Augury

 

I am delighted to have a story in the latest issue (Winter 2022) of the beautiful Catamaran Literary Reader—and honored that they've chosen "Augury" to be their online fiction feature, available here.

 

This writing—triggered earlier this year by a challenge to combine environmental issues with culture, reflect on human interaction with the natural world, landscape and self—took me back to New Mexico.  There is perhaps no other place where landscape and culture combine so seamlessly as in that land where I grew up, and where my spirit-being still resides.  The open-air opera house on the road to Tsankawi and Bandelier, the inspiring canyon and high cave where in this story Esther sings to her daughters . . . both a part of my real life and of the creative world of my imagination powered by things remembered, half-remembered, rewritten judiciously, and out-and-out stardust.  Writing about all that transports me back—and transports me, period.

 

         . . . they climbed the tufa cliffs up a series of ladders made of cottonwood, and Esther stood in the mouth of the ancient cave and sang Orfeo to the canyon, to the birds, to all and sundry spirits gathered there that day, including the god of music.  And while she sang the storm moved into the canyon's far end, bruising the air with its intensity.  They'd gotten drenched on their careful descent back down and down to the soft trail at the bottom, but that had felt strangely exhilarating.  They had laughed at their bedraggled state and gone back arm in arm in arm, Esther between her two daughters, to the thermos of coffee waiting in the car.

         "I've been drawn to the Anasazi ruins since I first discovered them," Esther said as they tried to dry themselves off with the picnic tablecloth.  "I loved the bit in Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark where the soprano heroine goes off to stay in one of the ancient cliff dwellings, to recuperate from illness and regain her soul."

 

 

 

image:  fresco, Akrotiri