(Published in the May/June, 2023 issue of Cathexis Northwest Press)

The God of Gaps

 

At the base

of tall redwoods

I stop thinking 

about thinking.

I wait in the space

between tall words.

It’s October and the late 

afternoon light

rests on its side

yet wavers from the wind.

The wind’s too much

for words I have remembered or found.

The only song now

is up in the crown.

There’s room

between the song I want to hear

and what keeps singing up there.

 

There’s a distance

between the right word

and me. 

Sunlight diagonals

fall through tall pillars of spongy bark, 

from canopy to duff,

to mark the link of shadow and light.

The trees invent the light.

They invite us to parse it.

We learn from what is sparse.

There is a Japanese word

for light like this

in the forest.

I can’t remember it.

I can’t remember enough.

Proper nouns, then nouns… in that order

words slow.

There is darkness between what I knew

and know.

The light in the forest

fills in its name,

komorebi.

Does this not sound like song?

Did it ever not sound like you

or me?

Nature needs to abhor a vacuum.

Without questions, words come

to the dark room between us.

The autumn wind

in this redwood forest can rain down

widowmakers in the gaps

or fill silence

with  a rush of singing

or stain a page

with exactly the right word

as long as this light lasts

and joins us.

(my first fiction accepted for publication, to be published July, 2023, by Half and One )

A Closed Set

Two men in French blue overalls knock on the door and mumble something important.  Something will happen.  We cannot hear them though. I am drinking coffee and I try to open the door, one hand balancing the coffee, the other struggling to close the door enough to release the chain lock.  But they’ve walked away now. I say, Excuse me! But it’s to their backs.

The next day we wake to find an large earthmover parked in the drive. A mound of dirt blocks our door from opening.

We don’t panic, but it’s odd to be trapped inside. I climb out the window and walk to the warehouse next door. I see a whirl of activity. I walk in the roll up door and talk to the workers, some anxiously moving, some sitting distractedly in canvas camp chairs.  Some in overalls, men and women both, some wear business casual.  In my significant voice I ask: What is this? Is it a film?  (There is a camera on tracks. A large man with a baseball cap that says “Manchester City” sits on the seat behind the Dolly.) When will it end? What about dirt in our driveway? (These are reasonable questions! I tell them when I am ignored.)
 
I think the shrugs of indifference are from shlubs who look like workers who build spreadsheets, carry iron boxes of tools, handle a web of cords and wires, and answer phones that do not ring. (Continued....)