Adrienne Rich

How lucky I was to have a houseful of girls tonight, laughing and eating, with just so much chat-chat-chatting. They have questions and their own contrived theories – could this be true? This? Would life be different with a houseful of sons? Somehow, I think so.

Driving to the movies, in this dark November night, I listened to their talk braiding around each other, and I realized these girls know each other through language. Too often, I’ve thought of my own use of language as either tool or weapon. A few years back, I wrote an essay about industrial wind in VTDigger, intentionally using language as weapon. Now, in the bits of journalism I do for paid work, it’s a serviceable tool. But these girls remind me, again, of simple loveliness of speaking, and that the deepest profundity is often what’s right at hand.

…If you can read and understand this poem
send something back: a burning strand of hair
a still-warm, still-liquid drop of blood
a shell
thickened from being battered year on year
send something back

— Adrienne Rich

Woodbury, Vermont

The other day, my younger daughter asked me what I would choose if I could I pick two talents. Talents? I thought, wondering at the unusual use of the word. She told me, What I would choose is to make clouds and to fly. I want to be a bird, she said.

I love this in my child: she didn’t stop where I would have – imagining a bird’s flight. In the book I’m writing, turkey vultures come and go, and I’ve spent a considerable amount of time metaphorically transporting myself into that wide wingspanned flight. But never have I imagined making the clouds, creating the literal landscape of sky around those creatures. In so many ways, I see my child’s life as fuller than mine, not diminished by the pieces I’ve outlined: chores and work and writing and pleasure. For this child, her life is still all one unfolding tapestry of landscape, and her longing to fly is just one woven element of the mystery’s enchantment.

… we’re forced to begin
in the midst of the hardest movement…
At most we’re allowed a few months
of simply listening to the simple line
of a woman’s voice singing a child
against her heart. Everything else is too soon,
too sudden, the wrenching apart, that woman’s heartbeat
heard ever after from a distance,
the loss of that ground-note echoing
whenever we are happy, or in despair.

Adrienne Rich, “Transcendental Etude”

Landscape Not-Vermont….

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

Tool, Weapon, Daily Bread

Vermont Landscape of Imaginary Birds