CREATIVE NONFICTION
JACQUELINE LYONS
DIALOGIC: EXCEPT THE RAIN
i.
Driving home alone after dark
Dear John,
A new year, and time to dialogue—the opposite of breaking up—with the elements. Especially water. The elements speak with such singularity and purpose, ferrying blue glyphs as the crow flies, while human nerve bundles shoulder a mix of fear and longing, more list than image. All of us, most of the time, of at least two minds. Giant Sequoia, Sparrows, and Sharks too.
Except for the taco truck near the intersection of Los Angeles Avenue and Somis Road that concentrates its powers inward and births an illuminated island, an horchata oasis, a candle in the window radiant after 9 pm. Committed, they do not offer combinación plates.
At a beginning,
J
P.S. People who write down their feelings, even a few minutes a day, report greater happiness.
***
ii.
When and where does rain = prosperity
Dear John,
An element is beginning-and-end, threshold, port(al). As in the greeting and good wish “Khotso! Pula! Nala!” (“Peace! Rain! Prosperity!”) exchanged by the people of Lesotho, Southern Africa, The Mountain Kingdom, Kingdom in the Sky, an enclave continually plagued by drought.
Where we first met, half a world ago.
Hello. Bodies seem strange at first. Hello, Peace, I may or may not share a blanket with you tonight. Peace, Rain, we have known each other, like the elements, for a long time, and also do not know each other yet. Still, we can walk without falling off the earth or melting in the rain or fainting or bursting into flames.
The first morning after the first time we slept under the same roof, the first time you made coffee for me—coffee, earth’s relative by marriage, with fire’s blessing and water’s inception—I watched you move around the kitchen, and thought I would like to wake this way, Peace, again and again.
Truly yours,
J
P.S. Thank you roads not washed away, thank you green especially California Pepper Tree along Los Angeles Avenue who, stirred by the breeze, quakes like a heart. Thanks, coffee, for ferrying us across hours, thank you eyes that open and close, thanks for opening this morning, thanks for the first one I see.
***
iii.
On a peaceful day, can see the future from here
Dear Juan,
When I hear “elemental,” I think from the center, or of an island, or picture a monolith pinging softly in the sun. The elements are the original always-already, the first yes-of-course.
When I hear “environmental,” trees and birds surround, maybe a consequence of growing up at the edge of a woods, though the longer I live within 100 miles of L.A., “environment” increasingly smells like toxic berry fields and brave sanctuaries.
When I read poems, elements proliferate. In but not from California, I’m working on my citizenship by writing to and near plants—Dear White Sage, Dear Toyon, Dear Poppy, Dear Live Oak.
Admiringly,
J
P.S. On a clear day, from the top of the nearest hill, I can see the Channel Islands. The endangered island fox is making a comeback.
***
iv.
Between quakes
Deep underground
Dear John & Juan,
February is back with its wintry intent. A month to get through, like an early polar expedition. Like I’m the last one alive, writing brave letters in the tent before walking out into the erasing cold.
I feel you understand collapse and final fire and ash, then salt water pouring from both windows at mention of remains.
If human emotions were elements, grief would be in the top five. In grief, air expands around the bed, between floor and ceiling, among clonal groves, and across pastures of unshorn alpaca. During grief, one weeps inside a car despite the exterior pearly sheen.
A college boyfriend annoyingly referred to himself as a “lone wolf.” No man is an island, though some should live on one, alone. One way to escape loneliness, or grief, is to say Yes. Yes you may leave poetry class to get a drink of water or put out the fire in your mind. Yes help yourself to more coffee, torches, clean towels, empathy for your situation, tissues for your deluge. Of course I will drive you to or collect you from or meet you at the airport or train station or floating dock. Times like February, short and cruel, people and animals should huddle together. Birds too if they don’t mind.
Floating,
J
P.S. In a new arrangement with the earth and air, I look out at African daisies proliferating across a flower bed and part of me is in Southern Africa, part of me at a desk at the edge of a forest, part of me with you in the East Bay, and part of me lying down in a bed of flowers where the dog used to sleep.
P.P.S. What would it take to count love among the elements? Maybe a better question is Can love drown out grief.
***
v.
Years without love + fear – present moment awareness =
temperature on the southern segment of the San Andreas Fault
Dear Juan,
Woke to pouring rain.
The mouth moves to form the word “pour” and makes a shape like expecting a kiss beneath or from the rain.
My love, though 374 miles away, wakes and walks to work beneath a similarly dark sky, heavy with rain.
For years in Southern California, most months no one could remember the last time it rained.
But ever since the largest wildfire in California history, and burn areas now vulnerable to mudslide, seems like all the sky wants to do is consider, construct, prepare, plan, and pour rain.
Is pour to poor like more is to moor, or morning to mourning doves—how do they, notoriously poor nest builders so easily startled, manage to stay afloat in their flimsy nests when it pours rain.
In between storms, fluttering birds replace rain.
Your poems orchestrate cityscapes, sketch interior landscapes, mosaic imagination, rarely a tree or river, though you often include the rain.
Your list of elements, which begins with wood and includes steel, ends with water.
Is ending with water like beginning with rain?
Is alluding to peripheral rain the same as acknowledging the centrality of rain?
Is weather a story’s setting, or its main character, especially during rain?
Does everything depend on when and where and weather, and whether or not it rains?
We can build and create and travel and fly into space, but it all ends after two or three days unless we drink water.
I didn’t think about rain, like love, until I thought about it all the time.
Eyes on the sky,
J
***
vi.
Waiting out strange times
Wading across a blue state
Dear John,
Hope, like water, springs, and softens at “co-owner.” Oh, how we would own together, row our custom-made boat gently down our stream. A boat we’ll name during happy hour, drinking tequila on ice.
A man, let’s call him Loser of the Popular Vote, did not win in a landslide on the Atlantic Coast. But one month later, up and down our Pacific Coast Highway, landslides. Archipelago of griefs, fears, wasted waters.
Years ago, in Southern Africa, I woke in the night to crackling and flickering, and peered out the window to see rows of a maize field on fire. Controlled burn. Companionable light. In that Southern Africa enclave, I chopped my own firewood, which warmed me twice, and when I carried water on my head, straight-backed strong-spined women applauded.
It bothers me that I did not notice the air around us when we first met 20 years ago. Could it have been the drought? Could we have been compatible then? It’s complicated. You hung out with the smokers, and I’m an air sign, content near water.
Air, like joy, rises.
Waiting for 23 & Me results,
J
P.S. What stops someone, me or not-me, from standing or lying close enough to someone, you or not-you, but you, to share breath. I feel that you are okay with the omission of question marks. The elements are sure things.
***
vii.
Where difficulty meets opportunity
Dear John,
I love that you created a fountain, including the mold, by hand. Love that you didn’t buy one, which would have been faster and easier.
In defense of poetry’s complexity, a poet pointed out, “the circulatory system is complex.” Do all systems imply complexity—solar, skeletal, trail, Doppler, digestive. Is the clean-ness of stainless steel, like the desert, stream-lined, or entangled.
On some shores, coffee comes in one size only, or in a refillable cup, or in sizes arbitrarily named, or number of ounces expressed in Italian.
What advice can we take from sound, who speeds up when she reaches a solid wall.
The offer of more coffee sounds as welcome and singular as a thickening creek rushing through a forest of fir and alder past a cabin where a chocolate-furred dog has slid onto the wooden floor after barking dutifully at someone walking by. Not a tall sound, or threatening. A renewable sound, a sound whose size is best expressed rhythmically, and shade-grown.
Let’s shelter in place,
J
P.S. It is a good day whose minutes feel renewable. Like you could hike this canyon again, see these wildflowers again after spring sun follows closely on the heels of winter rain. Standing in a place on earth—five twilit winter days on an island of fire and ice—for the first and maybe only time brings simultaneous pangs of joy and grief, feels elemental and extravagant.
***
viii.
Voluntarily evacuating ahead of mudslides
Dear John,
Love felt first elusive, then inescapable, like rainforest rain. After a primitive rain, more than usual, more than expected, soil changes. A tree uproots from the changed soil and falls on a house, splitting it in two. Who are the tree and house in this new weather system? Some relationships are characterized by fragmentation, the tree sawed to pieces, house torn down, and inhabitants split to Bali and New Zealand. Some relationships welcome and include—it is their nature to extend an invitation to stand under a tree and wait out the rain. Some relationships create a new third presence, a tree house. Here’s a key you can keep.
Equinoctially,
J
P.S. Resolving to get up on the love side of the bed.
***
ix.
Birdseye view
Sea change times
Dear Juan,
What if all of us bodies of water had been fed poems since we first opened our mouths. If we had been fed wild imagination, music and intelligence in a language that included thought, dream and speech. Would genetic tests reveal us as tagged by metaphor, trailing vestigial rhythms.
Sometimes, surrounded by Xeroxes and a bad coffee machine papered in puns and clichés (“Today is a gift, that’s why we call it the present”), I feel out of my element, stranded on a volcanic island. (“This is not my circus, these are not my monkeys.”)
Handing out poems once a year for National Poem in Pocket Day is nice, but sometimes we get rained out—palms, papers and pockets damp. Sometimes Earth Day activities get cancelled because of a 10% chance of rain. Sometimes the sky empties water from its cloud suitcases as if they’re overweight and the last flight that sky can catch to sleep with love tonight is about to close the cabin doors. Today it rains toads and dogs. No sign of coyotes or mice. The birds don’t seem to mind.
Lyrically yours,
J
***
x.
Intersection of intimacy & editing
Where the list of elements, like daylight minutes, grows
Dear John,
Someone else’s snow is our drought-delaying rain, which calls for contemplation.
Would love to see, in place of internet shopping, scrolling and trolling, a haiku coalition—thousands of verses linked by rain, a collaboration to stem the tide of disconnection.
Let’s start with your haiku, written on the corner of Central & Pierce, outside Metro Dog. Raining dogs and dogs.
Waiting at the bus stop
a minute to spare--
rain drops on the page
Adoring your minimalism and not in need of rescue,
J
P.S. Let’s be each other’s emergency contacts.
P.P.S. I found a note saying, “Add love to the list of elements.” I think it was from me.
Jacqueline Lyons is the author of the poetry collections Adorable Airport (Barrow Street Press), The Way They Say Yes Here (Hanging Loose Press), and poetry chapbooks Earthquake Daily (New Michigan Press), and Lost Colony (Dancing Girl Press). She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, Utah Arts Council Awards in poetry and nonfiction, and a Nevada Arts Council Fellowship in nonfiction. She lives on the southern segment of the San Andreas Fault.
