The Journey Begins

   . . . in the rocking chair, on my grandmother's lap, turnip soup, her favorite, going 'ker-pank' inside her little belly, her sweet alto rising with:

                               In my red rocking chair
                               We will travel far
                               Over hill, over dale,
                               Where the fairies are.

   Then on to Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden Of Verses where most verses are journeys of one kind or another befitting their author's lifelong propensity for travel:

                               Smooth it glides upon its travel,
                               Here a wimple, there a gleam--
                               O the clean gravel!
                               O the smooth stream!
                                           ~~~~~

                               I should like to rise and go
                               Where the golden apples grow;
                               . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
                               Where the knotty crocodile
                                Lies and blinks in the Nile;
                                            ~~~~~

                               But every night I go abroad
                               Afar into the land of Nod
                                             ~~~~~

                               The coach is at the door at last;
                               The eager children, mounting fast
                               And kissing hands, in chorus sing;
                               Good-bye, Good-bye to everything!

   Good-bye, Good-bye indeed!  WWII had been over for nearly a year and I would be starting school in the fall.  We moved into a duplex nearby.  Life as I had known it with Grandmother was done . . . but the seeds of skedaddle were already sown.
                                                           

                                               

                                                       1941                                                                                              

Snowbound

   The snowy fields rise to an alabaster sky. The union is seamless, the effect blinding and disturbing. It is like the bright light of the near-death experience, but there is no one there to take us home. We are alone. No word from the county. No phone. No electricity. No way out. We fear we have been forgotten. We wait. In another room someone is playing Tchaikovsky's Winter Dreams on Grandmother's wind-up Victrola. Grandfather, who has been dozing in fits in his chair by the window, wakes.

   

   "Do you remember when Ala and I made love on that snowy mountain in Colorado?"

   "Hush, Grandfather," I say. "You've been dreaming. There is no Ala and you've never been to Colorado."

   "What? But aren't we in Colorado as we speak?" he asks.

   "No, Grandfather, we're in Kansas."

   It is snowing again. Saucer-sized portions of the sky tumble straight down, intensifying our sense of claustrophobic isolation. The snow-mantled cedars, outposts of the world as we know it, are now lost to the horizon. The barn, the silo, the broken-down windmill are easing toward us and risk being sucked into the black hole that is this old farmhouse. God help us, we say, for it appears that no one else will. It has been nine days since we last saw the sun and it is madding. Even Grandfather, mad for more winters than we care to remember, appears agitated.

   "Kansas, you say? Kansas?"

   "Yes, Grandfather."

   "Well . . . is it possible it was Dorothy that I was thinking of?"

   "Hush, Grandfather," I say. "Anything is possible. Anything . . . and sometimes nothing." But he is asleep again and not in Kansas anymore.

                                                                                             glwarren 2008, 2014  

How It Finally Ended

Gerald shouts
terrifically as
he sails downstream like
a young man with a
destination.

                                                                                                                               --James Tate, Success Comes To Cow Creek

   "You are the greatest writer ever!"  Nadia shouted as she waved a half sheet of paper on which I had written a prose poem for her. I had slipped it beneath her door a half hour earlier with a note scrawled on the back saying I was off for a walk in the country. She was out of breath when she caught up with me and only half sober with the sun still high in the evening sky. Thinking there might be some magic for us there, we lay down in the warm grass on the bank of a stream where a now famous poet had often come to write. "I meant it," she said afterward. "The greatest! Ever!"

   

   The Eskimo told Rasmussen that whenever they needed a new song, the words would "shoot up of themselves." Many would be the words that came over them, they said, "like the wings of birds out of darkness." Sadly, my own words, which heretofore had always come to me of their own, began to fail me. Without words, Nadia's love for me began to diminish. She said she hoped there would be some kind of recovery, but soon grew tired of waiting and eventually ran off to the west coast with a slogger of prize-winning doggerel. Finally, for lack of words I was forced to give up writing altogether. There was no recovery. And the poet doesn't come here anymore.

                                                                                                                glwarren, 2014

Promises

Mostly cloudy overnight with rain likely.

   We had heard the thunder from distant storms all night long.  Dry and tinny the sound, bang, not boom, refusing to roll.  When dawn came we could see that the storms were moving away from us. Drought-weary and longing to feel the rain in our faces, we ran to the truck, the spent grass crackling like fire beneath our feet, and raced westward.  The storms were swifter however, and had passed well beyond us by the time we arrived where they had been. The roadway was barely damp.  Dolores, my sweet, sorrowful other, cried and railed against those "liars" from the city who had promised us rain. "I'm sick and tired of it," she said. "Let's just keep on going.  Let's just keep on going and never come back."

   "Ah, Dolores, you mustn't trust too much in what men say," I said.  You know that city folk don't amount to much when it comes to calling the weather.  Listen, I promise you that it will rain again soon.  The signs are everywhere.  The rain crow calls again and again from the thicket, for instance, while the burnt-land bird flies low to the ground.  And if you'd been down to the county road around midnight, you could have heard ol' Annabeth's rooster crowing.  But even if all the signs fail and the rains don't come, don't you worry.  I know a rainmaker out of Wichita who says he can drum us up a doozy anytime.

"Promise?" she sniffled.

"Promise," I said.

"Pinkie promise?" she asked.

"Oh, absolutely!'" I said.

"Alright'" she said.  "Then let's just go on home."
                                                                                             glwarren 2009,2014

A Very Very Short Story

Leaving Kansas

                           In my room on the road to Denver, a few miles from

                        the Colorado line, the amber light on the telephone was

                        flashing. The message was not meant for me. "Listen," a 

                        distraught woman's voice began, "it's me. And I'm so sorry

                        . . . and I . . . I really need to talk to you. Please don't go 

                        to Colorado. And please call me. Please."

                            "Oh, we get that all the time," the evening clerk said as

                         he tallied the day's receipts. "The man who was in that room

                         came in late last night and left first thing this morning. There's

                         nothing to be done about it. It's out of our hands. Day and

                         night that road out there thunders with the sound of leaving.

                         Madmen and fools, all of them. Mark my words. They will all

                         be back, sooner or later, one way or another, and none of 

                         them the wiser for it. Which way you headed?" he asked without

                         looking up.  "Kansas City," I lied.

                                                                                                                                                  glwarren, 2014

     Worse were the lies we told ourselves: that in faraway places we would discover who we really were and that our Muse, free at last, would carry us to the literary glory we had always imagined. Madmen and fools, truly!