Vision
On a grey board porch, I wait with my father, who has the habit of witnessing. We face the horizon, watching for the first slow flowering of cumulonimbus. The skin on our faces contracts, the hair lifts on our arms. An hour later, the clouds are leaving our sky, passing over the roof of the house behind us, a slow engine of change.
I know the smell of rain phutting into the dust like some people know the smell of baking bread. Just as I have come to know the musk of wet sand where I live now and how the earth smells on the fourth day of rain.
Our house then, my house now, was/is full of books: Webster’s Dictionary—the 1970 edition—Walter Farley’s Black Stallion series, the World Book Encyclopedia with pages and pages of piebald, dappled, and dun horses that made me hungry to understand why a Tennessee Walking Horse was what it was.
I am curious, a puzzler, a collector of small strangenesses. Like the Osadex worm that finishes the deconstruction of a whale by eating the bone. I note absences. A blue grotto below Sorrento that we swim in without remembering its small gods. I’ve a lifelong interest in how the immense can be contained within or implied by the minute. The language of the entire found in the articulation of the fragment. How a broken bit or half-seen image can suggest more, can carry within itself the larger world, the vast network of creation. The beach down the hill from our house is composed of pea- to pumpkin-sized rocks and gritty sand. That sand is a myriad of shapes, hexahedrons, spikey stars, honeycombs, colors ranging from saffron to blush to azure. I cannot recall a time when such things did not fascinate me. With or without an obvious conclusion, give me a wondering, a question, that challenges or widens the scope of what I understand. I am curious still about the thing on the other side of the threshold, the shadow slipping past, the strange. The imagined new heavens, the as-of-yet-undiscovered new earth.
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