Somewhere in that space
Sky starry with the
Same reasons as ever
Space enough to get lost
Somehow to be found
Somewhere under that sky
Starry as ever with reasons
© Liana
Category Archives: creative writing
marks herself “safe” in quarantine
Below the Skype-line are Bronco flannels and after 5 it’s the Quarantini . . . I got this!
Cyn wants to know where my March posts are . . . you’d think I could find a few moments to wax philosophic or sarcastic or morbid or fatalistic or optimistic about the state of the world . . . but I have a publisher and a deadline that haven’t acknowledged things as they are . . . so I don’t write for me in my voice . . . yet . . . but soon . . . if I survive . . . coping well enough . . . never bother to get dressed below the Skype-line these days . . . as long as everything from the waist-up appears to have it together, I’m dialing in and calling it good . . . it gets even better with the new house drink, the “quarantini” . . . made from whatever is left in any bottle . . . kind of a dystopian version of the Long Island Ice Tea . . .
palindrome
Two important things happened yesterday–the palindrome day:
1. After weeks under the permacloud of winter in the Mitten, the sun came back. I pulled the car over to grab this shot with my phone as evidence of this miraculous event.
2. I found my voice in a book I hadn’t realized I’d already been writing for several years now. When I heard it, it didn’t sound snarky, impatient and annoyed but joyful . . . as if whooping from the bottom of a well where it had waited for so long to be hauled up in a bucket full of everything I need. I couldn’t see it before . . . but yesterday I could . . . with complete clarity.
From these two amazing events, here’s what stands out:
1. All day, I was rolling my eyes at the big deal everyone was making of the palindromic date: 02/02/2020. But upon reflection, maybe a palindrome creates a portal for a rare and perfect balance of the present with a full 360 degree view of one’s past and future. Maybe it’s taken 909 years to be ready to write my own book in my own voice.
2. Clearly, I don’t give a rat’s ass about the Super Bowl.
a Literacy of the Land
“One must wait for the moment when a thing – the hill, the tarn, the lunette,
the kiss tank, the caliche flat, the bajada – ceases to be a thing and becomes
something that knows we are there.” – Barry Lopez
Living close to water and trees now, I know Lopez’s moment well, but not the word for it. There probably isn’t one, or we else don’t use it anymore. Today’s vernacular is expanding in a very different direction. Our lifestyles have become so digital and urbanized that we no longer need to know the frore surface of this lake is gleet and glibbed. Only a few generations back, those details would have rerouted my ancestors as they went about their hardscrabble existence in the Scottish Highlands–saving or costing them days, maybe even lives.
Landmarks, by the earth-fluent wordsmith Robert Macfarlane, documents this lost “language of landscape” of the British Isles. I’m reading it with art-gallery pacing, pausing after each paragraph to admire the art and architecture of his sentences. And then there’s the glossary itself curated from his interviews and grassroots contributors. It’s “a kind of sustained prose poem–exquisite in its precision and its metaphors” featuring words like:
ar’ris: the last movements of the tide before still water
borbban: the pearling or murmur of a stream
browse line: level above which large herbivores cannot browse woodland foliage
chawn: a crack in baked soil
flippety: young twig or branch that bends before a hook or clippers
glar: thick, sticky mud
smeuse: a hole in a hedge or wall made by the repeated passage of a small animal
zwer: the sound of a covey of quail taking flight
Discovering a lost word can be as exciting as it is futile. For two years now, I’ve tried to describe where I live at Swanchurch without knowing there is a word for these headwaters that are neither a great river nor a creek or stream or brook . . . not very deep except for a meandering channel. This is a seabbainn.
Once upon a time, that one word said all that–and needed to. Even if I can’t put it to work, but I’m glad Macfarlane has bound a museum of such terms. 
Although I can’t remember all the new old words, I still use them–or let them use me. Looking at the mysterious story on a lake in the San Isabel Forest of southern Colorado last week, I saw giel and jabble frozen into patterns rich with meaning. This wasn’t just ice, it was spandled and blae cut. As I tried to translate each feature, something more than I could see became fully real and present . . . and it knew I was there.
© Liana 1/2020
the next last word
here is
where it
begins
always
right at
the end
with the
apostrophe
of your
footprint
in the dust
of your pen
everything
left unsaid
waiting for
You to begin
then begin
again
© Liana 12/31/18
summerily
the next day I will find my wine glass near
something you read about the tendency
to say “firefly” in places that don’t
experience a lot of electrical storms so
lightning bugs are unknown, however
common
“lightning bug” is the vernacular of storm country . . . then
you say something about quantum research that feels random
which I like . . . our sentences like cicadas
sounding up here and there in trees as
the topics splash or just bump against
the dock ’til it gets too dark and whiny
with mosquitoes and my imagination gets tired
ophelia
Ophelia is the name of my macro lens, the one I reach for when I need to get back inside myself.
Last week was a bit over the top for me–two book launches. Giving autographs, smiling for pictures. I was on radio and TV doing author interviews that, to date, I have not seen nor do I care to see, this fleeting ego drosity. I am only writing this down now because this blog recalls things as I want to remember them . . . that I was brilliant and articulate and skinny without a bit of the “how the fuk did I get here?” on my face.
Believe me, equally WTF would have been no publicity at all. I can pretzel around in this kind of contradictory thinking until the full bag of kettle-cooked salt & vinegar chips are all gone.
Actually, this time I did not do that . . . I just reached for Ophelia and fixed her over a nice drippy dandelion until the calm descended.
Does anyone else ever feel this when taking pictures . . . the soothing stasis of holding onto a beautiful moment?
a Columbus of the near at hand
the kitchen curtain lace reflected in my morning coffee
The library does not open until 1pm on Sunday, not one minute early, says the eggplant-shaped man whose hair is side-parted just above his ear. He clutches a book bag possessively and peers at us over Walmart glasses. If there’s to be a line, he’ll be at the front of it, says his stance.
I’m in a random mix of people standing here . . . waiting. It’s too close to 1pm to do anything else. For the record, I’ve never been a person readily willing to queue for anything, which is why I was married over 20 years before legally changing my last name—such was my loathing to spend even an hour in the rope-tracked foyer at the Social Security Office in Arapahoe County, Colorado. This is an awkward, heel-shifting 15 minutes for me, mostly because I need to use the restroom.
I try to affect the look of a person who is here for a more important reason. I scan my phone with the air of one in a rush to pick up her reserved copy of Hurricane Preparedness from the front desk. Maybe I need to set up tables and chairs in the public meeting room for the community action group I have convened to fight global warming at the local level. Possibly, I am checking resources on desalination of water or how to set a broken arm with a curtain rod from the window where your curtains used to be, the ones we picked out together. Chrissakes, does Joely know how to do any of this?
On this beautiful day of early autumn, way up here in the Mitten, what’s wrong with me that I can’t just bring myself present to this short interlude with a few of my species who are safe today, pressing with only the sort of meager demands that a library that can and will open soon may meet.
With the altar call of cooperation that Harvey inspired at Houston, I commit to this tack. And before I can edit myself, I suggest to my fellow concatenators that we bide the time by discovering how we might be connected. Before silence gets the best of us, I plant a question: have any of us ridden out a hurricane?
Silence takes the stage.
OK, so none of us have ever ridden out a hurricane. But Mr. Eggplant volunteers that he has been in deep snow, pouring rain, and intense heat—all at the same time back when he lived in New Jersey. Also, he does not like Toyotas.
Silence drops the mic.
Finally, the heavy-set woman in a Detroit Tigers cap says, well, we like books, right?
Nods and relieved smiles all around.
A bright young librarian who looks like she wanted to be a librarian from the time she was ten years old unlocks the front door and we file in.
On the windowsill in the bathroom, there is a Dixie cup full of marigolds.
~ © 9/17 Liana, on the day Hurricane Irma hit Florida
(blog title: a quote by Saul Bellow)
Moonshine
On the day of the night of the Strawberry Moon, we hiked up a holler to a thin ridge in the foothills of Appalachia. A thick canopy of tall oaks sewn with threads of sunlight diffused everything in the clearing to the palette of gravestones.
This pioneer cemetery held less than a hundred graves, most of them lost under the forest floor. One of the girls buried here was named “America,” and one of the stones was carved in German for Johannes, the man without a wife.
We tried to imagine the lives of the dead. These were the men who worked for scrip at Vesuvius, a great beast of an old Furnace where pig iron was wrought into the weapons of the Civil War. These were the women who died in childbirth or just wore out before they were 40. These were their children not strong enough for winter.
They are the ancestors of this little girl whose other ancestors are Korean.
Imagine all that crowded into her bloodstream.
Later that evening back at the house, we removed 22 ticks between the four of us including a white-spotted tick that could leave Grandma allergic to the protein in red meat from now on.
Lots of locals came by to sit on Grandma’s porch and talk story as the sky filled up with mosquitoes and bats and stars. A truck would drive by and everyone would wave. Wild, raucous tales were told with a certain admiration for hot tempers, hard liquor, guns, and muscles.
All these hilljacks seem related by blood or marriage. They’ve been rooted deeply in this place for generations. I don’t belong, but they make room for me. Neither does the little Amerasian girl seem to fit this scene, nor her dad, even though he grew up here a lifetime ago. His eyes are Santa Monica bluegreen and his fingers bent from a Spanish guitar, but moonshine was washing out all kinds of borders. His Aunt Ruby observed loudly, well, he picked hisself a blonde this time.
No, I thought to myself . . . maybe the Moon chose this.
© Liana 6/17
This. All of this.
I never go anywhere without a little notebook to write in. Sometimes the thoughts written there are slight and undeveloped . . . I read them later and can’t remember why I wrote something like “the trees are just as confused as you.”
It’s to do with them all falling in the same direction, I suppose, away from the water and not into it.
We wondered why.
Other times, it’s a directional prompt that sounds poetic in retrospect: Once inside the station, get a ticket to ride the Breeze.
or “What is the plural of YES?”
My “Little Red Writing Book” (a gift from Jenny) is full of existential thoughts that need to be worked out (or not). What I know about myself pretty much gets known this way.
What the gods had in mind fits into a tiny seed.
Don’t worry overly . . . come March, the winds will replant all the seeds of your worst ideas
and the winds are not going to wait for a committee meeting.
Neither will the gods wait.
Repeat: the gods are not waiting.
“His finger doesn’t point straight because guitar . . . everything I know about divine aberration works exactly like that.”
Five years later, I am still finding Karekare Beach sand in the bed of such thoughts.
Nowadays, I sit on the shores of any big sea water and skip a stone all the way to Piha . . . yet it lands in little cove of Gigha,
All these different waters make up 90% of me.
Eventually, a life gets kindled on dryer ground beside the Chesapeake, the River Traun, little Sunset Lake, the Hallstätter See, the Moray Firth, or the Big Muddy.
Just a small toe-hold . . . I am never in one place the same way anymore.
It’s like I don’t have roots . . . only currents.
I am moved by the Moon or a monsoon . . . I am planted like a Kamikaze or a kiss.
© Liana 3/17
the hour of soft light... 
