(following James Joyce) Damn near Dublin weather today: a mash of lumpy clouds stuck on the bottom of a stainless-steel sky. We’re wrestling with the great expectations of late spring that sumer is icumen in. Here a thousand miles from the sea, for Christ’s sake, this salt taste is only alkali, these swells and chicane— wind gusting with nowhere to go, these dolphins, dogs chasing balls, that humpback whale, a cow in labor, and the Seirēnes are just sirens singing to no one except horseless cowboys taking their last ride. I sink my shovel in the garden still not seeded, an empty pole, hookless, baitless, and I think of you, Joyce, hunched over your table, half blind, your glasses like goggles as you dove deep, holding your breath until the language burst, rhetorical bubbles rushing to the surface and still you didn’t drown, but grew gills and scales that glistened like mirrors in which a landlubber like me could catch his reflection if he tried. I tried until I was blue in the face, swimming with only a scarf to keep me afloat, toward the dry land, the driest land, the drought in its fifth year, where my daughter, like Nausicaä, grinning, needing no words to save me, saved me with her paper winnowing fan.
Burt Bradley (he/him) lived on a bluff in Northwest Wyoming seventy miles from Yellowstone National Park. For over thirty years, with his wife Janet, a photographer, he has delved into the wild serenity of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. His writing has appeared in Ring of Fire: Writers of the Yellowstone Region, Michigan Quarterly Review, Best of Writers at Work, among others. His book, After Following, was published by Wayfarer Books.
