Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
Asked once about my writing process, I said it isn’t always what you’d call deliberate, that often a phrase just comes from who knows where? Or an image does, or a word, and then I use those things the way you’d cross a river by stepping from stone to stone. I said the key, at least for me, was letting my Guesswork-Brain do the steering while telling my Everything-Else-Brain to pipe down and quit grabbing at the wheel. Who needs to know where they’re headed all the time? Well, most of us, probably, but not poems. They’re luckier than we are.
That’s true of yardwork, too, now that it’s yardwork season. Spring and plants—they just do whatever they want to, going however they will no matter what we plan, no matter our intentions, starting with the siege of weeds that won’t just pull themselves. How amazing would that be? But no. That’s my job, a never-ending one, at least until it snows again.
I’m saying Jen and I try to be deliberate, to plant well, to plant with intention, but then the squirrels eat all the tops off the beets, and snails devour the pineapple-dancer flowers. Or the hollyhocks that vanished for a decade—here they are again. They showed up again a couple summers ago and went insane: a whole alleyway of them, green with these eight-foot bloom-stalks, growing from our front yard to the back and deciding what colors they want to be themselves—mostly yellow, but a few of them red; and then the next year a lot less red and some of them white.
We’ve got a rose bush that smells like licorice—this huge and reblooming firework—while the other rose looks like a pair of broken ski poles flung away in anger by desiccated yeti.
Those flowers called Alabama Jubilee? I wound up spreading them everywhere like some unintentional Johnny-Appleseed-of-Purple, so now the tulips are probably wondering, What the heck is this?! What exactly is the deal around here?
Bark beetles murdered our giant spruce.
I wish raccoons would come visit more often.
And Utah really needs rain, so would the clouds of Salt Lake City try to show a little more effort, please?
Anyway, it’s about to be spring again, so here are two poems I hope fit with the season. Where did the ideas come from? I don’t know. In the first, I had the thought of someone living in a greenhouse, which made me start to wonder who and why? And in the second, I was outside standing on the porch, and this fly kept getting in my face, and I thought Fuck off and Dragonflies are a million times better. So here are the poems:
The Gardener’s Story
People thought living in a greenhouse was crazy,
even hers, the size of a two-story cottage,
with a kitchenette, loft,
a floating staircase,
and fucshias year ’round,
hanging in assorted baskets.
The floor plan was open and airy.
And snow peas spiraled up trellises.
Plus, her vertical plots of stacked daffodils
were like a better kind of accent wall…
you know, maybe
she wasn’t really crazy after all.
Yes, her house was still see-through,
but the condensation helped fog things,
so no scandals had everybody whispering
around town.
They could just buy seeds—a new impulse—or ferns
like these new, green planets.
Something to hang in the windows
and rearrange their view.
≈
Why We Have Dragonflies
When the sky wants to lessen
the distance between us,
part of its blue becomes a dragonfly.
We can’t see one
zig
and ignore it,
can’t notice one hover over water
and think, So what, I’ve got a lot of shit to do.
They’re the blue ink scribbling
a new Commandment.
They’re the second hand
landing on a sundial.
They’re the dart
and the bull’s-eye,
the moon’s lost keys,
the wind’s tattoo.
Nobody decides what captivates.
It happens, and you just look up.
And since that’s what the sky wanted anyway,
you’ll see it smile.
Rob Carney is the author of nine books of poems, including The Book of Drought (Texas Review Press, 2024), winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and Call and Response (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), and his collection of creative nonfiction, Accidental Gardens: New & Revised, is forthcoming from Wakefield Press. His work has appeared in Cave Wall, The Dark Mountain Project, Sugar House Review, and many other journals, as well as the Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward (2006). In 2013 he won the Terrain.org Poetry Award and in 2014 he received the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Prize for Poetry. He is a Professor of English at Utah Valley University and lives in Salt Lake City. Follow his Terrain.org series Old Roads, New Stories.
Read an interview with Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: “The Ocean is Full of Questions.”
Read Rob Carney’s Letter to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published by Terrain.org and Trinity University Press.
Read poetry by Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: 6th Annual Contest Finalist, 4th Annual Contest Winner, and Issue 30. And listen to an interview on Montana Public Radio about The Book of Sharks.
Header photo by Matthias Böckel, courtesy Pixabay.
