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Reimagining the oxeye daisy. I see you. Elegant on the roadside. Pretty in the ditch. Consoling the abandoned lot. Where soil is rotten or sodden. Where light finds slots, or not. Where the lines between dominion and disorder blur. I watch, as you rise and spread, a ready-made meadow of little sunshines on slender stems, undulating and delicate. Your mustard eyes, rimmed with a flutter of shimmery petals, bob, nod, flirt. Love me, you say.
How to hold space for the landscape losses we perceive daily, how to imagine fiercely within the terrain of ongoing uncertainty? Dear America, I bike commute on a rail trail that links two rural college towns in the Inland Northwest. By mid-August, the wheat fields go blonde. Head-high stands of reed canary grass become tousled expanses, flaxen and feathery. The creek flows slowly and its exposed channel reveals deep and tawny soil. All around is rolling golden ground, sapphire sky.
Take a seat. Position your pencil to the page. Gaze outward. Widen your eyes and take in what you see. Without peeking at your sheet, make marks — any marks — to signify observable relationships. Scribble clouds dancing in puddles. Trace the roadside ditch holding tracks. Pen ticks and triangles for the telephone poles framing shacks. Can you do this for one minute? For two? Wherever you are, find something in motion. Forget what you know about this something and begin to draw it. Swiftly.
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