(This week we are pleased to present work by one of America’s under-appreciated writers and academics, Dale Williams Barrigar, who is also the Co-Editor of this site. He has wonderful twin daughters and a damn fine pack of Dogs, too.)
(Image provided by DWB)
Cabin blizzard on Halloween
visiting Alaska
in the evening
every single flake
that falls
memory of you
as
October branches
scratch
at cabin window
sleeping gone
grizzly bears somewhere
near here
but I’m not fearful
Mr. Sasquatch
but what am I trying so hard
swooning
for
as
the last stripe
of red sunlight
now falls down
around old autumn
apple tree
shadows
crooked trunk
tree branches
turbulent truculent
dreams of another world
in only half sleep
all night long
next morning
November
One
there is an
alone woodpecker
in sudden sunlight red and gray
and his feathers too
are red and gray
as his drummings
on the tree they
sound
like rock and roll…
Dale Williams Barrigar
Saragun Springs 
Dale
Tremendous tone, comforting, then uneasy and quiet again. For whatever reason it placed “DABDA” the five stages of grief in mind, with the movement from Halloween to the Big Day (which most forget) itself. And there is the wonderful “every flake a memory of you” section that adds memory.
And thst is a perfect picture you provided!
Alive unto itself.
Leila
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Leila
Only those who already know can understand. A hard fact of life that also buoys the spirit. Thanks for being YOU!
Dale
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….and Happy Birthday Mom! Lynn Ruth Williams Barrigar, 1942 – 2011. RIP.
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Hi Dale
“Cabin blizzard on Halloween” great opening!
Sparse perfect sentences fill the mind with images and a haunting loss.
“the last stripe
of red sunlight” That was excellent and perfectly placed.
There is a lonely isolation that is expressed by the remoteness of the cabin and the forlorn language.
The poem makes you feel good with the descriptions of nature. It refreshes the mind with the wintry Alaskan air. It would be one that I would read again to feel this. Like when I read some of Emily Dickinson’s work.
Excellent!
Christopher
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Christopher
Thanks for drawing out the yin and yang aspects of this, or even the bipolar aspects of it – the combo (and interpenetration) of darkness and light. All told in the way Time and the Seasons move, like a Jungian archetypal progression.
And congrats on your new story on Literally Stories today. I’m heading over there in a few minutes to put commentary under it. It cannot have been an easy story to write, but it is good enough that it makes you a peer of (or superior to) Denis Johnson and Raymond Carver. No doubt about this whatsoever…
Dale
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