Stillborn

 

For what seemed like much of my life, from late high school until my mother's death and memorial service up the coast, year's end was spent on the Big Island of Hawaii, most often at Keauhou Bay, south of Kailua-Kona.  I collected innumerable impressions and filled notebooks with loving detail of the place and its people, which felt akin and important to my own story.  An abandoned hotel figured in that, as well as the old temples of black lava fallen and reshaped into sea-walls.

 

Mention of those was casually slipped into a story set in England a few years ago, with an entirely different focus, and only last year did I write a fictional piece situated directly in that place of memory, setting and ambiance true and truthful, with only the facts changed to meet my whimsical fictional needs.  (The way, perhaps, I used to reinvent myself each year again waiting for New Year's Eve—and Chinese fireworks—under a little palm or other tree beside the bay.)  Whether I did it justice, finally, I don't know, and doubt, but it meant lots to me to be back there. 

 

"Stillborn" was published by the wonderful The Plentitudes in February, their Issue 21 (Winter 2026).  Here's a small taste of it—

 

Marley could get fairly close to some of the abandoned structures, approaching either from the boat harbor or the golf course, and get into the gardens on the property's periphery.  She unfolded the flowered beach chair she had bought up at the shopping center on the hill, and sat for hours on a strip of sandy lawn, or just in from the pitch black lava pools mirroring sky (cornflower, Maya, satiated blue), and try to picture how the place had been once, full of life.  The ocean was a living presence still, black-hearted blue, the color Helena had christened Kona blue, full of the spiritual energy the Hawaiians called mana.  A graceful freehand tree at harbor's edge, not a species she recognized, was her sole company.  Even the birds seemed to have gone for good.

     Line by line again she read her mother's poems, watched kayaks slipping in and out of the harbor like needles through green silk.  The harbor where the king was born, her mother said—just across the water from here.  Where boats anchored, cruise boats for snorkeling and island history tours, sportfishing boats, kayak rentals, and paddle boards.  She watched a fishing boat go by out of the harbor, past her observation post, loaded with brightly colored floats.  She glanced again the other way, toward the silent old hotel, bare as a scoured bone.

 

 

image:  Keauhou Bay collage, Christie Cochrell

Writing Spaces: Days Written in Flowers

 

Days written in flowers—

optimism, fragility,

constancy, consolation,

bashfulness,

wisdom and even hope—

fingers stained 

with the bright-colored ink

of all they want to say

before it is too late,

the urgent messages

hands cup, consult, 

the oracles 

of filament, stamen, petal

flaring like Pythia's flame

in far Delphi.  Visited 

once, and ever held within.

 

 

(I like to learn that those seeking the counsel of Apollo would offer laurel branches, money, and a black ram.)

 

 

 

image:  Old-fashioned Ladies and Gentlemen Too

Or Die of Namelessness

 

I'm pleased to have another story out, to start the year—my third published by the excellent Wild Roof Journal, which over the past several years has, it says, "built a community of emerging & established writers, visual artists, teachers, grad students, mental health professionals, travelers, hermits, vagabonds, ragamuffins, etc. etc.," (that sounds like me!); whose name comes from a line in William Blake's The Book of Urizen.

 

My story, "Or Die of Namelessness," can be found in Gallery 1, Knocking on wood: on glass.

 

Its name comes from another poet, Wendell Berry, and these lines of his—

“we must call all things by name out of the silence 

again to be with us, or die of namelessness”

 

The names are of particular interest, for it is the names the forlorn hero of the story is losing, to nominal aphasia, to the lonely, silent void.  Along with all the rest, the names of the fossil shells he had made his career, and the shared language between him and his true love—"Cephalopods, ammonites, opalised pippi shells, spotted Babylon snails, cowries, dolphin gastropods, miters, moon shells, turbans and vases and urchins, whelks; Venus comb murex, hundred-eyed cowrie, rainbow abalone, sheep’s ear abalone, pontifical mitre, orange-mouth olive and lettered olive, colorful coquina clams, chambered nautilus, tusk."

 

A cousin of mine died from aphasia last year, and by coincidence we saw a fine play in the fall about a woman suffering and finally perishing from word loss too—Nick Payne's Constellations.

 

images:  generated in WordItOut

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Christie Cochrell, Tassajara collage

Balconies

 

“Someday when peace has returned to this odd world I want to come to London again and stand on a certain balcony on a moonlit night and look down upon the peaceful silver curve of the Thames with its dark bridges.”

—Ernie Pyle

 

“The sparrow that is twittering on the edge of my balcony is calling up to me this moment a world of memories that reach over half my lifetime, and a world of hope that stretches farther than any flight of sparrows.”

—Donald G. Mitchell

 

(above,) This lovely balcony in Palma de Mallorca, bringing memories of peace and hope and other worlds.

And this, (below,) in San Juan Bautista, holding a small flight of angels—if fewer than on that famous pin.

And whimsey in Paris one year, a flight of chefs.

 

And this, and this.  Verona and a very famous balcony.  Flights of fancy.

 

"She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together."

—J.D. Salinger

images:  Christie B. Cochrell

Deus ex machina

 

Flames of Hope

 

I’m thinking of the powers of light, which include Sarastro, child spirits and flutes, the wonderful animal puppets of Julie Taymor!  Mozart, behind and inside all of that. 

 

And caravans, in their historical meaning—pilgrims and camels and banners of faith and fellowship.  "Allowing for the exchange of goods [salt and textiles; stone, spices, copper, gold] and ideas [in words] across long distances."  A group of people journeying together, most often through desert or hostile regions.

  

All carrying shimmering flames of hope.

 

images:  The Catalan Atlas; Shutterstock:  Camel caravan in Souq Okaz Festival