LIVE in a workshop

The poet Joy Harjo once remarked that she enters poetry on horseback.

This morning I ride the old familiar painted.  I let her pause to nibble at the grass as often as she likes.  I am not in pursuit of a destination, but I am back upon the horse I once rode when I was writing my great Western.  Two Rivers [an operating title] ran through me back then, throughout the winter (perhaps two and several other months.)  I was living there in the writing, in the world of Owen Jessup and Speaks in Cloud.  The only effort then was to scribble their lives down with black ink into the small spiral binder that set on the old antique desk from some 18th century schoolhouse in Iowa.  It rested there waiting before the window of the world, before worlds, two of them, held in confluence and great dissonance.  Were there two rivers also symbolically trying to call out to me?
One of "this world" and another, "the next?"

Yes I see this pattern.  Some of what I had said before led me to old writings I wanted to return to.  Here I am again, now on my horse, and where does she lead me?  Back, again?

Breathing beside the stream, watching the mist linger over the face of the waters flow... I want to cherish what has already been spoken, what has come to me, what stays.  I also sense my resistance to letting them go as pieces of artwork, as moments that were profoundly formative.  Again a word seems to beckon.

So yes, now again, I will refer you to another piece of writing from "before."  Please be patient with me.  You will even see in what is presented next a desire to do the very thing that I am now doing.  One reflection leads back into another and so on.  There's never just one story and although all rivers may lead into one great watery bliss, we experience many streams in flow, all at once.

So let us continue...