Author at Large
The call of an elk startles me. I look across the rolling brown and gray hills at the sewing-machine bobbing of pumpjacks and feel the disappointment shiver me like touching steel on a hard frost morning. It’s the same feeling I get when I mistake the wind cutting through the wires for a whale’s song …
A motorcycle wrecked in the carpool lane, just like when I’d driven my daughter and her boyfriend here three days ago. One hour and five minutes to go one mile. Time, though, makes all traffic pass, even if it’s over for some guy cutting between cars in so big a hurry it was worth never arriving. On …
He stands a shade bearing light. The blood of life in conjunction with the secondhand sunlight of the moon, Venus, and Jupiter as they spin along the ecliptic. The hum of distant electric lights sounds like his daughters in the far room with their dolls and stuffed animals arrayed for a celebration or on the daybed turned amphitheater as …
Your final morning in the field. Before sunup, in the dark the pump-jacks automatically pumping like thousands of hearts against the backdrop of stars sounds to you like the herds of elk you listened to in the forest waiting for first light years ago. You are alone in all that darkness as owls glide by and the coyotes shuffle …