Hawks Hawks
Hawks kettling on the thermals high above the Appalachians on their way south—it looks like thought, the mind floating by way of association, veering and floating, circling back to…
Jan 21, 2016 / Books & the Arts / Elizabeth Arnold
At Brú na Bóinne At Brú na Bóinne
The tumulus—I thought it was a hill at first (trees grow out of one in Sulm)— entered into. It was a clear day, bright, the grass bounded by its hedgerows too green all around and down, the fields’ squares troubled only by the Boyne that just about makes an island of this place snaking through. Sunbeams don’t snake, at least not visibly, though 5,000 years have worked at the Earth’s orbit. Still the light goes in, into the mound through holes one to a side that tunnel towards each other but don’t meet, the sun arriving on time every year unless it’s cloudy. But to do what? Wake the corpse.
May 15, 2013 / Books & the Arts / Elizabeth Arnold
Flow Dynamics Flow Dynamics
So lightly and invisibly I hardly knew it, river of blood descending without joy back to the heart through the frail vein all that time —the largest of the body— shredded then dissolved (“obliterated”) and there was a sudden seepage into the surrounding tissue instead of the blood pouring out as you’d expect forever before a new vein formed to bypass what was gone like a wide meander even the smallest flood ends, and the river goes straight from that point. But in my case the thin-walled base-ends held forming an anabranch, a section that diverts from the main channel, rejoins it downstream. Local ones can come from, make small islands in the watercourse or flow hundreds of miles like the Bahr el Zeref in the south Sudan that splits from the Bahr al Jabal of the White Nile, doesn’t return until Malakal instead of leaving behind, as it could have with the blood being old, a full-fledged oxbow lake, a little blue scar beside the heart.
Jul 10, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Elizabeth Arnold
Looking at Maps Looking at Maps
If they’d had writing in time, Cuba could have been Crete, watery source of the Minoans and thus the Greeks. What’s lost? A possible us growing like new foliage out of stony ground, emerging? Last voice, first, a whole world calling— awful, inaudible—into the unstoppable loud (roaring!) hurricane-force sea wind.
Mar 30, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Elizabeth Arnold