Contributor: Barbara Carlton

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Even when the rooms are empty, they echo
with watercolors of muted voices, edges blurred,
from the decades when their walls breathed in the tints
and textures of the lives they sheltered. They knew
her yearning for the clear air
of the mountainside; his long look
out the window before he left
for the last time; my quest
with the girl who has no name to
the castle that lies east of the sun
and west of the moon. Hush, sweetheart,
put your ear close, you can
hear the walls thinking, like a stream
that rustles through the woods at night.
Here
is a clean shape left behind where the little
landscape used to hang. So often she looked
through its painted surface and wondered
where the time had gone.


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I am a writer and architect living in the San Diego, California, area. My parents are long dead and my children are grown. It's a good vantage point for thinking.

Contributor: Barbara Carlton

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In my drifting state I imagine my children
as they will soon un-layer me. First--this is easy--
they’ll strip off the husk I became at last; hurl away
the bottles of useless pills, cans of pretend food, all such
hated, well-meant insults. But

inside the husk they’ll find the woman they knew, or
thought they did, who drove them to school when
the mountains echoed with birdsong, endured their
sicknesses and the beatings of their tempers, adored
the ashtrays they made for her in fifth grade--although
she hated smoking, cheered their races, and let them go
when it was time. Hers
are the easy touchstones: mixing bowls and
hiking boots and their kindergarten artwork, and
her fifties-green, round-shouldered electric
Smith Corona. And

under these they’ll confront the woman, unlined
and smooth-lipped, about whose life they never
thought to ask, whose face, even, is a stranger
to them. Perhaps I should have told them
where the little painting came from, and why the box
in the drawer, inlaid with mother of pearl,
is empty, and how my mother, who hated sewing,
made for my child-self the quilt I took from her house
when she was dead. Yes,

I think, maybe I should have told; but
then it hardly seemed to matter, and now
the sky is clearing in the mountains
and I am a rain cloud under the sun.


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I am a writer and architect living in the San Diego, California, area. My parents are long dead and my children are grown. It's a good vantage point for thinking.

Contributor: Barbara Carlton

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(Alfred Mitchell, c. 1940)

In the diaspora of her treasures, to me drifts
a tiny painting, very old, backcountry colors
in dots and swirls and sweeps: a scattered village
in a montane valley dozing
on a winter afternoon of green hills
under a snow-laced ridge
and pale sky; an hour trapped,
like a seed in amber. Stories--
hers, the painter’s, mine--braid together
in its silver-gilded frame like colored threads
humming in the wind that knot together
for a moment, before they blow away.

The painter is long since gone. My story
I know. Hers--how this came to her
and why--only teases me in some
nearly-remembered tongue; the words blow
past my ear like a light wind through
a valley on a winter afternoon
and disappear. I listen, but the edges
of her face reverberate, and begin to blur.


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I am a writer and architect living in the San Diego, California, area. My parents are long dead and my children are grown. It's a good vantage point for thinking.

Contributor: Barbara Carlton

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This is the ritual: stand naked
on the bluff before dawn and watch
the night begin to melt at its edge;
watch the hills across the water emerge
as shapes reflected in glass, for no air moves;
watch a band of light spread coral
at the horizon like a breath of grace;

pretend you are the first human standing, on
the first morning, the uses of air and forest, land
and sea still to be discovered: it’s just you
and the earth, all one, and the smells
of cedar and salt water make you want to run,
shout, be still, all at once;

watch the sun breach the ridge and drift
into the sky, where you can’t look at it
any longer; the breeze that rises
with the day swirls against your skin and
riffles the surface of the water, gusting drops
of sunlight toward you.

Reach for them. Understand you will
never touch, for you are separate now.

Later, run to Diamond Lake and watch the diamonds
skitter across the surface like wind made light,
while two ravens, who have been here since the beginning,
circle in the eddy overhead.


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I am a writer and architect living in the San Diego, California, area. My parents are long dead and my children are grown. It's a good vantage point for thinking.

Contributor: Barbara Carlton

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it’s for the fabric of bark: ropes
of fir, ribbons of cedar hair, red
madrona peels, alder mosaics
in gray raw silk;

it’s for the way ferns explode like
little green fireworks, branching,
branching, branching--their tiniest
part a fractal mirror of the whole

it’s for the calligraphy of sunlight written
in air, and the glitter of a turquoise
dragonfly in a glow of dust;

it’s for the muffled crackle
of invisible deer, squirrels snarking
at the feast, the giant who breathes
in the upper branches, the patient snore
of a rock weathering;

it’s for the sharp burst of unripe
blackberries, the crumble of rotting
logs, the hum of damp earth living
and dying;

it’s for all the inventions
of green, the perfection
of stillness, the permanent hush
of expectation, a hint of the world
when everything was forest.


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I am a writer and architect living in the San Diego, California, area. My parents are long dead and my children are grown. It's a good vantage point for thinking.