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It’s time to wax philosophical about American writing and what our unique strengths are. This post will contain some vast generalizations for which there are plenty of exceptions, but I hope that the general ideas will be mostly true.

For the longest time, American writers were considered an extension of British literary tradition. Early short stories, poems, and novels written in the United States mostly borrowed their themes and styles from the Brits, expanding British Lit into English Lit, but not bringing a lot of new material. In literary circles, it was often claimed that writings about some of the uniquely American situations, like the wilds of our as-yet-undiscovered country, written with the loose adventurous spirit of the colonies, were as crude as our society. Much of the early fiction reflected Puritan values or British society, or tried to cast American heroes into a model considered acceptable among the literati in an attempt to prove that our new land could be just as cultured as the Mother Country.

It must have seemed like an exciting, maybe even scandalous, novelty when European forms were adapted by people like Longfellow, Emerson, and Cooper, using American material such as Native Americans or colonial life.

Of course, there was also a large body of writing dedicated to the political atmosphere in the colonies and then in the young country, a tradition that, for better or worse, is still very much alive today.

But by the second half of the 19th Century, a strange thing started to happen. We started to break away. People like Whitman and Twain turned the traditions on their head and not only stopped trying to be British but started making fun of those old traditions in a most American way. Whitman broke away from traditional forms and themes and wrote from and about an American way of looking at the world. Twain, of course, mastered the art of combining the American tall-tale tradition with stories of life on the edge of the frontier, along with hot-button issues of his time like slavery. America had found its voice.

Besides writing stories based in very American cities and laced with very American characters, Twain did something else to help break us away from our Brit-Lit past. His travel writings, especially A Tramp Abroad and Following the Equator, lampooned the Old World traditions while at the same time making fun of the rude American in a delightfully American way. Few people have shown the American in all his glory and with all his warts like Twain did.

In the century since Twain was alive, American literature has grown and developed. If you think of something uniquely American, whether positive or negative, you’ll find it reflected in our writings and our attitude toward literature. Whether it’s our world-altering (and sometimes bizarre) politics, our often priggish Puritanical sensibilities and the unusual spiritual lifestyles that have grown out of them, our sense of wild adventure, our wide-open vistas, or our melting-pot culture, it is all reflected in our literature in ways seldom, if ever, seen before.

Look at adventure novels. The Brits and other Europeans might have invented the adventure story with stories like Ivanhoe and The Three Musketeers, but our American sense of adventure has transformed the genre to the point that, even in the old countries, it’s not hard to claim that they are now following our lead. America was, and to some extent still is, the land of adventure, and our stories reflect it.

In recent decades, we’ve also seen an explosion of fascinating writing coming out of our mixed ethnic backgrounds. If there’s an ethnic subculture in this country, it most likely has its own literary genre, beginning with Jewish-American and African-American lit and expanding into any hyphenation you can find, resulting in well-known works like The Joy Luck Club and The Kite Runner. This extends, of course, to our huge number of subcultures, ethnic or not, that make us richer because we have not

We all write for our own reasons, but I think those reasons can be grouped into a few categories. Chances are, we all fit in most of the categories to some extent, but we probably favor one over the others.

Here are my proposed groupings, all greatly generalized.

1. The Word Lover

I put this one first because it’s probably where I fit best. I’ve loved words since I was small. I love the rhythm of words, and how the sound and look. Often, when people talk to me, I watch their words float toward me. Sometimes I pick one of those words and picture it in my head and turn them around and flip them over and examine them from all directions. It can make it hard to follow a conversation.

For fun, I pick a word and research its history and look for unexpected related words. I got two new books today to help me with this game. I still have the spelling list I made in third or fourth grade when we were allowed to make our own list. It’s all long words, most having to do with dinosaurs, all words that look and sound really fun. The teacher commented that she’d never seen a list like it.

I’ve never found a toy I like better than words. I can build all kinds of stuff with them. Like stories. As early as five or six years old, I used to trace pictures of stories from books and make up new stories around them. I don’t remember exactly how my love of writing started, but it’s a good bet that it came from reading, which I started doing at an early age because I liked to find the patterns and sounds of words that I saw on signs and in early reader books.

I suspect that other word-lover-writers have a similar history. I’ve talked to a few who do. Word lovers often have to work harder at novels (although they enjoy that work and what it teaches them about language and words), but they enjoy the rhythms and sounds of poetry, songs, and other forms.

2. The Yarn Spinner

Some people are natural storytellers. They love telling stories and watching how people react. These people can invent a plot and make it entertaining with very little efforts. Sometimes, but certainly not always, these writers might not have the greatest mechanics, but they make up for it by telling a great yarn. These writers probably have an advantage in our modern entertainment-driven world, because their stories are just plain fun. They’re page-turners. They’re a fun ride.

3. The Maker of Imaginary Friends

Many writers have a bunch of people living in their heads. These writers like to let their imaginary friends out and watch them romp, so they make up situations and watch how their buddies react. The stories are entertaining, but the real strength is the detailed cast of characters who jump off the page, as real as the person sitting next you. They make us care about these people like we care about our neighbors. Maybe they are our friends. Or maybe we like to watch their lives fall apart so we can gossip about them.

4. The Treasure Hunter

The treasure hunter sees how much money some writers are making and wants a piece of the pie. They probably got decent grades in writing classes and figure this is an easier way to make a fortune than the lottery. Many writers find this kind of writer easy to criticize, but the fact is, writing is a business, and these writers take it seriously. They’re not trying to write junk. They’re trying to give the people what they want, as many people as possible. It might be harder for these people to actually meet their goals, and they’re probably the most likely to give up before they finish when they discover that writing is a lot of work. But those who stick with it often create entertaining, successful stories that draw readers to them. There’s really nothing wrong with taking this approach, and these writers still hav

I was talking to Jeff Harris about zombies, a common topic around the office, and he came up with an idea that I couldn’t resist. Jeff, you’re my inspiration…

Here is the result:

Dear Editor:

With great interest, I read your special issue about biometric computer authentication (May, 2009). My firm has been looking for a viable biometrics solution for quite some time and several of the products you reviewed look promising.

However, we have one question that remains unanswered by any of the articles in this otherwise excellent issue: Do any of these products work for the undead?

You see, we take being an equal opportunity employer quite seriously. Hiring the undead keeps us in compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act and contributes to a diverse work environment. We also recognize that there are certain advantages to hiring people who have risen from the grave. For one thing, they seldom object to working the night shift. In fact, they prefer it. As long as the shift ends before sunrise, you can count on zombies to remain alert and productive way into the wee hours of the morning. They also tend not to require expensive health benefits or group life insurance.

But for these prized workers, biometric authentication is often a problem. It’s hard to log in to the network with a fingerprint reader when your fingerprints have decayed and your finger tends to remain in the reader after you pull your hand away. Likewise, iris recognition devices are problematic when the eyes keep falling out of the head and dangle well below the beam from the reader. Face recognition? Forget it. In addition to the eyeball issue I just mentioned, as the face deteriorates new patches of mold or the continual changing of the shape of a rotting face with its sagging skin and ever-more-deviating septum renders such systems useless.

Some of our employees have suggested that it might be useful to have a device that allows the employee to pull the bowels from his belly and run them through a scanner. This might help solve the problem, but it raises an obvious security issue. What’s to stop somebody from pulling the guts out of a coworker and using them to gain access to a restricted system? DNA-based devices have similar security problems. With disembodied body parts littered throughout the office, there’s little control over people’s samples. They leave bits and pieces everywhere they go. Anybody can pick up a bit of disembodied flesh and run it through a scanner. We even tried odor-based biometrics, but quickly learned that this type of device overloads and fails when the workplace houses more than a small number of rotting corpses.

As you can see, current biometrics don’t work for an organization like ours. In the current economy, people seem to be dying every day, and as they rise from the dead and seek suitable employment, biometric authentication seems like the way to go. Traditional passwords don’t do any good because people tend to forget them when their brains rot and leak out of their ears.

If the research you did for your special issue provided insight into how to use biometrics for this under-appreciated segment of the workforce, we would love to hear about it.

Thank you,

Rip Morguenstern,
VP of Security
Liquid Putrefaction, Inc.

PinderSoft Whiteboard (http://pindersoft.com/whiteboardps.htm) is an interesting note keeping app, set up with a whiteboard metaphor (meaning a blank screen). Its uniqueness comes from its ten tabs, which can all be renamed, plus an 11th tab for storing links. Beyond that, there’s not much to say. It’s a notes app. It does notes stuff. There are some basic editing capabilities, basically what you’d expect from a notes app. And it can easily be kept in the system tray.

Wishlist:

• Keeping the app in the system tray is nice, but how could they not give it a hotkey so you can bring it up without having to remember which tiny icon to click in the tray? I’ve solved that, I think, by assigning a gMote mouse gesture (http://www.handform.net/gmote.php). If I could remember that I did that, it would make pulling stuff up pretty easy. If I had a hotkey, I’d use this a lot, I think. It would be as easy or easier than turning around and writing on the real whiteboard.

• Being able to strike-through or check off completed items seems like another obvious feature, but it apparently wasn’t very obvious to the developer. Maybe he thought being able to strike through text using the font option was enough, but I want something easier, maybe with a keystroke. At least there’s a workaround, though.

• Not really any export to speak of. Each tab is saved as an RTF file, so I guess you can pretty much do what you want with your text. That reminds me of a weird usability thing. When you click to open a file in your default editor, you just get an Explorer window with the directory where the files are stored. You still have to open the file. An extra step, not really a big deal, but kind of weird.

• And, if each tab is just stored as an RTF file, why can’t you create more tabs? That seems logical.

• Tougher to implement with the RTF editing environment, but being able to draw would make this a real whiteboard app instead of just a note taking app. Even if you could just import a graphic file, it would be better.

In a Dream World

If I ran the world and all my wishes came true, we’d have this app, with a hotkey to bring it up, and the ability to draw, and even some basic mind-mapping features. Plus, I could write down my notes telepathically and they would be put down the way I mean them, not the way I actually say or think them, in perfect clarity and Pulitzer-worthy prose. It would also have basic to-do list features, like check boxes. And it would be a gourmet seafood chef with great legs and unlimited financial resources.

But even with its limitations, it seems pretty useful, especially if you have several (but not more than ten) projects to track. I think it’s worth checking out.

This song is best when complete, but almost nobody ever sings the whole thing, completely changing Mr. Guthrie’s meaning and intent.

This Land Is Your Land

This land is your land This land is my land
From California to the New York island;
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and Me.

As I was walking that ribbon of highway,
I saw above me that endless skyway:
I saw below me that golden valley:
This land was made for you and me.

I’ve roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;
And all around me a voice was sounding:
This land was made for you and me.

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

I was planning a post about my file backup strategy, but I posted it at the Utah Children’s Writers Blog instead. Go over there and check it out.

I blogged today, just not here. Look for my post, “Writing Good Villains,” at http://utahchildrenswriters.blogspot.com.

—————-
Now playing: LadyHawke Soundtrack - Marquet’s Death
via FoxyTunes

I just read this one for the first time this morning, and really like it. So I’m sharing.

THAT EVERYTHING’S INEVITABLE

That everything’s inevitable.
That fate is whatever has already happened.
The brain, which is as elemental, as sane, as the rest of the processing universe is.
In this world, I am the surest thing.
Scrunched-up arms, folded legs, lovely destitute eyes.
Please insert your spare coins.
I am filling them up.
Please insert your spare vision, your vigor, your vim.
But yet, I am a vatic one.
As vatic as the Vatican.
In the temper and the tantrum, in the well-kept arboretum
I am waiting, like an animal,
For poetry.

–Katy Lederer

—————-
Now playing: THE ROLLING STONES - As Tears Go By
via FoxyTunes

SPECULATION: ALONG THE WAY

The roaring alongside he takes for granted —”Sandpiper” by Elizabeth Bishop

And when, of a given evening, say, an evening laced
with storm clouds skirting distance parsed by slanting light,

or when the thick air of an August afternoon by the late approach
of just such a storm turns suddenly thin and cool, and the familiar

roaring, for the moment made especially unmistakable
by distant thunder, may seem oddly to be answered from within

—that’s how it feels, anyway—and when, of a moment, such roaring
couples as well with sudden calm—interior, exterior, it hardly matters—

in that fortunate incursion whereby the roar itself is suddenly interred,
you might startle to having had a taste of what will pass as prayer,

or a taste, at the very least, of how fraught, how laden the visible is,
even as you find a likely figure for its uncanny agency. Sure,

I’m making this up as I go, hoping—even as I go—to be finally
getting somewhere. And maybe I am. Maybe I’m taking you along.

Let’s say it’s so, and say we now commence.

–Scott Cairns

THE ALLIGATOR BRIDE

The clock of my days winds down.
The cat eats sparrows outside my window.
Once, she brought me a small rabbit
which we devoured together, under
the Empire Table
while the men shrieked
repossessing the gold umbrella.

Now the beard on my clock turns white.
My cat stares into dark corners
missing her gold umbrella.
She is in love
with the Alligator Bride.

Ah, the tiny fine white
teeth! The Bride, propped on her tail
in white lace
stares from the holes
of her eyes. Her stuck-open mouth
laughs at minister and people.

On bare new wood
fourteen tomatoes,
a dozen ears of corn,
six bottles of white wine,

a melon,
a cat,
broccoli
and the Alligator Bride.

The color of bubble gum,
the consistency of petroleum jelly,
wickedness oozes
from the palm of my left hand.
My cat licks it.
I watch the Alligator Bride.

Big houses like shabby boulders
hold themselves tight
in gelatin.
I am unable to daydream.
The sky is a gun aimed at me.
I pull the trigger.
The skull of my promises
leans in a black closet, gapes
with its good mouth
for a teat to suck.

A bird flies back and forth
in my house that is covered by gelatin
and the cat leaps at it
missing. Under the Empire Table
the Alligator Bride
lies in her bridal shroud.
My left hand
leaks on the Chinese carpet.

–Donald Hall

DUETS

A dream flips me into the daylight.
I pry my way back:
a door opens, I enter, never
escape; the jailor sings by morning
duets through the bars with me.
I wake and out my window
by dawn a blackbird sings and
listens, sings and listens.

Listen. Thistledown jumps its dance
in the wind. I’m small and have
no regrets. Yesterday is a temporary
tombstone, a hollow stalk
on the hill. I’m putting my best
ear forward; in the space between songs
I’m travelling. My hands make
whistling wings in the wind.

No things meet without music:
wind and the chimney’s whine, hail’s click
with the pane, breath in a bird’s
throat, rain in my ear when I
sleep in the grass. I miss the
whisper of a swallow’s wings
meeting the thin air somewhere far.
Branches of my voice, come back.
Inside each song
I’m listening.

–Kim Robert Stafford

A NOISELESS PATIENT SPIDER

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

–Walt Whitman

MENDING WALL

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

–Robert Frost

ALLEGIANCES

It is time for all the heroes to go home
if they have any, time for all of us common ones
to locate ourselves by the real things
we live by.

Far to the north, or indeed in any direction,
strange mountains and creatures have always lurked-
elves, goblins, trolls, and spiders:-we
encounter them in dread and wonder,

But once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold,
found some limit beyond the waterfall,
a season changes, and we come back, changed
but safe, quiet, grateful.

Suppose an insane wind holds all the hills
while strange beliefs whine at the traveler’s ears,
we ordinary beings can cling to the earth and love
where we are, sturdy for common things.

–William Stafford

LOOKING ACROSS THE FIELDS AND WATCHING THE BIRDS FLY

Among the more irritating minor ideas
Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home
To Concord, at the edge of things, was this:

To think away the grass, the trees, the clouds,
Not to transform them into other things,
Is only what the sun does every day,

Until we say to ourselves that there may be
A pensive nature, a mechanical
And slightly detestable operandum, free

From man’s ghost, larger and yet a little like,
Without his literature and without his gods . . .
No doubt we live beyond ourselves in air,

In an element that does not do for us,
so well, that which we do for ourselves, too big,
A thing not planned for imagery or belief,

Not one of the masculine myths we used to make,
A transparency through which the swallow weaves,
Without any form or any sense of form,

What we know in what we see, what we feel in what
We hear, what we are, beyond mystic disputation,
In the tumult of integrations out of the sky,

And what we think, a breathing like the wind,
A moving part of a motion, a discovery
Part of a discovery, a change part of a change,

A sharing of color and being part of it.
The afternoon is visibly a source,
Too wide, too irised, to be more than calm,

Too much like thinking to be less than thought,
Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch,
A daily majesty of meditation,

That comes and goes in silences of its own.
We think, then as the sun shines or does not.
We think as wind skitters on a pond in a field

Or we put mantles on our words because
The same wind, rising and rising, makes a sound
Like the last muting of winter as it ends.

A new scholar replacing an older one reflects
A moment on this fantasia. He seeks
For a human that can be accounted for.

The spirit comes from the body of the world,
Or so Mr. Homburg thought: the body of a world
Whose blunt laws make an affectation of mind,

The mannerism of nature caught in a glass
And there become a spirit’s mannerism,
A glass as warm with things going as far as they can.

–Wallace Stevens

AT BAIA

I should have thought
in a dream you would have brought
some lovely, perilous thing,
orchids piled in a great sheath,
as who would say (in a dream),
“I send you this,
who left the blue veins
of your throat unkissed.”

Why was it that your hands
(that never took mine),
your hands that I could see
drift over the orchid-heads
so carefully,
your hands, so fragile, sure to lift
so gently, the fragile flower-stuff–
ah, ah, how was it

You never sent (in a dream)
the very form, the very scent,
not heavy, not sensuous,
but perilous–perilous–
of orchids, piled in a great sheath,
and folded underneath on a bright scroll,
some word:

“Flower sent to flower;
for white hands, the lesser white,
less lovely of flower-leaf,”

or

“Lover to lover, no kiss,
no touch, but forever and ever this.”

–H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

THE STORM

1

Against the stone breakwater,
Only an ominous lapping,
While the wind whines overhead,
Coming down from the mountain,
Whistling between the arbors, the winding terraces;
A thin whine of wires, a rattling and flapping of leaves,
And the small street-lamp swinging and slamming against
the lamp pole.

Where have the people gone?
There is one light on the mountain.

2

Along the sea-wall, a steady sloshing of the swell,
The waves not yet high, but even,
Coming closer and closer upon each other;
A fine fume of rain driving in from the sea,
Riddling the sand, like a wide spray of buckshot,
The wind from the sea and the wind from the mountain contending,
Flicking the foam from the whitecaps straight upward into the darkness.

A time to go home!–
And a child’s dirty shift billows upward out of an alley,
A cat runs from the wind as we do,
Between the whitening trees, up Santa Lucia,
Where the heavy door unlocks,
And our breath comes more easy,–
Then a crack of thunder, and the black rain runs over us, over
The flat-roofed houses, coming down in gusts, beating
The walls, the slatted windows, driving
The last watcher indoors, moving the cardplayers closer
To their cards, their anisette.

3

We creep to our bed, and its straw mattress.
We wait; we listen.
The storm lulls off, then redoubles,
Bending the trees half-way down to the ground,
Shaking loose the last wizened oranges in the orchard,
Flattening the limber carnations.

A spider eases himself down from a swaying light-bulb,
Running over the coverlet, down under the iron bedstead.
The bulb goes on and off, weakly.
Water roars into the cistern.

We lie closer on the gritty pillow,
Breathing heavily, hoping–
For the great last leap of the wave over the breakwater,
The flat boom on the beach of the towering sea-swell,
The sudden shudder as the jutting sea-cliff collapses,
And the hurricane drives the dead straw into the living pine-tree.

–Theodore Roethke

130

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.

–William Shakespeare

Just because I couldn’t resist doing one of my own. I might do a couple more.

DREAMTIME
For the angel between the dreams

She told me, at night
the angels come into your dreams.
They play with you–
sweet little angels–
shower you with secret delights

like chocolate kisses
the candy shop owner folds into
your hand with a wink after mom
says you can’t have any.
Forbidden sweets taste the best.

In that Between-Time when
one dream sleeps into the next,
an angel is at your side,
real as the tickle of
a finger brushing down your spine.

–Scott Rhoades

MORRO BAY

Beautiful years when she was by me and we visited
Every rock and creek of the coast–
She gave life from her eyes. Now the bay is brown-stagnant
With rotting weed, and the stranded fish-boats
Reek in the sun; but still the great rock hangs like a thuindercloud
Over the stale mist and still sea.
They say that it swarms with rattlenakes–right–the stored lightnings
In the stone cloud. Guard it well, vipers.
That Norman rockhead Mont St. Michel may have been as beautiful as this one
Once, long ago, before it was built on.

–Robinson Jeffers

—————-
Now playing: JOHN LENNON - Oh My Love
via FoxyTunes

The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly

by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them —

all the exciting detail
of the chase

and the escape, the error
the flash of genius —

all to no end save beauty
the eternal -

So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful

for this
to be warned against

saluted and defied —
It is alive, venomous

it smiles grimly
its words cut —

The flashy female with her
mother, gets it —

The Jew gets it straight - it
is deadly, terrifying —

It is the Inquisition, the
Revolution

It is beauty itself
that lives

day by day in them
idly —

This is
the power of their faces

It is summer, it is the solstice
the crowd is

cheering, the crowd is laughing
in detail

permanently, seriously
without thought

–William Carlos Williams

GLEN UIG

Believe in this couple this day who come
to picnic in the Faery Glen. They pay rain
no matter, or wind. They spread their picnic
under a gale-stunted rowan. Believe they grew tired
of giants and heroes and know they believe
in wise tiny creatures who live under the rocks.

Believe these odd mounds, the geologic joke
played by those wise tiny creatures far from
the world’s pitiful demands: make money, stay sane.
Believe the couple, by now soaked to the skin,
sing their day as if dry, as if sheltered inside
Castle Ewen. Be glad Castle Ewen’s only a rock
that looks like a castle. Be glad for no real king.

These wise tiny creatures, you’d better believe,
have lived through it all: the Viking occupation,
clan torturing clan, the Clearances, the World War
II bomber gone down, a fiery boom
on Beinn Edra. They saw it from here. They heard
the sobs of last century’s crofters trail off below
where every day the Conon sets out determined for Uig.
They remember the Viking who wandered off course,
under the hazelnut tree hating aloud all he’d done.

Some days dance in the bracken. Some days go out
wide and warm on bad roads to collect the dispossessed
and offer them homes. Some days celebrate addicts
sweet in their dreams and hope to share with them
a personal spectrum. The loch here’s only a pond,
the monster is in it small as a wren.

Believe the couple who have finished their picnic
and make wet love in the grass, the tiny wise creatures
cheering them on. Believe in milestones, the day
you left home forever and the cold open way
a world wouldn’t let you come in. Believe you
and I are that couple. Believe you and I sing tiny
and wise and could if we had to eat stone and go on.

–Richard Hugo