bruorton

for Scout

So, here it is. The last page
in a notebook I’ve turned into poems
and torn out week by week
to pass from my hand into yours.
Now we come to it, the heavy
handed symbolism is hard to miss: the
inside cover scored by a hundred passes
of my exacto, shearing off unwanted tatters;
the ghostly absence of so many missing pages,
which seems to beg a melancholy reverie
on the vanished, unrecoverable past.

But why dwell on the scars and losses
of the last two years? Why not, instead,
on frogs lurking in their duckweed;
union minutiae and emergency transport;
countless hugs and medical commiserations;
lunches on the couch with Freddie;
an eclipse; horror films and books
recounted; a constant cycling back and
forth of tupperware? Honestly, tear
out this page. Throw away these
empty covers, this vacant spiral
ring. The pages that are full
are bound between us.

art credit: Precious Cargo by E. Hart

dogzilla2312: it was awesome, he won by just running in circles, they couldn’t hit him until the time ran out

zomBmom: omg reminds me of Sendula

dogzilla2312: huh. wuts a sendula

zomBmom: you know, big cargo vert whose programming somehow got it thinking it always needed to return to the back of the line for unloading?

dogzilla2312: thats hilarious. so it just kept circling back when it got to the front?

zomBmom: yep, would never actually dock and let the bots unload it.

zomBmom: but worse, the bug jumped to the other cargo verts via the docking sequence reader

dogzilla2312: lol, buncha ships just circling to get behind each other? hahahah

zomBmom: !! yeah

zomBmom: THEN when they tried to reroute the bugged verts it spread to other docks lol. Shut down a ton of shipping for about 48 hours along the whole BAMA sprawl before someone fixed the bug, but the knock-on shipping delays lasted for months

dogzilla2312: I sort of love that we know the name of the vert that started it

zomBmom: oh yeah it was like a folk hero. the news was so depressing that summer, Syzygy broke that year and the first Timor corpwar had just started and we prob all just needed something to laugh about

dogzilla2312: yikes i bet

zomBmom: sendula was everywhere for a while. “don’t let them take your goods” and “no means no” memes, someone even created a sendula holoskin that flashed for a hot sec

dogzilla2312: amazels. when was this?

zomBmom: oh uh lesse… 51, i wanna say? you don’t remember this at all?

dogzilla2312: haha dude i was just 2

zomBmom: well great now i feel old

( On to the narrative... )

Because my kidneys were failing
and I didn’t have a donor yet I had
surgery on my left arm to prepare it for
dialysis. Because now the circulation
in that arm doesn’t work so well
I carry a little stress ball to squeeze
to try to keep it from retaining fluid.

Because all last week I kept forgetting
to carry it with me I made sure to
put it in my jacket pocket this
morning. Because I still had to brush
my teeth I laid my jacket down on
the table and went into the bathroom.

Because I left the door open and
because the table is visible in the
mirror at that angle and because
my cat loves investigating anything
left on the table I got to witness
him pawing at the soft ball he

discovered, a hidden toy just
for him, prancing in his delight.
Sometimes I lie awake hours feeling
that my life is an immovable weight
I must somehow endure another day
when, from out of nowhere,
joy overtakes me like a flood.

Last night I dreamed I was witness
to an exhibition of magic. True magic,
where a dead twig came back to life.
There were other miracles too:
a wooden dowel was turned
to chrome by dipping it in a liquid;
when it dried, it rang when tapped
like a tuning fork. A mug of water
was turned to boiling milk –
an exothermic sorcery? –
which, when it cooled, could be
drunk. But I only had eyes for
the resurrection. I could not have
cared less about the incantation
spoken by the magician before he
bit down to rip the twig from its
dead branch with his teeth. Only how
the new leaves, tiny and hesitant,
pushed out from each old leaf scar.
Only the way its crackled skin
turned smooth, and lustrous.
The way the terminal bud grew
once more ruddy with purpose,
straining to find a way forward.

for Lizzie, who is leaving the country

Eruptions in Tonga bring us a rainy season,
we complain about the weather, and
the rivers threaten to overflow. You cannot
step into the same river twice, Heraclitus
opined; neither the river nor you can ever
be the same. There was a joke my father,
a retired philosophy prof, loved to repeat:
Heraclitus’ wife saying “Don’t be an ass—
of course you can, if you just walk downstream.”

Walking through this summer has felt
to me like a favorite childhood book you
never wanted to end, wishing you could
follow the characters on beyond the last
page into that other world, the one
where they go on just living happily
after all adventures are over, doing
the dishes and going about their days.

We reread our favorite books, but give
Heraclitus his due: it’s never quite the
same. We’re always a little older. We know
how it ends. That it ends. We pick up
on things we missed before. But I
suppose that means the book itself
is always new too, in a way.

I don’t mean to be writing a book
myself, here. I just went looking
for a way to say how much I’ll
miss you, how much it has
been raining inside me. The
way it threatens to overflow.

Not to worry. I do trust we’ll get to
pick up this book again at some
point. One day the page will turn
and there we’ll be, our own little Ratty
and Mole, messing about in boats.

We’ll be different, too; older, maybe
wiser. More aware of endings. I do
realize how much of the last few years
neither of us wants to repeat.

But I dare to say we built ourselves
a little haven, here amid the depression
and the heartbreak. A companionable joy.

Of any gift I could give, that’s the one I’m
sending with you. The one I’ll carry safe.

I’ll see you downstream. It’ll all be new.

In the news, the wars rage on.

The terrible and the duped

strive tirelessly to make the world

worse. The world, tired herself,

seems to be complying. But while

the stakes do seem to go nowhere

but up, history would suggest we
have always lived under this pall.

Meanwhile, our attention snags

like a bare foot on every jagged nail

of aggravation. This morning the coffee

spilled. The cat made a mess as you

rushed to get out the door. You hit

every stop light. One of those awful

starts that inevitably heralds, perhaps

manifests, an awful day to come.

It's a survival instinct, I suppose,

to focus on the worst things. But

what is survival, these days? Last

weekend I somehow forgot until

evening the medication I must take

every morning to stop my body

from destroying itself. Behold, a

tiny miracle: I am still here. This

morning I didn't notice until after

rinsing my contacts under the faucet

that I hadn't closed the sink drain

first. A terrible start to the day

that never manifested. And now,

walking across the yard, a raven

is making a hilarious ratcheting

noise with its throat, like those

wooden toys designed to simulate

a croaking toad. Juvenile robins,

summer's first brood to the pair

nesting in the old wreath on the

garage, are flitting about to test

their wings. After two solid weeks

of rain, the sun is only partially

obscured by clouds.

Trees have assembled
an exquisite mosaic
at the beaver dam.

for Lizzie

That tree was part of me, or I was part of it.

I'm not quite sure. Four feet thick at the base,

with grooves in its bark I could wedge my hand into,

it was a mainstay of my early years. Its climbs,

its views, as intimately known as family. The games

I played, dancing in and out of its dappling shade

with a certainty that never countenanced

the storm-wracked day it fell upon our home,

shattering the ridgepole, chimney, windows.

Were it not for the house's rugged post-and-beam

construction I'd have been part of it for good;

the main trunk crashing to rest mere feet above my head.

After the rain, we opened the door to find its canopy

snapped off into the yard at the far end from the jagged

stump: the lawn, become an upside-down jungle.

The next day, gazing up into the blue cavity

where it had stood, I saw a bird circling, bewildered.

It is that bird I think of now, when she says

she's not feeling much of anything exactly,

the week after her husband of six years moved out.

She's sitting on a stool at her kitchen bar,

turning her water glass in circles, counter-clockwise,

and achingly it comes to me that nothing I can give

could fill the breach she's standing under.

But once upon a time,
some anonymous worker

knocked an oak peg
through a hemlock tenon,
anchoring it in its mortise socket.
A momentary, forgettable gesture,
that allowed me to walk out

into the sudden jungle of the world.

I woke with a poetic thought
simple, spare,
three lines at most.

In the manner of dreams
it evaporated
by the time I was upright.

Several times I tried to reclaim it
but all day my page remained blank
until driving home

I saw the full moon rise
pale, translucent,
in an empty winter sky.

And where will I find this,
perfect and wondrous?
…I slip into rain,
slip into rain.”
–Karen Peris, “Green Bus”

   The first time she was only a toddler, barely even walking at all. Her mother had set her down at the foot of the porch stairs as she rushed across the lawn to take down dry laundry from the line, as an early summer thunderstorm began to spatter fat drops. As the first few struck her, Jillian used the bottom step to lever herself up on pudgy legs. Borne on a gust, a sudden spray of rain swept the yard, just as she took an unaided step toward her mother.
    And there she was, on an infinite white beach. She remembered this moment all her life, as with other early memories, like a fragment of a dream. Nothing moved on the beach but the steadily falling rain, obscuring the distance in every direction: the gentle surf, the wavering line of damp pale sand, the curious trees inland with delicate stems and jagged fronds.
    It was unspeakably beautiful, flawless, in the way only a dream can be. The sort of dream that has imprinted as an indelible image, when it isn’t really even the image that matters, but the emotion that inexplicably blossoms up from nowhere knowable, unfiltered by actual experience, a feeling which can never be shaken off.
    Then she heard her mother’s voice calling and turned back, stumbling against the porch and falling backwards into the grass on her small rear, and began crying. Whether the tears were prompted by the unexpected bump or the sudden loss of heaven, would have been impossible to say. They were not distinguishable to her.
    ( Read more... )

We buried him in the high meadow

where he always loved to race ahead

and hide in the tall grass, then pretend

to ambush us when we came along.

We left no marker, with only the edges

of displaced sod to show the grave

which will disappear by next spring—

so that, not knowing where precisely,

this whole field will be his resting place.

Or, at a greater remove, this whole mountain

where once he ranged up and down

with us in all seasons, whether in the dark

and moody hemlock woods, by the stream

as we foraged in autumn for chanterelles,

or up the steep eroded slope, to the hidden

orchard at the top, planted generations ago,

giving still an ambrosia perfume every spring.

But this seems the right place for him

to rest; nothing more is needed.

For a gravestone, simply the sun slanting

on the distant pines. For an epitaph,

the thrush and chickadee calling

from the great and spreading ash.

A sub-zero trudge two miles before dawn,
my knee stiff, aching, I stop cold
on the bridge. A riveting cacophony
rises up from below,
a susurration and hum:
ice battering ice in a fast channel.
Downstream, somewhere
far out in the gloom where
this river flows into the larger
comes an ominous snap,
a seismic shift amid
intractable glacial shelves.
There is only the slightest
smudge of light in the east,
nothing you can hold on to.
Yet high above the freezing fog
an invisible crow announces,
raucous and undaunted,
the rebirth of the world.

I only wanted to remind myself

that I have heard the quiet voice.

The wind high in the pines on a hill

as the first blanketing snow falls steady, steady.

The muffled, gurgling brook

amidst the frozen woods.

The clarion call of the pioneering blackbird,

returning to stake his claim while there is

still ice on the marsh.

Perhaps you have heard it too,

that unexpected divine voice that

speaks straight to your innermost heart,

on which all the rest of your life
is only commentary.

Under the thin ice, black bubbles swell
and melt and writhe, living Rorschach blobs
flitting hypnotically away in the water's rush.
Downstream, where the banks widen,
stiff lacy collars surround each rock,
arctic islands in a frigid stream.

Yet further on, where logs jammed
with dead leaves form a small cascade,
the spray has coated the moss and twigs
with an exquisite glistening armor in bulging
mineral lumps below, hung over by
a hundred crystalline Damocles' swords.

How profligate! And to think that there are miles yet,
upstream and down, of such unmatched wonders
that no one will pause to marvel at today,
or any other. And tomorrow they will be gone,
transformed from one impossibility to another:
a universe of unrelenting extravagance.

[this story is a follow-up to this concept piece]

A brief summary of the primary genders of the First People:
- Pneot: attuned to air and sky and things that breath; usually hunters
- Geot: attuned to the earth and water; usually foragers and fishers
- Hleots: attuned to sun and fire; keepers of the camp, teachers, crafters, raising of children
- Praots: anyone changing from one gender to another, or bridging or in between genders; attuned to change, esp. birth and death. Most often those who bear children.
- Rmaots: rare, attuned to strange and unusual things, like time or dreams. Typically seek out their own unique calling.

Children were considered genderless until one clearly expressed itself.

~

Tsaki was in prar sixth hour of labor when Chele became hopelessly bored and wandered off. Chele had come along in the first place due to delusions of grandeur -- which, being so young, had proven easily dispelled. Wone had recently become a midwife at only 15, and Chele had overheard two adults discussing with admiration how Wone had been observing births for about as long as hle could walk. Thus inspired, when the midwife group, the payen, had gathered to accompany Tsaki to prar chosen birth site, on what passed for a mountain near the village, the eight-year-old Chele could not be dissuaded from going along.

( Read more... )

Saturday mornings with K

are blueberry pancakes,

always. Or waffles, on

occasion. But either way,

a sacred time together.

This morning, as usual,

I end up with a spoonful

too many blueberries,

and since by this time

they are already thawed

I simply eat them,

the crisp strange tang

of their juice taking me

not to just any of the

times I have eaten

wild blueberries

in my life, but to the one

tiny patch that grew

near the marsh above

my family's house,

now swallowed up by

the encroachment of trees

and time, where I

and my brothers spent

so many afternoons

foraging together.

I awake hot, sweaty, mouth parched.

Sitting up carefully, I let my head swim

to shore. Is this fever? Is that nausea

I feel? It has been some while since I

last fell afoul of it. But this year,

this year.

I make my way to the bathroom,

mind in what passes for racing

in its thickened state. Is this it?

The one I've been isolated for

9 months to avoid, only to find

it incubated at last? I review who

I have interacted with, brought

cookies to, over the last few days,

who I have exposed. I consider

how it will feel to have accomplished

no more than I have up to now.

Disappointing, I decide, but beside

the point. I have loved the world

imperfectly, and been loved in return.

If this is to be it, it is enough.

I take my handful of nighttime pills,

and return to bed, thinking of St. Francis

asked in the garden what he'd do, if the end
of the world was coming at sundown:

"I would finish weeding my row."

I drift off, and wake again in the dark

a few hours later, still too hot, but

this time less disoriented. I rise again

and check: yes, we forgot to turn

the thermostat down before bed.

So, a couple friends and I were discussing how magic would actually change a society -- as opposed to the fantasy trope of "medieval-ish world where some people also know magic, but it does not fundamentally change anything." And it was observed that to work out a realistic magic society, you'd have to go back to the origins of culture, to the very beginnings and work your way up... and one thing led to another, and now that's what we're going to try to do, as a sort of correspondence writing game thing. We worked out a few fundamental starting concepts to orient us and how our early people think and maybe the first glimmerings of how they use magic -- from "place" and "death" to more practical things like "food" and shelter."

My first entry is "gender" and the only request was that it not be some boring binary patriarchal nonsense. I was entirely down with this, although... I may have gotten carried away. Critiques are welcome.

( Read more... )

The moths are everywhere;

when you unfocus your eyes,

the woods are filled with their

dusty featherweight wings.

Their erratic spiraling seems

so aimless it's hard to imagine

how they ever reproduce,

and yet: here they still are.

They even have their own beauty,

if you catch a glimpse of one resting

briefly on a tree trunk: silver and beige

painted delicately on a fine cloth.

K. is on a boulder by the stream

waiting to see if she can spy a fish,

one of the tiny ones so far uphill.

The moths flit about her, ephemeral.

The boulder under her is on

its own journey, out of the epic

glacial past and into an entirely

unknowable future, so slowly

that around it, the lot of us—

the fish, the moths,

even the whole forest—

are all whirling aimlessly about.

I do not know what will happen

tomorrow. Yesterday is still

an aching tooth in my head.

Today is a mystery I have yet to solve.

And yet, here we still are.

The moths of late spring

are everywhere, after all,

once you begin looking.

Long ago, when the sky was still close to the ground, two twins were born. The first burst from a coconut when the sun was high, so he named himself Anisweizu. The second emerged from a kudu’s blood that pooled on a stone worn into a bowl by the rain, so he named himself Pardenewa.

Pardenewa understood suffering, so as he travelled the world he considered how to make life easier. He sweetened whatever fruits he came upon, and softened the knife-sharp grass, and pushed around the stars into patterns that could aid travelers.

Anisweizu found this a silly pursuit. It seemed to him that life was already too easy. And so he began by tampering with things he thought too simple, or too convenient. He made streams and rivers flow only one direction at a time, instead of both, making them harder to travel on. He gave the fruits he found hard pits, or tough rinds. He teased the wind, always a gentle soul, until it became angry and confused and would every now and then throw a stormy tantrum.

But this was not enough for Anisweizu, because it seemed for every thing he touched, Pardenewa made something else less difficult. Finally, Anisweizu decided the way to win this contest was to think bigger. So Anisweizu began to dig. He dug down to the very edge of reality, and he wore the edge of it thin, and then he blew and blew into the thin place until it ballooned out and swelled up until it was almost as large again as the world.

He climbed down into this space and created another world there, an imitation of this one, but one where he could set all the rules. Finally, he created death to pull people out of the real world and down into his own, and he dictated that no one who died could ever, by any means, leave his world again. And there he set himself up as the Lord of the Dead, and soon his land began to fill up with subjects.

( Read more... )

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Among the Sharply Pointed Stars

September 2026

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Supply Chain Problems

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