I’ve been sick with the Ely crud that, I guess, started going around early. Most likely as soon as kids started going back to school. I’ve had it for nearly a week and it basically took me out of commission for our anniversary and definitely my birthday.
I spent a lot of time trying to sleep and trying to cough up three lungs. Gross, I know. While I tried to sleep I watched a couple of my favorite movies, Alien and Aliens over and over and over just like a xenomorph cycle. Yeah, maybe you didn’t know it, but I’m a facehugger fan.
It - and the season - got me thinking a lot about rebirth, about spring, even though autumn is just upon us and about the alien nature of some of our own landscape, so close to home. There are things here in Minnesota on the water and in the woods that are more alien in nature to most folks minds who live elsewhere than Ridley Scott’s horrors.
It’s not surprising that truth is stranger than fiction and that sources for inspiration are hiding right in plain sight. You just have to know where to look. I thought of floating bogs, of pitcher plants, of the tenacious and temporary “world” floating on the surface of lakes many people just don’t notice.
Some of this inspiration is part of reflections from experiences decades old, and some of it is just part of having time to think about having written about a discovery ten years removed.
Sometimes going back over poems and going back over memories brings new inspiration where once you thought that the creative juices had dried up.
Well, we are talking about water, and another of my favorite subjects, walking on it, after all… so I shouldn’t really be surprised. I called this one:
Hungry
North of South Hegman.
Traceable on Trease. One of summer’s notable mysteries walks on water like we will be doing in December.
Off muskeg shores cold sphagnum mats leech minimal oxygen and acidic algorithms adapt to missing nutrients and more.
Hunting, like the rest of us, waiting to capture the things we never knew we needed from the natural world. Snatched from thin air.
Towering, red-veined Pitcher Plants, Round-leaved Sundews, yellow- flowered bladderworts with their underwater bladder traps.
And us. Capturing alluring autumn one summer memory at a time.
©Timothy James Stouffer #elystreetpoet 09202026 All Rights Reserved As I write this the sun is out and I’m almost recovered. Still tired, but we’re about to reach seventy and that might not happen again for seven or more months. It’s a hungry time. It’s time to enjoy the flowers still in bloom!
