11 April 2022

Dry Desiring

They say whisperings
Heart entangled
Plank bridging Crooked River
They say remember
They glaze fire
They say paradise
They make tracks
Say sky before time
In Great Yearning
They do not say
In rapt desiring
They make ties to bind
Irrigation Gate wall
They say collateral damage
Bones they said

Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are fewer enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittlebush in a dry wind. 

— Barbara Kingsolver from High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never (1995)


NOTE

Photos Crook County Oregon, late March 2022, a filling-the-sky country entangled in "Exceptional" Drought. I wonder, how in our gage of things unfolding as Exceptional exceeds Extreme?  I wonder, how when do Words collapse under the gravity of unknowing? -DB


CODA:  Poem by Jaime de Angulo ((1887–1950) in Coyote's Bones:

Coyote, ululating on the hill,

is it my fire that distresses you so?

Or the memories of long ago

when you were a man roaming the hills.