Jam on Bread

(Or what I did with my glorious weekend)

SwampFire 2008

In the space between the water and the flame, more lies than just a road, a house, a lawn. Fields of corn. Fields of bean. Somewhere too there exists a burning in the brain. A thirst of the spirit.

Some Thing. Un-nameable. Un-graspable. Taking no form. Using no space. Wasting no time. SwampFire roils under the surface of the swamp, crackles in the wood turning to ash, fights the harness even while it longs to be ridden. Wild berry bush brambles lash us open. Soft green leaves make us itch, blister, even weep. But we can’t always choose what we brush up against. Sometimes we shouldn’t even try.

Not so wild as all that, sometimes it just sits, pretty as a cherry on a low-hanging branch, waiting to be pinched, pulled, popped between parted lips. The tartness still teasing our tongues, we spit the slippery pit.

In the space between spirits is a fire that goes unspoken. Each to her own. Stories spill out. Sketches on paper become mindscapes. A camera’s lens pulls out a moment in space and time. We never know what we will discover. Two arrowheads on the edge of a field. A heart stone between bean rows. A father’s coffee cup in somebody else’s cupboard. We never know what will discover us. A tall lean ghost—“Did somebody die here?” Chocolate-foil fortunes proclaiming “Dare to love completely,” and “Go against the grain.” We see what we need to in glimpses, glances, eye-corner grazings. When we forget what it is we’re looking for, arrowheads rise up, stones become hearts, mass-printed fortunes become meaningful.

The ghost may always be watching from beside the barn, but when we look a second time, it is always gone. Now begins the imagining.

In this space where we need nothing but open eyes and minds we speak of other spaces, cluttered spaces. Closets crowded with blazers. Hallways stacked with newspapers. Basements cluttered with meat grinders and Crock Pots and crutches and tricycles. And we wonder why it is that we need so much, even while gently understanding that we’re only trying to give ourselves color and comfort and warmth and wisdom. We’re only trying to hold in one place our selves over all of time.

This is no rural reflection about getting back to nature, living off the land, worshipping the idyllic vibe of the countryside. We know that farming is hard work, that living here is different than visiting. Living anywhere is unstable, unpredictable, subject as much to deaths and lost marriages as to births and found friendships. Still, it is nice to watch the red-winged blackbirds linger through the cloudless blue, to let ourselves delight in the amoeba squiggles that cross our vision when we let our eyes drift. Scarred vision. Maybe that’s what these floaters really are. But they’re so languid, so aquatic. Jellyfish waltzing amidst bubbles of light. Learning what to call them, I quickly forget, stick a mental post-it note on my mind’s refrigerator door never to tell the eye doctor. I don’t want them to go away, would miss them in my world.

SwampFire. In the space between the water and the flame rests that which makes it possible for us to live and to return.