation is screened by hydrangea, hollyhock, and Indian hawthorn deer have failed to eat. 


I live in Mexico now.  Sun is my ceiling fire.

Love the bird...baloney etc. At first, couldn't read "Mina relation", used to "myna" but do get the pun, and appreciate it!

This line -- "We are twenty-one years one dead, one not." -- is important and might be a touch clearer, simpler.

Reminds me of Steinbeck, To A God Unknown for example. Very powerful currents. The "I live in Mexico now" maybe should start it's own paragraph, it dispels so much so suddenly, it hurts right there in that paragraph, like food breathed into the trachea. Better in its own tube!

Tom

mina was a minor spelling error.  sometimes the brain works; sometimes, no.  i split off the Mexico lines as suggested.  will have to think on how to clarify the twenty-one, one business.  Thanks, tom. 

ld

Lynn, this one strikes me as sound. I can't decide about its structure. It kind of goes nowhere and that is good except the form begs it to become something complete. As it is, it is a fragment that feels like it has been lifted from another body of work. It could be because there are signs of plot. When I get to the end and we aren't in Kansas any more, I almost get the feeling of so what, like ending it that way is maybe too easy?

The language in here is very rich and Tom's right about the feeling of "To a God Unknown" First time I've ever run into anyone that actually read that one of Steinbeck's.

larry

I need to attend to this one, make some edits, give some thought.  Larry and Tom, thank you both.  I haven't read To a God Unknown, but I just might have to look it up.

Larry, I've signed on for the Brevity online newsletter and am hoping to submit some of my shorter pieces; a limit of two per [is it volume or year?] so I want to not rush off work I can hope to improve.  Appreciate the info there.

geez, when I found Steinbeck I read ALL of Steinbeck, immediately, even the tags on his underpants. if I remember, as it happened I actually read Grapes last and when I hit that last scene, I literally almost died from literary greatness overdose.