Two Observations – Terrain.org

Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
 

1. The Stars

I hope you’ll excuse me for thinking that the whole space tourism trend was concocted by a-holes. But anything that exclusive—only affordable to zillionaires—what else can I say? Plus, the rest of us are the real space tourists, just by looking up, assuming we can leave the city for a night, that we can aim for somewhere open, get out and drive, pull over and park, then start counting the Perseid meteors by their burn-trails, brief and white. Sometimes they’re by the Big Dipper, sometimes Orion, others not; sometimes they’re nearer to whatever that cluster is—Who knows, until we give it a name?

“That M-shape, there, is the Raven.”

“See the arc of five above a brighter dot? I’m pretty sure that one’s the Hieroglyph Eye.”

“And those four, lowest in the sky, are called the Boat since they sail the horizon.”

My wife Jen keeps track of upcoming eclipses. She’s a better space tourist than a million multi-millionaires.

And me, I’m some kind of tourist, too, since I remember when you didn’t have to drive somewhere to see them. Not a space tourist, no, but possibly a tourist of time…

Every Place I’ve Ever Lived Is Gone:

All the orchards south of Salt Lake City, the pine woods north of Spokane, the field by my house where the snow piled deep, where a snowy owl passed so silently and low it changed my idea of ghosts—now they’re stores, and neighborhoods named after trees, and spillover parking for a church, and maybe the choir sings hymns so beautifully it’s fine; I’ll call it the future, agree that it’s bright.

But west of Washtucna, Washington, the highway stretches through the dark… miles of no-place, of in-between, that haven’t disappeared.

Freight trucks are too few to bother me much, and wind off the river cools the hood down. I can stop on the shoulder and sit there still while stars fill every inch of night.

2. The Wind

The wind thinks smithereening tool sheds is funny. My dad had a tool shed when I was a kid, and the morning after a windstorm, it was gone. Or it was almost gone. The wind had wadded it up like paper, then tossed it over our house and into the ditch, like the wind was just playing a game of garbage-can basketball.

Here’s another example: Before Jen and I were married, she had a rental house up in the foothills east of the city, a house with a shed, the same kind my dad had, and one day a windstorm swept down the mountain and changed it to a jagged mangle.

If you think that afterward her landlord said, “I’ll handle it,” think again. “Pull it apart and haul it to the curb” he told her. “You can use my tools,” he said, which were a hammer and a mismatched pair of gloves.

Or try setting up a seasonal fireworks stand in a parking lot in Lewiston, Idaho: The panels are sheet metal, black, and it’s 99 degrees; and they’re 8’ x 8’, so at least 100 pounds; and the wind starts blowing like some dragon-breath laughter; and those panels, when you try to stand them up, just catch it like sails. You can’t let go, but you’d better. A dilemma, but worse, and also faster.

I’m saying the wind is our friend until it isn’t. We need it, but it doesn’t need us:

“For Your Essay, Describe Nature”

The screen door batters in its frame. This is no June storm, it’s more than a little wind, so stand with your back against whatever swear words you can. Let them bloom. Plant a garden.

If you had peaches, they’d be flinging, nothing left: wind-pilfered, engined under.

You can lovetalk forever about nature. It’ll still kick your ass.

Rob Carney is the author of nine books of poems, including The Book of Drought (Texas Review Press, 2024), winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and Call and Response (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), and his collection of creative nonfiction, Accidental Gardens: New & Revised, is forthcoming from Wakefield Press. His work has appeared in Cave Wall, The Dark Mountain Project, Sugar House Review, and many other journals, as well as the Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward (2006). In 2013 he won the Terrain.org Poetry Award and in 2014 he received the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Prize for Poetry. He is a Professor of English at Utah Valley University and lives in Salt Lake City. Follow his Terrain.org series Old Roads, New Stories.

Read an interview with Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: “The Ocean is Full of Questions.”
 
Read Rob Carney’s Letter to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published by Terrain.org and Trinity University Press.
 
Read poetry by Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: 6th Annual Contest Finalist, 4th Annual Contest Winner, and Issue 30. And listen to an interview on Montana Public Radio about The Book of Sharks.

Header photo by Myshkovskyi, courtesy Shutterstock.