Opening our eyes, our ears--and our hearts

Everything is animate

Why do picture-frames shift on the wall, compelling us to walk up close and touch them? Could it be that they want us to touch them?

After all, we take a good deal of thought and trouble decorating our walls: we choose our graphic companions with care. Each image possesses some special meaning beyond harmonizing with the couch or the rug or the paint on the wall. Each painting, poster, or print evokes a particular beloved landscape or feeling. A particular moment from the past.

But after a longer or shorter period of time, our lives’ visual accompaniments can become as invisible as the daily geography we’ve assimilated: the journey from bed to bathroom, from living-room to fridge.

Would I see those micro-voyages differently—would I see them better—if I were blind?

After watching “The Miracle Worker” on our black-and-white TV when I was a child, I walked around our house with my eyes shut and my hands held out in front of me, trying to imagine what it must have felt like to be Helen Keller.

I am at my best as a poet and writer when I’m seeing everything as if I’ve never seen anything before. When even the most ordinary sights take on the luminous sheen of revelation.

***

We witness and we are also witnessed by what we see.

Almost every day since Wayne and I moved from California to Connecticut, I have walked down and up the steep hill where our house is perched at the very top of the road, surrounded on both sides by woods and gardens. Especially on the uphill slope, I’m aware that my lungs are working in tandem with all the other oxygen-inhaling creatures around me.

I hear the crash of a deer (or is it a bear?) where the undergrowth is dense. I catch a glimpse of something sleek and coal-black—something feline, too large to be a house-cat—with another creature’s long tail dangling from its jaws. The deer linger long enough on the manicured slopes to look back at me before leaping for cover. The bunnies, straight out of an engraving by Dürer, stay very still until I pass some invisible boundary that signals, “Too close!” and they scamper away under a fence or into the tall grass.

I think grateful thoughts to the trees as I pass under them and breathe in the good oxygen they exude for me and every other one of my fellow creatures to enjoy. Are those same trees delighting in the carbon dioxide of my exhalations? In Nature’s cafeteria, aren’t we all eating at long tables together—the mammals, the birds, the trees and plants, and the mushrooms in their underground carbon banks where they’re giving and getting the stuff of life?

As I pass beneath some pine trees on a hot day in the here and now, I feel the comfort of their shade as well as the companionship of their roots in my future.

We are witnessing one another: I am seeing the trees and they are seeing me in whatever mysterious way that beings without ocular organs can nonetheless, very definitely, “see.”

A Thousand Paper Airplanes

If I could fold a thousand paper airplanes
from the pages of poetry and prose
stacked, one-sided, in the recycling box
beneath my desk.

If, when I launched them from a high place,
bright white against the blue sky,
they could—as in an animated film or fever dream—
turn into birds.

If those messengers, freighted with my words,
could fly to lands where readers wait with cupped hands
ready to hold each feathered ark, to feel the warm,
fluttering heart encased inside.

If all that I am and all that I’ve written
could come to rest in soil that feeds
a family of redwoods.

If forest mushrooms could weave a silver cocoon
of life over what remains of me.

If in my transformation, I could give my skin,
my flesh, my bones and all my printed words
back to the trees.

Copyright ©️ 2021 by Barbara Quick

Google tells me, when I inquire, that pictures might shift on the wall if they’re mounted on the wrong-sized hook or with a wire not pulled quite tight enough. Or even in reaction to a door slamming shut or a breeze coming in through a window. (When I lived in earthquake country, it was far easier to explain these things.)

I’m looking up from the chair where I’m sitting and scribbling, at the extraordinarily beautiful, absolutely luminous painting of a Sonoma County vineyard painted by Brooks Anderson. When you walk up close to the painting, its realism breaks apart and you can see the impasto technique, the brushstrokes that create an optical illusion of realism.

I feel the painting holding out its metaphorical arms to me, as Brooks always did when I came into the dance studio, whichever studio it was where he was drumming, saying my name as people said it in Brazil: “Bar-bara,” a word that means “something wonderful” in Brazilian Portuguese. A word I saw with pleasure and surprise on billboards during the weeks I spent there.

I had never liked my name before I traveled to Brazil.

Shortly before his career as an artist skyrocketed, I commissioned Brooks to create a painting based on one of the photos I took on the island of Sifnos—and now his painting graces the cover of the little book of poems I wrote during my sojourn there, in that beautifully haunted landscape.

I’m looking out the picture windows of this house on a high green hill in rural Connecticut—and all the trees, and even the Berkshire Mountains in the distance, are looking back at me.

We are in this world and we are of this world.

You can buy The Light on Sifnos here.

Visit my author website to learn more about my work!

From a reader who just wrote to me about my most recent novel, What Disappears, on LinkedIn: “I finished your lovely book and will write a terrific review. Still thinking about how to phrase it... I will keep it short, saying just enough to make someone say I absolutely must read this book. Barbara, it is truly exquisite.”

Buy links for What Disappears:

From Regal House (you can order the paperback or a special collector’s edition here)

On Amazon

At Bookshop.org

If your book-buying budget is depleted now, I hope you’ll consider asking for What Disappears from your local library. If they don’t have it on their shelves, you can ask them to get it. I’m so grateful that my 2007 novel, Vivaldi’s Virgins, is already in the catalogue of many (most?) libraries around the country (and in libraries in 12 other countries abroad).

This has made me feel richly rewarded (even though I still have not received a single royalty check since I got my advance—it wasn’t that big!—17 years ago). Ah, the writers’ life!

Your comments are reaching me—even though, for some mysterious reason, they don’t display here. I think you have to get onto the SubStack app (also free) for this to work. But rest assured that I love hearing from you!