blue wheelbarrow: first post

Saturday, April 14, 2007

first post

Spring is arriving in our latitude. The snow is nearly gone today, and eagles--an adult pair and a juvenile--are perching in popple trees along the Leaf river near our farm. The Sandhill Cranes have been back for ten days or so, and we hear them every morning sing their prehistoric clacking song. The ground hasn't settled yet. We're afloat for a time while the skin of earth remans disconnected from the frozen ground below. I continue to hope that Thoreau was right about this flowing time when he proclaimed that all men's sins are forgiven on a bright spring day.

There are only a couple of weeks remaining till new life change arrives for my son and daughter-in-law. Soon they will introduce my wife and me to our first grandchild. If the world hadn't been giving us news enough about spring, our expectation provides confirmation that the frozen time is dead. It's good to wipe away the crust of winter from our eyes and hear and smell the commotion of the world born again.

from "The Names"

When Pohd-lohk told a story he began by being quiet. Then he said Ah-keah-de, "They were camping," and he said it every time. I have tried to write in the same way, in the same spirit. Imagine: They were camping.

In my earliest years I traveled a number of times from Oklahoma to the Navajo reservation in New Mexico and Arizona and back again. The two landscapes are fixed in my mind. They are separate realities, but they are sometimes confused in my memory. I place my feet in the plain, but my prints are made on the mountain.

N. Scott Momaday

from "The Lives of a Cell"

from "The Fork River Space Project"

I have just discovered I can magnify objects by a slight pressure on the lids of my eyes. My head lies on the pillow, a fold of the bedspread touches my nose. The weave is coarse. If I press lightly on the lids of my eyelids the material of the spread looks like a fishnet. If I lid my eyes and turn to face the light, I see a color glowing like heated metal. Across it motes flick, like water insects. The color changes to a smog-filtered sunset. If I give myself over to this impression, I am free-falling in space (that is my sensation), and only by an effort do I recover my bearings. I owe this to Harry Lorbeer. He started me thinking--or should I say seeing? On the mind's eye, or on the balls of the eyes, or wherever it is we see what we imagine, or imagine what we see.

Wright Morris

blue wheelbarrow

Saturday, April 14, 2007

first post

from "The Names"

Invocation to the muse from "Ceremony"

from "The Lives of a Cell"

from "The Inner Reaches of Outer Space"

from "On Photography"

from "In the American Grain"

from "Anecdote of the Jar"

the best prayer I know

from "The Fork River Space Project"

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