Averted Vision
October 26, 2018There are no streetlights where my cottage hides
within a forest. Nights there grant a cold
permission to the stars who drag along
their lazy arc. Away from manmade glare,
There are no streetlights where my cottage hides
within a forest. Nights there grant a cold
permission to the stars who drag along
their lazy arc. Away from manmade glare,
whatever I say I keep alive
keeping you you near
me to the point of me
My first pair of glasses had green plastic rims and Coke-bottle thick, anti-glare-coated lenses, which reflected green light. In every fourth grade photo, my eyes hid behind a glint of green flashing fire, but I did not care because when I slid the glasses on in the doctor’s office, the blurry rack of “For Sale” frames suddenly snapped into distinct lines and angles. I slipped the glasses off, then on again—watching the frames become blurry, then crisp again. Yet even knowing about the stunning change, I jerked to a stop outside the doctor’s office door, my mom and the trail of siblings piling up behind me. I stared at the trees across the street. Angular leaves fluttered in the breeze, avocado undersides distinct from their forest green tops.
For starters, the desert is not empty. Things grow in ways you could not dream up. In the Arizona desert, where I was dropped off as a pain-in-the ass teen, there are ocotillo and prickly…
in counter-sense
the eye hunts out
more than what it holds
On November 9, 2016, I remained in bed all day. The previous evening— what F. Scott Fitzgerald might have referred to as the “real dark night of the soul”—I had broken all the speed limits…
One day, I woke up blinded by white light stinging my sleeping eyes. A thin, radiant line created by a break in my window blinds had been making a slow sojourn, day by day, across…
Looking back with the perspective of fifty years, I can see (and feel) a sustaining philosophy that has guided Dialogue through its amazing half-century tenure, more than a quarter of the entire history of the LDS Church.
For two days in October 2010, “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” was part of the LDS canon. Maybe.
I’m writing this from our roof, where I can see over the tops of mango trees, wet from last night’s rain. Mynas swoop from palm to palm, and enough sun filters through the misty dawn…