Raw Light

“Arizona” can be read on pp. 81-83 of heart speech this (Atropos Press, 2009, ISBN 9 780982 530948).

A lake as out of place as I have often felt, a river contained within cliffs and dammed until its heights depended less on snowmelt than on heat and turbines—where better to explore while standing still, while disturbing surfaces too thin to resist intruders? “Tonight I trick a stone” follows the smearing of mosquitoes across the evening air; “Arizona” follows a Philip Larkin form far from the decay of anxious London and its suburbs.

“Arizona” takes a rhyme scheme borrowed from Larkin and moves his achingly sad musings on the dreariness of belief-less, depthless lives to a place that holds its own belief and depth, a place with an “unknown shimmer” and a “trout’s fierce blush.” The lakes made from the Colorado River were part of my childhood escapes and isolations, family trips from desert to desert, irrigation to reservoirs. England’s postwar landscape only became familiar years later, too late to replace the “canyons crumbling to dust” that came from wars too little publicized, too barely protested.

My family traveled to these lakes—Mohave, Havasu, and Powell—once, twice, or even three times per year for weekend breaks or summer vacations, piling six children, their friends, and food and clothes into a van and a car, divvying up the kids by size and anticipated tempers. Some nights we drove separately, one group arriving hours before the other. I remember leaning out of the window of the front seat along the Arizona highway, no lights except the deep, deep piles of stars I wanted to sink into, wanted to breathe.

I felt that way about these lakes. Artificial as they were, fish and weeds and stone had made them real. I wanted to breathe the textures and heat, the cool water against the burning skies, wanted to dissolve myself in both and in the cliffs reddening my sight more than my sunburned skin. “This rush to release what cannot be born” tangled itself in my intense desires to take in all my senses could translate and to release all I felt I was unable to share. The only connection I trusted was this beauty and strangeness.

“Nothing seamless in this place,” and yet there was nothing I could add, nothing that could connect to me here in these difficult places that shifted volume and contour daily, visibly, audibly. The sheet lightning struck nearly every evening; thunderstorms kicked up waves dangerous for swimmers and boats. And then utter, utter calm, with water so smooth the skis skated their soft, cottony surfaces like waterbugs, fish breaking the surface with bubbling gasps like children pursing their lips to pop out restless pressures.

Every year I wanted more, wanted to leave myself in these waters, wanted to imprint myself in these cliffs. I felt more awkward, less able to dissolve, and yet more at home in these false constructions of beauty than home itself. This is where I found belief, “in the vagaries of day, the lone bird, the lost stone.”  This is when I found there was something of home “murmuring slight in the dimpling of surfaces, the grasp for connection extended, borne alight.”