The Color of Lightning (a collaboration with Tania Pryputniewicz)

Perhaps lightning has a color all its own – like the bright flash at the bottom of a pan that prompts the eager prospector to cry out, “Eureka!” He has captured a bit of lightning, if only a speck, signaling that the rugged morning hike to this secluded spot has really been worth it after all.

And maybe, all the darkening trail home, like Poe and his trick of titling a treatise a prose poem, the prospector dedicates his find to the left, right symmetry of boot fall and fading tines of adrenaline along edges of spine, throat and heart, placing mindless sifting and coincident grace above any rational method of explanation for his luck.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/poe/eureka.html

From a Mage's Staff (guest bloggers Tess P and Tania Pryputniewicz)

Perhaps you were intentional when you dove into the cold blueness of the pool and submerged yourself dolphin-like, staying beneath for a brief eternity, your blood knocking in the private chambers until you rose out of the water primeval; and laid your body upon the sun stricken cement to leave behind a silhouette of water that you might rise from and look back upon, softly chanting -- so that none can hear you: leave it, leave that sliver of being behind you.

 

Maybe that sliver of being with its shadow longing and love rises later towards what it perceives as the distance the body must cross to find home. Fractionally hesitant yet responsive as the were-light from a mage's staff is to the magician's need for light, the body turns back for each silver sliver, soothed like a child by the promise of grasping again the string tied to the balloon rising to the ceiling. Someone taller and kinder inevitably returns to the room.

A Sound So Private (a collaboration with JHG)

Perhaps if you could find a place where satellites and airplanes could never spot you, and where a drop of water fell every few seconds tapping the surface of a pond, it would be quiet enough for you to hear a sound so private from within you emerging in tiny ripples radiating outward toward blue distances of sea and sky and grassy fields of wandering green tendrils grown from a seed so small a single thought contains them all.

Maybe memory is a lap in a rainy pool, a lapse, an orbit of wobbly jewels, et le bon mot, per chance de lysees, peut-etre, may actually be a dance of elegant lawn turkeys, that elusive bird that's a combination of: hey what's it to you, and here, I dare you, strutting along the edge of the open field. The closer you try to get, the further they remove into the thicket, into the bruise of thorn and hairy ruse. In fact they hate to fly at all, flying downward is preferred, but can, when necessary, by a series of hops from limb to limb, get way up high in the trees, where the fox cannot, and to be out on one can bird-word winter, tuck in.