Romancing the Stone / Advanced Writing Class under Mildred Adams
Holloway, Glenna & McClellan, Jane
Romancing the Stone The only other woman on the crew speaks beautiful Spanish. An amateur mineralista, she loves rocks as I do, calls them the story of creation. Sometimes on a break, the...
...Jane McClellan Commonweal 3 2 April 10, 1998...
...As we push the new interstate through layers of limestone, basalt, chert, each blast raises pulverized eons to curtain the sun...
...The road cut exposes Mesozoic epics, a cross-sectioned registry of time out of sight until now...
...The foreman calls these Rockies a quick scraping of God's boots once passing...
...I climb a peak half-a-mile south, topping a ridge the highway will tunnel: A parade of virgin conifers celebrates their fin de si~cle...
...We couldn't write like E.B...
...Long lr passages echo blue...
...I reach the top of the scale, hearing the treble of triumph...
...Viridian shadows adagio on outcropped red agate and trombone slides of shale, each foothold measured in grace notes...
...Daily we find fragment lyrics in the core drill...
...Every sense attuned, celebration in my lungs, joy is an obbligato graphed on sky...
...Our sandwiches are seasoned with the grit of life...
...She and I talk of how the text is set to music, written in the mountain's opened volume, systematic staff lines, chords waiting to be played...
...We breathe atomized fossils of early temperate zone trees, cycads, teleost fishes...
...And so we believed we would, and so even in our wooden words we came to love the air she moved...
...Glenna Holloway Advanced Writing Class under Mildred Adams We students knew she flew not as witches do on potions and at night, but right in front of our eyes while seeming not to move...
...Perhaps I should have said she walked on air and thought our feet of clay could too...
...My day off, I leave her sitting with him, gazing at a seam of chalcedony over the rims of their coffee cups as if reading Cervantes...
...Her eyes gave her away: that clarity of blue overlay on Attic gray, enameled by gliding near the sun while we would run beneath her shadow losing ground but gaining wind...
...White or Forster, yet occasionally we penned a phrase that raised us above the commonplace and blazed into the wind she was and brought to us...
...Sometimes on a break, the foreman brings us chunks of patterned jasper or dusty quartz as we try to decode the ancient narrative together...
...I say she flew...
Vol. 125 • April 1998 • No. 7
