Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
At the post office, the clerk wanted to know, “Do you write books?” I had a bunch of padded envelopes addressed to different bookstores, and I told him yes.
“About what?” he asked, and there it was: that moment when I wasn’t quite sure what I should say because one has some orca linguistics and the worst-ever firestorm in Spokane, and another is a shark mythology, and another starts out as a time-traveling revenge tale and ends with an elegy in Northern California, and this one—the one that I was mailing—covers more ground than that.
I said, “Mostly about the West, I guess, about animals and the environment. Not novels,” I said, “they’re poems and essays,” and the clerk said, “Oh.”
That’s the way it goes, I know, and I could’ve been even more disappointing. Imagine if I’d told him that lately I’ve been writing parables—what then? A look of confusion. A headshake.
Still, there’s something about the form that I just like: the way it’s both sideways and urgent; how your thoughts disappear into one-minute stories, here-and-gone, but maybe still hanging in the air, like they’re gusts and the reader is a wind chime.
This century could use some new parables, I think, and maybe you do too:
When the Mermaids Filed a Class-Action Lawsuit,
some thought they didn’t have standing.
Another thought maybe they did,
but only on a boat:
“You know, because of Maritime Law.”
She said, “That means all we have to do
is bore a few holes in the ones at the marina;
I know sinking boats sounds expensive, but believe me,
not compared to punitive damages.”
She meant owing for the decades and miles
of lost nets—
adrift now
and noosing through the water.
She meant for oil spills and barges of garbage
a century deep.
She meant for kelp beds the size of the Amazon gone,
and everything coastal with them,
from rockfish and otters and abalone
to the ocean’s biggest carbon sink
to mermaids
complaining that our plastic is worse than disease…
There was a pause. Waves sloshed
against the pilings. Then somebody spoke:
“On the other hand,” he reminded them,
“mermaids aren’t even people,
so the judge’ll toss this out,
and we’re off the hook,”
and it sounded like wisdom,
and everyone cheered.
Rob Carney’s first collection of creative nonfiction, Accidental Gardens, is out now from Stormbird Press, and his new book of poems, Call and Response, is available from Black Lawrence Press. Previous books include Facts and Figures, The Last Tiger is Somewhere, The Book of Sharks, and 88 Maps.
Read an interview with Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: “The Ocean is Full of Questions.”
Read Rob Carney’s Letter to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published by Terrain.org and Trinity University Press.
Read poetry by Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: 6th Annual Contest Finalist, 4th Annual Contest Winner, and Issue 30. And listen to an interview on Montana Public Radio about The Book of Sharks.
Header image by L. Kramer, courtesy Shutterstock.
