Roy Arthur Blodgett


Permalink | 0 notes A photograph taken by my girl, Catherine, while I was writing the previous poem on the shores of Loch Leven, in Glencoe, Scotland. 
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Loch Leven

When he stepped onto the littered shore of the loch, his lungs filled with the rank sea air. Each step he made sounded the crushing of crustacean skeletons, and looking down, he could scarcely separate shells from pebble and rock. Some were picked over by the morning gulls, and droves more were wasted in the noon sun, now wreaking in the orange light of the evening. His eyes were lured amid them by a sphere of sparkling granite, and when he reached for it, he found that it was right in his hand. He walked for a while, slinging it skyward at

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Just So

Sometimes I reckon

the Creator made my hands 

to grip her waist just so, 

and the width of her ribs

to match my fingers

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Bear the Name

I stood ankle deep 

in the water at Lyd Glaslyn, 

and imagined I might

cut my heel on a sword 

embedded in the shore

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All the Sights Seen

He scarcely felt the springs of the mattress before falling away, but dreaming was not to be this night. Instead, his sleeping crafted a vision beheld so audacious and terrible that he reckoned to trade all the sights seen for it to be undone, for fear the very act of seeing might force him to recollect it. He woke panting, fists clenched ‘round sweat-dampened sheets, and made his way to the fire in the stove, now reduced to smolders waning in the dark. His hurried breath made fog, dissipating in a rapid gradient from moonlit to black as it distanced from the

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Orchid and Moth

He contemplated the discovery

The petals begged attention -

a phantasmal white mass

trembling delicately upon

the air’s invisible currents

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Terpsichorean Oak

They parked the sedan near a sleeping residence and ascended into the hills. The two went there often in search of something that neither could define, nor entirely comprehend, only certain that it made each feel at one with the earth he knew. They moved along an animal trail by moonlight, without speaking - as if cautious to shelter some sacred state germinating in the air. It was an hour of steep uphill before reaching the crest, and they stood panting at the mouth of the meadow and peered down at the forested expanse below

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Permalink | 1 note "He looked at a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt’s blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth’s core sucking his bones, a moment’s giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus." — Cormac McCarthy. Now to aim for writing with one-tenth the potency of this. 
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A Novel

I’ve got a novel in me. I’m sure of it now. 

Now. Write it so it’s real.

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An Oak

Never had his knees weakened 

or buckled under pressure

His stomach never hollowed

and he never lost his appetite

Told himself he was an oak

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