A SHORT MEMOIR
 
back to main WRITINGS page CARSON’S LAW ( excerpts ) by DWIGHT BERNARD MIKKELSEN copyright © 2005 NotesLinger Arts back to main WRITINGS page back to SITE MAP back to SITE MAP Winter births spring. The gray and argentine clouds slowly turn white, their tracings easy and languorous, and they succor the winds. The winds change too. At night they hold their former vibrancy but with piercings grown soft like the touchings of doves in flight. During the day they blow in dry mutation, the burnt remains falling with the dew to feed the earth. And the earth changes too – the soil redolent and gravid with urgent beginnings. It is before morning. She knifes through the rasping winds and she listens to them; her muscles flex and unflex and flex again and she feels them; her steps grasp and compress and thrust back the soft ground, and grasp and compress and thrust again and she watches them. Her lungs breathe and her heart pulses and her blood turns from red to blue to red again and still she does not turn toward home. Mists rise. Shadows, gray and dark gray and black, plod toward extinction like charred viscera reaching for deliverance. The dawning is a carnage of crimson and indigo and black-laced orange and the dawning clouds vector out from the sun’s rising as if to lift and hallow the sky itself. Moon and earth and sun pirouette together on their mad paths, hiding their frail light from the celestial dark. She has run six miles and will not slow and will not falter and will not turn toward home. The heat glows within and the heat radiates out and the heat vanishes the cold and vanquishes the cold clamorings of those ill souls who reside beneath the earth’s crust, those ill souls who call for her, who call for all of us. But she does not falter and she does not slow. She runs. And still she does not turn toward home. *** She decides to walk back to her motel, the Andean Cordillera behind her indigo, serene, and mysteriously friendly. She crosses a wide wooden bridge that spans a narrow canal lined with stones, the purling water sounding like a family of softly cooing doves settling in for the night; on either side thick grasses caress the earth and at a short distance to her right a tree rises modestly, its sparsely-leafed, upwardly flowing branches offering peace to the moonless betwinkled sky that rests like an endless blessing on the world. The street is deserted except for a few merchants hurrying home and a young couple, arm within arm, slowly walking in that warm silence that only lovers know. Atop a wooden pole is a large round bulb, wanly glowing gold, nestled in folded cobwebs that look like silk filigree weaved for some ages-ago effeminate aristocrat. The cracks and bubbles of the asphalt gently rock her as she walks. Inside the houses are families eating dinner or reading or watching television, and children doing homework or playing with dogs and cats and birds of all colors. Laughter. Togetherness. Her most keen feeling is the constancy, the constancy of trust, the constancy of happiness, the constancies of dreamt futures and the joy of remembered joys. And she remembers her childhood fascination with the world and the love it birthed and succored and she is vindicated.