From the Dappled Things Catholic literary magazine. I love the images in this piece. It speaks to a writer’s heart in the imagination of applying written (and sung) words to created forms. And there is playfulness, which surely is a key element of inspiration.
Above all Abigail Carroll gives me inspiration for my walks through the neighborhood or memories of driving across the Southwest. I play her word game with the migrating hummingbirds, the ever-present mockingbirds, the red and scarlet dawn clouds in the sky … what word form was used to create them?
Genesis
Abigail CarrollWe read that the Word
spoke forth creation, but
I’m not so sure creation
wasn’t sung into being,and not exactly hummed,
though the insects might
have appeared with hardly
an opening of the mouth.The sun, on the other hand,
was spun from delicate
but forceful arias—thus,
the operatic nature of light.Out of a bass-line, deep
blue tones—the kind you
rarely hear until they are
no longer there—whales.Ostriches sprang from
strange improvisations,
Elephants are echoes
of ancient, sacred chants.I imagine larkspur, phlox,
and clover are the progeny
of nursery rhymes repeated
quaintly, readily, musingly,as if their meaningless
were their purpose, as if
they were made for nothing
more than loveliness. Stars,in their totality, emerged
not from a tune, but rather
a soft and knowing noise:
a buzz, a kind of celestialpurr, a note so perfectly
content with itself that
it sparked, became what
it dreamed: a universe.
