Some of the plums had already fallen, so I knew the others were ready to pick. As I stood there pulling them into the colander one by two, I heard the steady, whispered “whoop, whoop, whoop” of raven wings. At beat four he flew overhead and whoop-whooped out of sight. There were a lot of plums.
On the way back to the kitchen, I passed by the carved stone fish my wife bought from a roadside vendor in Michoacán in ’78. Yesterday I spontaneously hosed it down for no particular reason, and it was like something popped inside. The instinctive ritual blew more than a few circuits, connecting me with something normally obscured (meaning that the symbolism worked). It’s just the thing to do, so this morning I set up the camera and watered the fish again. You have no idea how good that feels, but maybe this video will help.
The soundtrack is from an early instrumental version of “Thank You Jesus for the Nails,” a work of dark vigor and questionable taste fortunately still very much in progress, as the part where I play the keyboard with my knuckles will attest.
John Hamilton Farr lives at 7,000 feet in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A. As New York Times best-selling author James C. Moore tells it, John is “a man attuned to the world who sees it differently than you and I and writes about it with a language and a vision of life that is impossible to ignore.” This JHFARR.COM site is the master writing archive. To email John, please see CONTACT INFO on .png)