The fear of white

I have found there to be voids, like the
times when the stark white of it is blinding
transfixing all attempts at meaningful expression,
mocking my tongue-tied immobility with blank eyes.

A fading memory of grade school reminds me that
figures placed in appropriate order upon paper make sense,
so that is where I begin to break the curse,
to place one or two words, tentative sentences into

the void. But my heart longs for the rush of thought
and the cramping of my fingers as they frantically try to
match the pace of mental discourse around
something glimpsed in passing, a brief transcendent

thought, that should someone happen upon it, they might
feel a catch in their throat or an ache in their gut
and maybe the urge to cry -- Do you know what I mean?
Like when you listen to a particular piece of music, and

it tears your heart from your chest, and leaves you
struggling to breath.

Lesley-Anne Evans
December 2009

Ode to Arid

my own photography…







She described you as ‘brown’
and ‘not to her liking’
in a turned up nose distasteful kind of way.
‘I like the green of it,’ she said
and I wanted to take my little soapbox
stand upon it
and sing your praises…

Instead,
I sit down, righteous pen in hand, and
write an ode to the proven beauty that is dryness
and would argue that
green is needy, garish and greedy,
fed day after day upon relentless rain…
soaking in, sodden, superfluous super-saturation.

While the brown of it --
the golden stretches of rolling bunch grass and
Ponderosa dotted highlands are soft, undemanding
on my eyes, providing
fodder for ranging cattle and quarter horses
and contentment
for those satisfied with ‘just enough’.

…A conservative abundance.

Lesley-Anne Evans
November 2009