{"id":470,"date":"2012-05-27T09:19:21","date_gmt":"2012-05-27T17:19:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/?p=470"},"modified":"2012-05-27T09:19:21","modified_gmt":"2012-05-27T17:19:21","slug":"carolyne-wright","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/?p=470","title":{"rendered":"Carolyne Wright"},"content":{"rendered":"

“This dream the world is having about itself….”<\/em><\/p>\n

–William Stafford<\/p>\n

won’t let us go. The western sky gathers
\nits thunderclouds. It has no urgent need<\/p>\n

of us. That summer in our late teens we
\nwalked all evening through town–let’s say Cheyenne–<\/p>\n

we were sisters at the prairie’s edge: I
\nwho dreamed between sage-green pages, and you<\/p>\n

a girl who feared you’d die in your twenties.
\nBoth of us barefoot, wearing light summer<\/p>\n

dresses from the Thirties, our mother’s good
\nold days, when she still believed she could live<\/p>\n

anywhere, before her generation
\nwon the War and moved on through the Forties.<\/p>\n

As we walked, a riderless tricycle
\nrolled out slowly from a carport, fathers<\/p>\n

watered lawns along the subdivisions’
\ntreeless streets. We walked past the last houses<\/p>\n

and out of the Fifties, the Oregon
\ntrail opened beneath our feet like the dream<\/p>\n

of a furrow turned over by plough blades
\nand watered by Sacajawea’s tears.<\/p>\n

What did the fathers think by then, dropping
\ntheir hoses without protest as we girls<\/p>\n

disappeared into the Sixties? We walked
\nall night, skirting the hurricane-force winds<\/p>\n

in our frontier skirts so that the weather
\nforecasts for the Seventies could come true,<\/p>\n

the Arapahoe’s final treaties for
\nthe inland ranges could fulfill themselves<\/p>\n

ahead of the building sprees. We walked on
\nbut where was our mother by then? Your lungs<\/p>\n

were filling with summer storms, and my eyes
\nblurred before unrefracted glacial lakes.<\/p>\n

Limousines started out from country inns
\nat the center of town, they meant to drive<\/p>\n

our grandparents deep into their eighties.
\nOur mother in her remodeled kitchen<\/p>\n

whispered our names into her cordless phone
\nbut before the Nineties were over, both<\/p>\n

of you were gone. Mother’s breath was shadow
\nbut her heart beat strong all the way in to<\/p>\n

the cloud wall. You carried your final thoughts
\nalmost to the millennium’s edge, where<\/p>\n

the westward-leaning sky might have told us
\nour vocation: in open fields, we would<\/p>\n

watch the trail deepen in brilliant shadow
\nand dream all the decades ahead of us.<\/p>\n

In memory of my sister<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

“This dream the world is having about itself…” was winner of the Firman Houghton Award, published in The Iowa Review,<\/em> reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2009<\/em> and in The Pushcart Prize XXXIV: Best of the Small Presses.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Carolyne Wright <\/a>has published nine books and chapbooks of poetry, a collection of essays, and four volumes of translations from Spanish and Bengali. Her latest book is Mania Klepto: the Book of Eulene<\/a><\/em> (Turning Point, 2011). Her previous collection, A Change of Maps<\/em> <\/a>(Lost Horse Press, 2006), finalist for the Idaho Prize and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the PSA, won the 2007 IPPY Bronze Award. Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire<\/em> <\/a>(Carnegie Mellon UP\/EWU Books, 2nd edition 2005) won the Blue Lynx Prize and American Book Award. She is editing an anthology on women and the work place for Lost Horse Press. A Seattle native who studied with Elizabeth Bishop<\/a> and Richard Hugo, <\/a>Wright has been a visiting writer at colleges, universities, schools, and conferences around the country. She moved back to Seattle in 2005, and teaches for the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts’ Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA Program<\/a>, and for Hugo House.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“This dream the world is having about itself….” –William Stafford won’t let us go. The western sky gathers its thunderclouds. It has no urgent need of us. That summer in our late teens we walked all evening through town–let’s say … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[61,8,1],"tags":[165,166],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=470"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":472,"href":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470\/revisions\/472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}