DiaBLOGue

History, Memory and Imagination in Virginia Eggertsen Sorensen’s Kingdom Come

March 28, 2018

Many years ago Virginia Sorensen wrote me a prophetic letter. She had just read my article, “Through Immigrant Eyes: Utah History at the Grass Roots.” She sounded breathless: “For years and years/’ she wrote, “I have believed—for what reason, I wonder, since I never really lived in the houses where the true tradition was but could only visit a while, and listen, and pause always by the gate where I could hear and see it?—that I was the one to tell this story you speak of. Almost I have heard The Call!”

The Handing

March 28, 2018

—for Beth Rich 

She was seventy-one, moving on. Her five-foot-two 
leukemia-lessened to eighty pounds, only 
her hands the same, large, fanned storehouse of comfort, her
vitaligo, the brown pattern of taking on 
the sun to map the journeys:

Proud Flesh

March 28, 2018

Dad doctors Rudy’s leg, 
torn and jagged 
just above the hoof 
enmeshed in barbed wire. 

Selling the Chevrolet: A Moral Exercise (vol. 16, no. 3, Fall 1983)

March 28, 2018

This is the saddest story I have ever told. Not because The Chevrolet is gone, but because it probably is not. 

This much is known. During the Christmas season of 1973, Gene and Charlotte England traveled to Salt Lake City from Northfield, Minnesota. They made the trip in The Chevrolet—a brown stationwagon of uncertain origin.

The Rose Jar

March 28, 2018

Musky as the cedar drawer 
in Grandmas’ standing metal trunk, 

a genie scent, improbable and 
distant as the sound of hooves on sand

Two Trains and a Dream

March 28, 2018

I. October 8, 1908: A Train

Pulled out of Green River, Wyoming, heading 
West toward Salt Lake City. The Mormon prophet, 
Joseph F. Smith, was going home from a visit 
to Boston, with his traveling companion.

The Weeping God of Mormonism

March 28, 2018

[1]In the book of Moses, revealed to Joseph Smith in 1830 as part of his re vision of the Bible, we learn of a prophet named Enoch, who is called to preach repentance to his…

Out in the Shop: In Memory of Grandpa

March 28, 2018

The sun shines a triangle through the hazed glass 
of the shop door, spotlighting the eternal snow of dust
falling and collecting, as if by magnetic force, 
on drill bits, saw blades, and boxes of nails. 

Encounter

March 28, 2018

Absently, I opened the medicine cabinet 
in my folks’ house (searching for a comb), 
then stood stunned as you wafted out 
like a genie, so generous with cologne