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Owl in flight

Two Summers

By Rob Carney

Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
 

1. Radio Waves

When I worked in the fireworks business, some of the trucks had radios, but they only got am stations, and those were all the same: selling gold, selling guaranteed salvation, selling weight loss and fringe-right fury about the Democrats across the Northwest and then out to other galaxies since our radio waves leave the atmosphere and carry this splutter like another kind of space junk. So mostly I’d spin the dial around until I landed on a mariachi station. Would you rather have shilling and yelling, or accordions and brass? And these days aren’t much different either, except that there’s a whole lot more of it. It would take a whole continent of trumpets now to drown it out:

“What’s the Universe’s Home Address?”

Don’t answer that. I wasn’t serious. The world’s already full enough as is with too much certainty. What I could use, really use, aren’t opinions but questions, questions wide enough to quiet noise.

Imagine no one listening to lies, no one repeating them, no false success about whatever war, no pious views. The universe can manage on its own and might not mind a trade: less microphones for more of us out gardening… that stillness… that chance to hear what we really want to know. Like, “Do birds ever feel too empty to sing?” Or, “What causes heart skips? And when will mine again?”

2. Stage Directions

There’s a stage direction in theater: Tableau. It means the actors freeze mid-action, then the lights fade to black… sort of like a living photograph. They freeze, mid-action, when the resolution seems just right, when they’re hugging or laughing or something.

Sometimes I wish that life was like that too, that right when everything’s good, when it’s exactly as it should be, we just freeze, and that feeling lingers…. Then we wake up, and it’s the next day, and the night didn’t end with an argument, and the hours ahead (with their possible bullshit) haven’t come, not yet, they’re still out there in the distance. I wish I could perform that magic trick. I wish right in the middle of life, I could say, “Tableau”:

“What Grade Would You Give the Night?”

The stars are dialed in, it’s not noisy, it smells full of life, late dinners just over. And a house set down in the middle with a garden out back.

Someone calls to someone, and the wind, that magic carpet, floats her voice until it’s everywhere.

And no dogs—forget dogs—their barking seems packed off to a museum where people skip the headsets since no one wants to hear.

I’d say it’s a big Amen. I’d love to trade places with an owl.

 

 

Rob CarneyRob 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 Petr Elvis, courtesy Pixabay.