Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Flood Stage

It has been storming for days like it did that first June we were in the house. The yard is deceptive; you step into grass and splash into puddle. The dogs hate it. Neither of them care for standing water, bathing, or being wrapped in towels after 15 seconds in the wet grass. When I imagine mermaids in the dark ditchwater, they are part crocodile rather than half fish.

Glancing to the right (I'm working on this in the library), there's a picture of a pressed flower on a blog that looks like a squashed spider. The ghost of a spider splayed over columns of words. If spiders carry stories, that bookcover implies a violent capture of those same stories. Is that the atavism of smashing them? Are they carrying the gossip and the stories that make up our homelife?

Why no poetry today? Watching the creek water and feeling my stomach clench at the idea of the weight of the water, I am thinking not of words but of the ideas that have tangled around themselves in various drafts that are buried under one another on my desk. Several writing meetings recently have brought up the idea of family and heritage to the detriment of me putting pen to paper and then we went to a comic convention that pushed me to admit that I am a fan of the silly rather than the serious. Familial? Carnival? What will the banks look like when the waters recede?

No comments:

Post a Comment