Survival Class
For a
month each day we saw red—
morning and
night in the sky—the rest
of the
time in rocks, sheer canyon walls,
and a few
blossoms where thorns
pricked our
skin.
Blood dries
fast in the desert sun.
Wrens sang,
but the sand, pure, fine—
red as
everything else—filled our boots
and the creases
where sweat ran down
faces and
arms.
When we
got back to the world we had
known, nothing
was the same after that
with new found
friends we never saw again
except in
dreams.
—Donnell
Hunter
14
January 2012
Gene always contends that we "all have to go to Bolivia, either Here or There." I remember your survival of the survival program. Nita and I drove down to get you at the House of 15. You looked like you really had been to Bolivia. "Red" everywhere in the Utah desert but red only in your tired eyes. And now, here you are, 82, writing as much poetry as you did 30 years ago. Does the experience ever actually surface in your dream world occasionally? Whole? Or distorted, dreamified into odd shapes and sounds from that alien world?
ReplyDeleteNot the specific experience itself. Maybe only in this poem. I had to find some way to get out of it. When I began with "seeing red" I didn't know where it would lead. My first draft I had used haiku stanzas, 5-7-5 syllables, but then it changed direction as the poem developed and I recast the lines and line breaks. That was what you have called an epiphany experience. Academically it wasn't a good sabbatical, but spiritually it and my subsequent teaching in outdoor settings prepared me for my later assignment in Veracruz better than anything else.
DeleteWe never did visit Bolivia, though we did drive almost to the border when we were in northern Chile looking for Flamingos and other oddities there.