Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
1.
People outside of Utah think this place is weird, and Utah deserves that. But when it comes to sprawl, it’s as normal as everywhere else.
Take Point of the Mountain, for instance. Forty years ago, that name made sense. Before the gravel mine. Before they pulled down half the mountain. See, it takes gravel to make the concrete, and they need the concrete to build the mall sprawl, driveways, and eight more lanes of interstate. They can call this “progress” if they want to, or call it “development,” but it’s really just a slow kind of avalanche. No wonder no one’s seen an eagle in a long, long time.
I’m not trying to be gloomy, though. Fall is a bad time for that. To me, October means that midterms are coming and I’m way too busy for gloom. And not just me; everyone in our family is too busy. Jen is a fifth-grade teacher. Jameson’s a junior now; meaning, all the usual stuff, plus test prep for the ACTs. And Quentin’s deeper in his major, and Rhyan’s beginning first grade, so if gloom wants more of my attention, it’ll have to wait in line.
Besides, school can often surprise us with something good, and I’d rather get sidetracked by that. Years ago, for instance, I was passing by a cart in the library, when the cover art on this giant biography caught my eye. It made me stop, pick it up, and discover the work of Romare Bearden: shape and color, culture and memory, social critique and celebration—everything all at once—through painting and collage. What if I’d missed that? What if that cart of books had been somewhere else where I wasn’t walking?
I’m not trying to say this was some kind of sign. I just got lucky. And dreams don’t have to be signs of anything either. Most times they’re probably just fire escapes for our anxieties. Here’s a dream I had back in college to show what I mean: I was walking up a hill I’d never been to before because the top of this hill was supposed to be an ideal spot to see Jupiter, and Jupiter was going to be closer to Earth than it’d been in a couple million years. Then I get to the top, and it is close, close enough to touch—like, three feet away—and also bright green.
That doesn’t make sense, I’m thinking. Jupiter’s red not green.
And then a girl from my Oceanography class says, “Yes, it does. Yes, it is. I guess you didn’t read the next chapter. Good luck on the test.”
Well, it turns out nobody else read it either, because if the world had read the next chapter, then people would’ve woken up a long time ago. We’d have woken up and known that this was the future that was coming: a future in which the oceans have more plastic in them than fish. As if humans are really this planet’s collective bad dream.
2.
But that’s being gloomy again, and I don’t want to be gloomy because I do like fall.
I like the four more hours of darkness. I like the yard’s transformation: What was green since spring is now spare and clean, and the limbs of the trees look like thin, tired dancers, dancers glad to stand still for a while and wait for the snow to come visit, for the snow to shrug off its winter coat and wrap it around their branches.
Autumn Tanka
Morning air sharper—
you can feel it in each breath.
And the sky’s face
a clock face now,
counting time with flocks of geese.
Rob Carney is the author of nine books of poems, including The Book of Drought (Texas Review Press, 2024), winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and Call and Response (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), and his collection of creative nonfiction, Accidental Gardens: New & Revised, is forthcoming from Wakefield Press. His work has appeared in Cave Wall, The Dark Mountain Project, Sugar House Review, and many other journals, as well as the Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward (2006). In 2013 he won the Terrain.org Poetry Award and in 2014 he received the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Prize for Poetry. He is a Professor of English at Utah Valley University and lives in Salt Lake City. Follow his Terrain.org series Old Roads, New Stories.
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 photo by Anja, courtesy Pixabay.
