The Order of Things

Writing no longer wishes to be first in my life nor asks to be, nor begs, but demands its place at the top of the to-do list every day. Every day, words must be written, revised, sent out. Writing prefers the word “submitted.”

Where once stood fields of mustard, vegetables, almonds, olives, and orchards of apples, pears--now all vineyards, their beautiful lines upon the land--all gone to wine...

Many a winter's trim and wait  gnarls the vine

Trunks and cordons in a flooded field

Patent medicine, old style

Writing takes me out photographing for fifteen minutes and comes home five hours later, and my camera and I have wandered through flooded vineyards, past an orange-and-rusty-red retired train, along a creek bed savaged by the recent rains, to the supermarket vegetable counter at Ray’s. 

Roadside still life

Unexpected harbinger

Creekside with anise

What I see becomes indelible, camera or not, and the reflections of the flooded fields grow solid and transform into words. All I see becomes a prompt for writing.

"56": Boxcar art

Writing demands my time--first, before breakfast—and lectures me: “You will give me part of every day. We have things to say.”

…simple things that seemed once to be unimportant, like a weed or a metal road rail with a few pieces of patterned wood beside it. The visions of  earth and memory have become significant.

Tree portrait

Under a stand of pines

What is there to say but the beauty of landscape, how it presumes to become the subject of whatever I write or buries itself as a subplot or metaphorical rush that defines the character of a poem or essay?

 Calligraphy of road repair

More gifts from the Mother--all earth's gifts nurture

All things come from the earth, are made of earth. Light falls on a fallow field, frost-covered, or on the jungle, perhaps, and its tangle, where in the third tier of foliage monkeys chat. The gibbon whoop-whoop-whoops in descending scale: alive. alive, alive.

Photographs by Luna Zeffer