At Home and Rising
By Rich Ives
Amphibious Reservations
Froghopper
Only Nechirvan is bold enough now, red, orange, and shiny black. His compact body eats quietly, moves little. If disturbed he just hops away.
But Nechirvan is already away, at the grassy verges, the wetlands. Forest paths and plantations call to him. He does not understand that he is listening, but he is responding.
Nechirvan thinks he may have invented himself. He finds himself finishing before he has decided to start.
But now we must go to the pond and discover how far away tomorrow can be, for there may be too many interests there to focus clearly upon.
If there is some interest with deep red eyes in the pond, Nechirvan has failed to spot her and translate what she is doing. He saw himself too many times approaching without knowing.
Nechirvan’s thoughts are tied in knots, which is not at all unfamiliar, but today they fall into the water and find themselves in a life before walking. Nechirvan does not recognize himself in the water but learns quickly to swim. Just as before he entered the pond, he did not know where he was going.
It is too late to become another portion of what he knows and too early to know who he has been. Nechirvan’s feet begin growing. He stands up and finds himself on the shoreline, but no one else is there, not even who he thought he was.
Now he will breathe the way his new body tells him, the way a man who has started over would breathe, the way an answer sometimes comes back with only the breath from the other side of the pond, growing louder.
Impatient for what it hasn’t yet learned.
Leaving Home
Giant Click Beetle
Uncle Jersey is large and distinctive, smooth, elegant with a hard body covered in hair that often wears or scratches off to reveal a shiny, almost metallic, polished-looking surface. He has a notch and pointed spine on his underside that can be clicked in a rapid defensive motion. The edges of his thorax can pinch fingers.
Uncle Jersey is associated with acacia woodlands. He has done much to separate them from the ordinary. He knows all the stories of threatened survival that these woodlands contain. He spills them intentionally. He can seem to be inexhaustible. He never stops talking, merely shifts to his internal mirror.
You may need something to respond to, but Uncle Jersey already has it. He does not know it’s just him. He loses track of when he is talking to himself.
Uncle Jersey is not polished, though he appears to be. He is not related to everyone though he acts as if he is. He puts his hand out as if it contains answers when it contains only good intentions, and these intentions are often good only for Uncle Jersey.
You might wonder if Uncle Jersey actually sleeps. It’s a question like many that he has never asked. His answer for all questions is: Why, of course, for he can sleep without thinking about it and often does not remember that it happened. Uncle Jersey lives as though he were already where he was going.
When the world is dark, one is asleep.
When the world is light, all but the one who does not remember are awake.
Being awake is not a life. It’s just barely an opening.
The Moment in Flight
Giant Forest Cicada
Englebert and Ruth Anne chose each other because they are both quite large, with stout transparent, yet veined, wings with green markings that can be hidden. You would not expect them to fly.
Closer attention reveals a mottled green to mottled brown color, with their bright black eyes watching. They are noisy, shrill, almost deafening in their calls. It’s an assertion of their similarities.
Such men are constant in the middle of the day. Such women are constant in the evening. They must struggle to come together. Their pleas reverberate but sound like gratitude.
Their music is returned from time to time, but often they are struggling to make it. It cannot be merely repeated. It cannot be consuming.
When relatives are visiting it is not obvious, for everything is relative and it is not always easy to discover which relatives are still growing. Those that fall away carry their status name, but might as well be dead. Many relatives are very much like this.
A sour baby smell is not a relative but an absolute. Englebert watching Ruth Anne is a relative, as if each fully engaged creature can always be another. It is not something you are born to but something you can find.
It is the refusal to stop looking that keeps Englebert and Ruth Anne together. Success can be rare but effort must be frequent for a happy life. Englebert and Ruth Anne are fully aware that they must live with this reasoning, but they need to remind each other when those who know them try to act like relatives.
To fly is to hold in one place that which moves around you. Englebert and Ruth Anne have mastered this skill, they are no longer conscious of it, just as one might think about where one is going while one has only begun getting there. Life is not merely in the moment.
Rich Ives has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander and the 2012 winner of the Thin Air Creative Nonfiction Award. His books include Light from a Small Brown Bird (Bitter Oleander Press—poetry), Sharpen (The Newer York—fiction chapbook), The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leaking (What Books—stories), Old Man Walking Home After Dark (Cyberwit—poetry), Dubious Inquiries into Magnificent Inadequacies (Cyberwit—poetry), A Servant’s Map of the Body (Cyberwit—stories), Incomprehensibly Well-adjusted Missing Persons of Interest (Cyberwit—stories), and Tunneling to the Moon (Silenced Press—stories).