Slow Arrow
Kathryn Winograd
The slow arrow of beauty . . . which slowly filters
into our minds, which we take away with us almost unnoticed,
and which we encounter again in our dreams.
⎯Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
into our minds, which we take away with us almost unnoticed,
and which we encounter again in our dreams.
⎯Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
I am thinking mushrooms because my sister, head tilted at her godless sister, has asked me if I always write of death. And because my new neighbors, in the draw just below our broken fence line, have scraped what I thought was Eight Mile Creek into a dam, a fishing hole they always “dreamed of.”
The end of summer here and I want to write of summer, how flowers remind us of what has risen: the delicate breath of those we loved gone under, a tendril of green we want to touch⎯ a bent petal, a circlet of seed.
But here is the mushroom.
The first time I think I truly saw mushrooms was in Mary Oliver’s poem of the same name. She balanced them “in the earth on one hoof,” made them “skulls,” transformed them into “flocks of glitterers,” then vanquished them beneath “shining fields of rain.”
I think I have always been half-afraid of mushrooms, their abruptness of “being” after days of dampness, their bloodless pallor⎯ a kin of clay in a litter of leaves, molded out of the rot and dankness just beneath the hinged door of our earth. If flowers are the poets’ beloved “airy soul” crept back, then the mushroom is the fleshy body in wait beneath a river of moles and feeding cicadas. Both are equally part of this world.
And what of my neighbors?
They began the first year of their suburban exodus to our mountain plain by leaving the bloody carcass of an elk outside their modular cabin. When the poet Wordsworth, the purveyor of beauty, speaks of beauty, when his “heart with pleasure fills,” it fills with the daffodil, not the mushroom. And, certainly, not the hulk of an elk birthing blowflies.
Yet, my neighbors with their trophy camera wired to a tree outside their cabin door and their wild hopes of marauding bear and mountain lion drawn close to the camera’s shutter distance, despite the precarious balance of their tiny cabin perched on concrete blocks, are as equally a part of this place as is the yellow wild flower I pick for the glass vase on my dining table and the mushroom that spreads its spores at my feet.
When my sister asks me why I write of death in a world filled with the natural beauty she takes comfort in--those sparkling lakes, turquoise skies, and “colorful flowers” that my students fill their essays and poems with-- I am helpless to answer. It’s what the literary writer does, I should tell her; it’s the way to get beyond what journals like Ecotone and Flyaway call “the hushed tones and clichés of much of so-called nature writing,” or the “simply lovely meandering poetry about the beauty of a field of wheat or sunset.”
But what is beauty in nature then, especially when the human, when the neighbor, interrupts the wild? I often ask my students not to write about the everyday beauty of nature, what they have grown up hearing, but about the beauty that is harder to see like the calf I have tried to write about for years now, the one I found dead one spring below the cabin. Half angel shell, I wrote, now sea sound, all winter the predators sculling his collapsing belly, cleaning out his soft organs in the craterous dark, in the eye socket dark.
In her essay, “An argument about beauty,” Susan Sontag argues that “the most stirring beauty is the most evanescent …it reminds us of nature as such⎯of what lies beyond the human and the made.” To understand the complexity of earth, to express beauty in all its unfathomableness, even as it passes from us is what I know I want, the things of this earth we have loved and lost cycling into transcendence.
But still, I look through my journal for moments to give my sister that she might love⎯ boughs of descended rain, gauze of air. And then I find the miller moth that once circled the light bulb of my reading lamp, the crush of its wings against the hot glass, I wrote, and how I caught it mid-air, the tiny ragged thread of its life less than breath against my palms, I wrote, until I released it, its frail exoskeleton littering the floor by morning.
In spring, we smelled death, I want to write, despite my sister’s admonishment, a gritty tendril of it cast through the air, the dogs mysteriously oblivious to it. But Leonard and I stayed, anxious at the scent of it, until we found it: a fawn against the rocks, its neck broken, splayed back, its ribs like a fan unfolded. A fresh kill, most likely mountain lion, someone told us later, berating us for going back at evening, and then the next morning, too⎯ the mountain lion surely treed nearby⎯ to find what was left of the fawn⎯ a leg, hair, the rack of its tender spine.
Death but a terrible beauty, too. Yes, I want to say to my sister, we were tossed from your paradise, but to what more beautiful place than earth with not just its minions of fish and bird calling out to be named, but its scoured bones and the yellow leafs we call trembling so soon to vanish against the blue blaze of a noon ⎯ as is the turkey vulture that soars above a fallen fawn?
“Exactly how many,” interrupts my mother, my cabin companion today, transplant from the red leaves of Ohio, “ yellow leaves can you really look at?”⎯ my reveries ended.
The Caterpillar stuck in the creek early in the summer. I saw it from the once solitary ridge I share with my new neighbors now, and where now a large metal canister hangs from a tree, a kind of “elk-baiter.” It disperses, my neighbors explain, alfalfa pellets to draw elk to the second wildlife camera they’ve secured to another tree nearby and what, in fall, I’m sure will lure the elk to the sighting scopes of their rifles.
“Better wear orange,” my neighbors warn me.
When the bulldozer stuck, the creek pushed hard around it, half-swallowed despite the bunker of mud that Dave, our local digger of footers and septic fields, scraped up from the creek bed for the dam. “Well,” Dave told me later, “we’ll just take it apart piece by piece,” and he described to me how the chain rigged to their truck to free it snapped, bursting through the back window, his wife Tandy almost smashed in the head, death it seems, my dear sister, everywhere.
But I am thinking about ancient water rights now, not death nor beauty. And of a man, my neighbor, who owns one slim finger of land across a wide valley and will go against a whole history of community to damn a creek: the acequias trenched by hand by early Spaniards, and the placer claims of the 1800s gold miners who created “first in time, first in right” water doctrines still upheld by our courts today. I have known a certain Colorado water lawyer for about three decades now and given his comments on water rights, I’m pretty sure plugging up an entire creek in our watershed with a bulldozer is neither legal nor community-minded.
“I can’t believe it,” my mother says in her red coat, walking stick in hand, as we trudge up the lane with the dog to see some more yellow leaves. I describe to her this small waterway, this nameless creek just a blue squiggle mapped out in the Beaver Creek watershed, where my daughters once waded amid tiny fish and bright snakes. Once it was strong enough to knock down the stone bridges that, broken, still criss-cross it, built by other inhabitants long dead. John Wesley Powell, the 19th century explorer of the American West, said that within the watershed, a natural conduit of precipitation, “ All living things are inextricably linked.” And now this creek⎯that has braided the floor of this valley, carved banks and deep tunnels beneath fallen logs and boulders, watered elk, deer, birds, bear, bobcat, aspen, conifer and the wildflowers and the mushrooms of every summer for as long as anyone here can remember⎯plugged, for a fishing hole.
I remember, before this neighbor, walking down the draw through the aspen shoot, a faded cow path wandering the hillside to the valley and passing the small detritus of neighbors, here and gone: rusted farm machinery, abandoned spring cellars, holes dug for gold, and the fencing wires still nailed to trees to keep cattle in. We leave and yet our detritus lives on, even as nature slowly takes over in its fierce and beautiful regularity. How I hated it when our neighbors first camped below our property, an American flag sticking out between the concrete blocks they stacked for the cabin to come. The meadow, once small and beautiful with only a broken down hunter’s shack and towering aspen trees to ring it, was strewn with campers and outhouse tents. And then I saw the homemade “footer” the couple had poured for the cabin they dreamed of. How each had put their hand prints into the concrete, a small child’s there, too, and then the paw prints of a dog, each name written out in such joy below, each name⎯forgive me, my sister⎯writ in Water, I think, words the poet Keats had engraved on his tombstone.
The neighbors have wired another wildlife camera to a tree down by the creek and their dam. “A hundred pictures,” they told me it took, “ninety-eight percent triggered by cows.”
I take Leonard to the ledge to show him the dam, my mother waiting for us in her red coat in a lane of yellow leaves like the final one I imagine that may one day take her to places I know nothing of. How do we reconcile faith here, beauty or death, or a mother’s death? I remember how I could barely stand to look at the calf, but I did anyway, season after season, as if decay alone propelled transcendence, wishing, as I did, for my sister’s sweetness. Note the black shadow, I wrote, the oil staining its perimeter, how the bones keep scattering, swept by some invisible tide. This is what the calf falters into earth for, I thought, bloats skyward cell for cell: puma at hushed dark, the coyote’s tongue, and the bulbous may flower, so tissue-thin.
Leonard stops at the top of the ridge beneath a pine tree to pee and I go down alone to stand on the stones to wait for him, to finger-trace an empty creek bed to a dam I can only curse. Whole trees, the off shoots of an aspen colony, a thick comb of them, have long grown over where the body of the calf once lay and I have learned to search for mushrooms, to say their names: Shaggy Mane, Grisette, Hawks Wing. Sometimes, they will billow out of the earth as big as skulls, Tête de mort, we call them, filled with trillions of dark spores that I could circle this whole earth with. And some days, clouds push up from the Arkansas Valley, whole horizons disappearing, the world I can see a mere fifty yards wide.
But, sometimes, beauty without warning does come ⎯ here, a mushroom or, even, a calf, or a mother in a red coat blazing against the coming gold. Or a herd of elk you never expected sunk to their bellies in a quiet fishing hole your neighbor always dreamed of.
Our breath, I write my sister, flies from us like small sparrows.
The end of summer here and I want to write of summer, how flowers remind us of what has risen: the delicate breath of those we loved gone under, a tendril of green we want to touch⎯ a bent petal, a circlet of seed.
But here is the mushroom.
The first time I think I truly saw mushrooms was in Mary Oliver’s poem of the same name. She balanced them “in the earth on one hoof,” made them “skulls,” transformed them into “flocks of glitterers,” then vanquished them beneath “shining fields of rain.”
I think I have always been half-afraid of mushrooms, their abruptness of “being” after days of dampness, their bloodless pallor⎯ a kin of clay in a litter of leaves, molded out of the rot and dankness just beneath the hinged door of our earth. If flowers are the poets’ beloved “airy soul” crept back, then the mushroom is the fleshy body in wait beneath a river of moles and feeding cicadas. Both are equally part of this world.
And what of my neighbors?
They began the first year of their suburban exodus to our mountain plain by leaving the bloody carcass of an elk outside their modular cabin. When the poet Wordsworth, the purveyor of beauty, speaks of beauty, when his “heart with pleasure fills,” it fills with the daffodil, not the mushroom. And, certainly, not the hulk of an elk birthing blowflies.
Yet, my neighbors with their trophy camera wired to a tree outside their cabin door and their wild hopes of marauding bear and mountain lion drawn close to the camera’s shutter distance, despite the precarious balance of their tiny cabin perched on concrete blocks, are as equally a part of this place as is the yellow wild flower I pick for the glass vase on my dining table and the mushroom that spreads its spores at my feet.
When my sister asks me why I write of death in a world filled with the natural beauty she takes comfort in--those sparkling lakes, turquoise skies, and “colorful flowers” that my students fill their essays and poems with-- I am helpless to answer. It’s what the literary writer does, I should tell her; it’s the way to get beyond what journals like Ecotone and Flyaway call “the hushed tones and clichés of much of so-called nature writing,” or the “simply lovely meandering poetry about the beauty of a field of wheat or sunset.”
But what is beauty in nature then, especially when the human, when the neighbor, interrupts the wild? I often ask my students not to write about the everyday beauty of nature, what they have grown up hearing, but about the beauty that is harder to see like the calf I have tried to write about for years now, the one I found dead one spring below the cabin. Half angel shell, I wrote, now sea sound, all winter the predators sculling his collapsing belly, cleaning out his soft organs in the craterous dark, in the eye socket dark.
In her essay, “An argument about beauty,” Susan Sontag argues that “the most stirring beauty is the most evanescent …it reminds us of nature as such⎯of what lies beyond the human and the made.” To understand the complexity of earth, to express beauty in all its unfathomableness, even as it passes from us is what I know I want, the things of this earth we have loved and lost cycling into transcendence.
But still, I look through my journal for moments to give my sister that she might love⎯ boughs of descended rain, gauze of air. And then I find the miller moth that once circled the light bulb of my reading lamp, the crush of its wings against the hot glass, I wrote, and how I caught it mid-air, the tiny ragged thread of its life less than breath against my palms, I wrote, until I released it, its frail exoskeleton littering the floor by morning.
In spring, we smelled death, I want to write, despite my sister’s admonishment, a gritty tendril of it cast through the air, the dogs mysteriously oblivious to it. But Leonard and I stayed, anxious at the scent of it, until we found it: a fawn against the rocks, its neck broken, splayed back, its ribs like a fan unfolded. A fresh kill, most likely mountain lion, someone told us later, berating us for going back at evening, and then the next morning, too⎯ the mountain lion surely treed nearby⎯ to find what was left of the fawn⎯ a leg, hair, the rack of its tender spine.
Death but a terrible beauty, too. Yes, I want to say to my sister, we were tossed from your paradise, but to what more beautiful place than earth with not just its minions of fish and bird calling out to be named, but its scoured bones and the yellow leafs we call trembling so soon to vanish against the blue blaze of a noon ⎯ as is the turkey vulture that soars above a fallen fawn?
“Exactly how many,” interrupts my mother, my cabin companion today, transplant from the red leaves of Ohio, “ yellow leaves can you really look at?”⎯ my reveries ended.
The Caterpillar stuck in the creek early in the summer. I saw it from the once solitary ridge I share with my new neighbors now, and where now a large metal canister hangs from a tree, a kind of “elk-baiter.” It disperses, my neighbors explain, alfalfa pellets to draw elk to the second wildlife camera they’ve secured to another tree nearby and what, in fall, I’m sure will lure the elk to the sighting scopes of their rifles.
“Better wear orange,” my neighbors warn me.
When the bulldozer stuck, the creek pushed hard around it, half-swallowed despite the bunker of mud that Dave, our local digger of footers and septic fields, scraped up from the creek bed for the dam. “Well,” Dave told me later, “we’ll just take it apart piece by piece,” and he described to me how the chain rigged to their truck to free it snapped, bursting through the back window, his wife Tandy almost smashed in the head, death it seems, my dear sister, everywhere.
But I am thinking about ancient water rights now, not death nor beauty. And of a man, my neighbor, who owns one slim finger of land across a wide valley and will go against a whole history of community to damn a creek: the acequias trenched by hand by early Spaniards, and the placer claims of the 1800s gold miners who created “first in time, first in right” water doctrines still upheld by our courts today. I have known a certain Colorado water lawyer for about three decades now and given his comments on water rights, I’m pretty sure plugging up an entire creek in our watershed with a bulldozer is neither legal nor community-minded.
“I can’t believe it,” my mother says in her red coat, walking stick in hand, as we trudge up the lane with the dog to see some more yellow leaves. I describe to her this small waterway, this nameless creek just a blue squiggle mapped out in the Beaver Creek watershed, where my daughters once waded amid tiny fish and bright snakes. Once it was strong enough to knock down the stone bridges that, broken, still criss-cross it, built by other inhabitants long dead. John Wesley Powell, the 19th century explorer of the American West, said that within the watershed, a natural conduit of precipitation, “ All living things are inextricably linked.” And now this creek⎯that has braided the floor of this valley, carved banks and deep tunnels beneath fallen logs and boulders, watered elk, deer, birds, bear, bobcat, aspen, conifer and the wildflowers and the mushrooms of every summer for as long as anyone here can remember⎯plugged, for a fishing hole.
I remember, before this neighbor, walking down the draw through the aspen shoot, a faded cow path wandering the hillside to the valley and passing the small detritus of neighbors, here and gone: rusted farm machinery, abandoned spring cellars, holes dug for gold, and the fencing wires still nailed to trees to keep cattle in. We leave and yet our detritus lives on, even as nature slowly takes over in its fierce and beautiful regularity. How I hated it when our neighbors first camped below our property, an American flag sticking out between the concrete blocks they stacked for the cabin to come. The meadow, once small and beautiful with only a broken down hunter’s shack and towering aspen trees to ring it, was strewn with campers and outhouse tents. And then I saw the homemade “footer” the couple had poured for the cabin they dreamed of. How each had put their hand prints into the concrete, a small child’s there, too, and then the paw prints of a dog, each name written out in such joy below, each name⎯forgive me, my sister⎯writ in Water, I think, words the poet Keats had engraved on his tombstone.
The neighbors have wired another wildlife camera to a tree down by the creek and their dam. “A hundred pictures,” they told me it took, “ninety-eight percent triggered by cows.”
I take Leonard to the ledge to show him the dam, my mother waiting for us in her red coat in a lane of yellow leaves like the final one I imagine that may one day take her to places I know nothing of. How do we reconcile faith here, beauty or death, or a mother’s death? I remember how I could barely stand to look at the calf, but I did anyway, season after season, as if decay alone propelled transcendence, wishing, as I did, for my sister’s sweetness. Note the black shadow, I wrote, the oil staining its perimeter, how the bones keep scattering, swept by some invisible tide. This is what the calf falters into earth for, I thought, bloats skyward cell for cell: puma at hushed dark, the coyote’s tongue, and the bulbous may flower, so tissue-thin.
Leonard stops at the top of the ridge beneath a pine tree to pee and I go down alone to stand on the stones to wait for him, to finger-trace an empty creek bed to a dam I can only curse. Whole trees, the off shoots of an aspen colony, a thick comb of them, have long grown over where the body of the calf once lay and I have learned to search for mushrooms, to say their names: Shaggy Mane, Grisette, Hawks Wing. Sometimes, they will billow out of the earth as big as skulls, Tête de mort, we call them, filled with trillions of dark spores that I could circle this whole earth with. And some days, clouds push up from the Arkansas Valley, whole horizons disappearing, the world I can see a mere fifty yards wide.
But, sometimes, beauty without warning does come ⎯ here, a mushroom or, even, a calf, or a mother in a red coat blazing against the coming gold. Or a herd of elk you never expected sunk to their bellies in a quiet fishing hole your neighbor always dreamed of.
Our breath, I write my sister, flies from us like small sparrows.
Kathryn Winograd is the author of Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation, a finalist in the Foreword Review's 2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards, Air Into Breath, winner of the Colorado Book Award in Poetry, and Stepping Sideways into a Poetry, a Scholastic resource book for K12 teachers. Her essays have been noted in Best American Essays, and published in journals and anthologies including Arts & Letters, Fourth Genre, Hotel Amerika, River Teeth, The Florida Review, Essay Daily, Puerto del Sol and The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction, 6th edition. Her poetry has received three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Special Mention in Pushcart Prize XXXVIII. Poems have won the Chautauqua Literary Journal’s 2011 Poetry contest on War and Peace and the 2011 Writer's Digest Annual Writing Competition for non-rhyming poetry, and appeared in literary journals such as TriQuarterly, The Denver Quarterly, The Colorado Review, The Journal, The Antioch Review, Kalliope, The Ohio Review, The Cincinnati Review, Water-Stone, Poets Laureate, Weber Studies and The New Yorker.
About the work: “I found a folder in my “cloud” named “On Beauty” under a larger folder named “Beacon.” For a year, I wrote a monthly column for Beacon, a since defunct experiment in online journalism, using the land around our cabin near Victor, Colorado as a microcosm for environmental issues and moments of “awe.” An exciting year of writing: each month, I am clueless. And then the journey begins. “Slow Arrow” began as a collage—threads and snatches I placed together on the blank page in hopes puzzling together some momentary meaning. Perhaps a frivolous way to write, but fun and so often, in the way of the muse, mysterious. Slow Arrow unearthed itself from my husband’s Nietzsche books in the study, from the giant puffs of mushrooms I poked with a stick, and the unseen neighbors in the little gulch below us staking out their territory, from my born again sister asking me the question that became seminal to the piece, from my mother and her journey, as always. But those threads only began to work when I remembered the bits of poetry lost in my journals and began to weave them through the essay. Presto! an organic form that allowed me not only reflection and experience, but allowed me to stumble into one of my favorite “leaps” in prose or poetry, Slow Arrow proving to me, as creative nonfiction always does, the inseparability of poetry and prose.”
About the work: “I found a folder in my “cloud” named “On Beauty” under a larger folder named “Beacon.” For a year, I wrote a monthly column for Beacon, a since defunct experiment in online journalism, using the land around our cabin near Victor, Colorado as a microcosm for environmental issues and moments of “awe.” An exciting year of writing: each month, I am clueless. And then the journey begins. “Slow Arrow” began as a collage—threads and snatches I placed together on the blank page in hopes puzzling together some momentary meaning. Perhaps a frivolous way to write, but fun and so often, in the way of the muse, mysterious. Slow Arrow unearthed itself from my husband’s Nietzsche books in the study, from the giant puffs of mushrooms I poked with a stick, and the unseen neighbors in the little gulch below us staking out their territory, from my born again sister asking me the question that became seminal to the piece, from my mother and her journey, as always. But those threads only began to work when I remembered the bits of poetry lost in my journals and began to weave them through the essay. Presto! an organic form that allowed me not only reflection and experience, but allowed me to stumble into one of my favorite “leaps” in prose or poetry, Slow Arrow proving to me, as creative nonfiction always does, the inseparability of poetry and prose.”
The Art
“Whisper”
Oil on canvas
8’’x2''
2018
Amber Williams continuously finds herself drawn to the outdoors. It’s where she goes to unplug, to think over a problem or to put things back into perspective. So, it only seems natural that it is her primary source of inspiration. Her current work is inspired by everything from the deep canyons cutting into the Colorado Plateau to the alpine lakes found in the Rocky Mountains. Williams strives to capture the essence of what her personal experience was like in each location. If it was a wide expanse that made her feel small or a texture of a rock that pulled her in, then that’s what she focuses on. She simply hopes to provoke the array of emotions that people often experience in nature so that she can help bring attention to how important these places are to all of us.
About the art: “Within this work, I feel that the natural setting grounds and liberates the viewer at the same time. The components are recognizable, but the sediment bubbles out of the fog in hues of phthalo blue and chartreuse green, pulling you in to search for something inconspicuous. Making you question, "Is there something hiding in there? Is there someone looking back at me?" This image holds not only a landscape but a fleeting feeling too. I would hope this provokes the viewer to ask themselves what that feeling is for them.”
About the art: “Within this work, I feel that the natural setting grounds and liberates the viewer at the same time. The components are recognizable, but the sediment bubbles out of the fog in hues of phthalo blue and chartreuse green, pulling you in to search for something inconspicuous. Making you question, "Is there something hiding in there? Is there someone looking back at me?" This image holds not only a landscape but a fleeting feeling too. I would hope this provokes the viewer to ask themselves what that feeling is for them.”
