Rick Hartwell is a retired middle school teacher (remember the hormonally-challenged?) living in Southern California. He believes in the succinct, that the small becomes large; and, like the Transcendentalists and William Blake, that the instant contains eternity. Given his “druthers,” if he’s not writing, Rick would rather still be tailing plywood in a mill in Oregon. He can be reached at[email protected]. Prairie Passage Grasses undulate in a freshening breeze, prairie roiling much like a huge animal shivering its fur as it wakes and stretches; tactile ululations announcing another dawn. Two wild geese spotted heading east into a winter sunrise – “red sky at morning, sailors take warning” – wondering if birds squint against such brightness. Honking is at first call-and-response then one voice skips a beat, retrieves timing so they clack and flap in unison until they drown below the horizon. Wandering across this open prairie without a deadline or a destination, I encounter what was once a machined, futile attempt to prevent free passage: A long fence-line of barbed wire, two strands in most places, three or four in others, slackened, no longer stretched taut, fixed on splintered wooden posts, Some of which, being decayed with rot at bottom along a seam of high-water mark or where snowmelt each spring, leaves only amputated stumps dangling askew. Now I focus on this distraction from my view of subtly-hummocked high- plains steppe rich in wild, late-winter- wheat in a face caressed with ravines. It was a barrier once meant to restrain the have-nots from the land of the haves, or to sever from sheep and to cleave to cattle, or just to quarter and contain land. What was once open-range, performs now as gaming platform for hawks to plunder small darting prey with zeal across this divide fallen in disrepair since cowboys no longer Ride the fence-line repairing breaks in company with their lonesome memories; and tufts of hair or fur or cloth caught on barbs have mostly rotted away and an occasional plastic bag Signals surrender to the spurs, as it flutters or droops from the wire as weather demands. The slow squeal of a windmill down an arroyo spins tales of vacancy and loss as it draws up Water from a receding aquifer, slurping slowly into an oblong tin tub roofed in moss and skaters. Avian, animal and reptile tracks crisscross the muddy overflow; though, unlike the intent of the barbed wire, This miniature oasis serves as treaty-land of sorts, bequeathed by an age submerged long past beneath a winding-sheet of natural grasses covering the slow bleed-out of a land once verdant and fertile. Above the windmill and the water trough, at the end of a footpath grown indistinct, on a trailer without tires, sits a shipwrecked sailboat with a hole in its hull that pleads a tale of the vessel’s demise, but settles to serve instead as landlocked houseboat for casual habitués of this vast sea of grass in no need of man as mariner or marauder. Hospice, Home Harbor Continents drift together, bruises colliding colorfully – blue, black, green, yellow – enlarging from the sites of self-injections; her body at war with itself, ravaging the victorious along with the vanquished, and here is so little a neutral country can do, neutered by frustration, fear, expectant loss – ignored for all that. She, so weak, so faint, nauseous, and I, massaging islands of flesh trying to liberate the pain of her civil war, am too late to redeem pawned promises, seeking forgiveness for unspoken sins, which won’t salve the other’s wounds. Persistently, land masses flow together, expanding across the world of her body, eclipsing the smooth paleness that was my map to pleasure her when younger; as I remember her streaming body awash with seas of sweat after sex under a fallow moon at seventeen, seen through eyes of remembrance, though now seventy, awaiting results – tests and consultations – facing the global apocalypse fast approaching. And I, too, am defeated at war’s end. Phantasms Cutting the throat of night, the sky bleeds across the horizon; or, viewed differently, the life’s blood of day seeps into earth. Three plums depend from a gnarled branch, a pawnbroker’s marquee inviting the curious: come and browse or bite, surrender to appetite, redeem recollections of sumptuous fruit, and knock down the seeds next to the birdbath, cycling the seasons for each new generation. Peeking through the window like an avian voyeur, an observer of birds at bath; giddy watching sparkles from feathered splashes; no other reference – phantasms: Flashback of the bow-spray, rail down on a catboat at 10; sweat pooling between her breasts at each breath at 17 beneath a summer moon; an accretion of memories. Things of nature, as well as men, possess their own philosophies. Litmus Test Suddenly, aloft, accusations begin with raucous chirping: Tiny yellow bird, seen distantly, canary or perhaps parakeet – hectored by several ravens and a single adolescent hawk – plunges into a rose bush forest to escape hostile intentions. Being different seems as subject to attack among avian as among human; perhaps birds, too, have differences of religious beliefs or are merely organized as against song. Unknown whether the butter-feathered bird escaped or not, but the predators, sated with indignation, drifted away, and such drama before breakfast prepares me for morning news. Perhaps God’s Nuts There have been too many ways by which God or god or gods have been characterized. Perhaps it is not too bizarre to personify the universal creator as a paranoid schizophrenic. Did (s)he start all this with a big bang, accelerating towards an unimaginably immobile and frozen entropy; or, is such a big bang decelerating towards nil only to then crumple into a super-heated singularity? So then what? – Unfolding again in a parallel manner with the same or similar outcome? – or, perhaps collapsing again to a nullity, a nothing, from out of which it, this universe, originally burst into being or, another chance, - collapsing on through such a singularity, punching out to another dimension? It seems likely that such a schizophrenic architect has multiple psychoses, any of which, or in combination, may sketch the dawn and death of stars or entire galactic assembles, of black holes or obscure dark matter. All of this presupposes that such an unstable author partakes in the busyness of this one universe, let alone the prospect of meddling in a multiverse simultaneously. Conceivably, we are all nuts; merely the rant, the paranoid imaginings of God or god or gods at tragic play.
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