As the Crow Flies
No one my age can possibly see these times as normal. This is no meandering flight, but the shortest path from here to planetary disaster.
I say this both for myself and for our species: We should have looked where we were going.
What would the crow say if he deigned to speak to me? Taken up with trying to manage my own flight, I can’t know.
The whole world of possibilities spreads out below me. But it’s starting to feel like I’m too close to the end to become a different, more accomplished person of greater substance. A person who managed to put money by and own a home. A writer with royalty checks that come in every April and October. A movie or mini-series deal that did more than make me feel excited about my potential to break in to that rarified world of people in the arts who achieve both critical and material success while they’re still alive.
I’ve worked hard to meet the challenges of my life with as much grace as I’ve been able to muster: to do the best that I can with whatever gifts I’ve been given.
I’ll be the first to admit that my focus could have been sharper. I’ve been distracted by that hungry place inside me that needs love—the basic kind of love and sense of self-worth that wasn’t in the larder when I was growing up. I’ve spent a lot of time and energy looking for it. But the journey has yielded a wealth of wonderful people in my life, people I love and treasure, as well as a lot of travel and many adventures, and a fair number of foolishly optimistic decisions that didn’t, in the end, serve me well.
Is it too late to change course? I’m thinking about the trajectory of my own little life—but also about the life of our beautiful, imperiled planet.
How can we have been so careless with all the goodness and beauty of this world? How can I have managed to be so careless about securing a legacy beyond boxes and boxes of notebooks filled with my writing—and a modest shelf of books with my name on the spine?
Sleepless in the middle of the night, I had the thought that my job now is simply to safely land the plane.
My son is visiting me from Denmark—and my joy in spending time with him is profound.
Life doesn’t last forever for any of us. Just the other day, I learned of the death of one of California’s beloved Poets in the Schools, Tobey Kaplan—a kind and vivacious person who was a well-loved member of the Bay Area’s poetry community.
Very far away from the place I have always called home, I am suffused with wonder and gratitude for all the extraordinarily wonderful people with whom I have forged a bond of love and esteem in my lifetime. And I am struck every day by the beauty of the Connecticut landscape, all of it exotic to me.
As I stand on the deck outside, an Eastern bluebird swoops past the leafy backdrop of the bitterroot hickory tree that looms taller than this two-story house. The swift little, brightly colored bird looks like a puzzle piece broken off from the summer sky.
The raucous whistles and trills of the Northern cardinal reach my ears. It takes me a long time, craning my neck, before I spy the bird itself in the leafy branches of the tree—a bird I had only known before as an image on Christmas cards.
I say a prayer of thanks every time I see one of these bright red jewels in the landscape.
Do the cardinal and his mate have a nest in the hickory tree?
At my son’s request, I trimmed his waist-length hair, letting hanks of the silken, copper-tinged brown strands fall onto the boards of the deck, knowing that the wind would blow it away.
My hope is that at least some of these keratinized bits of him will be gathered up by the birds to line their nests and keep their little ones safe—that part of him will become part of the landscape here, even after he flies back to his job in that far northern place, where he’s been working for close on four years now to make green energy an ever more efficient and affordable option for the world.
Shh! Received on June 2nd…
Dear Barbara Quick,
We are very happy to inform you that your manuscript sample has been selected as a semifinalist in the Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award contest for this year. Your work stood out among many talented submissions, and our readers were impressed by its creativity, emotional depth, and unique perspective.
The collection is, as mandated by the contest rules, quite hefty. I was thrilled, as I assembled it from work I’ve written over these many years, to realize that, yes, I am, by and large, a narrative poet! This is what happens when a novelist and a poet live in one body.
The working title for the book is Time Travel: A Life in Poems.
Please think good thoughts for me! There are 20 semi-finalists. Knowing that my manuscript is among them is, in itself, a tremendous dose of encouragement.
We must keep on striving for everything and everyone we hold dear—especially at those times when things seem hopeless!
The Birds Know What They’re Doing The birds know what they’re doing. They own the air, the branches, wires, rafters. The ground is their dinner-plate, the ether filled with snacks. Feeding, flying, gathering—staying still to feel the day’s last benediction of sunlight, filling their eyes with it— They’re never paralyzed, worrying whether they’ve focused on the wrong things— Or have anything to express, after all— Or will ever sing again. Copyright © 2015 by Barbara Quick
Congratulations and Good Luck!
so happy to read this