Although nothing I can say about

PARABLE OF THE FICTIONIST

He wanted to own his own past,
be able to manage it
more than it managed him.
He wanted all the unfair
advantages of the charmed.
He selected his childhood,
told only those stories
that mixed loneliness with
rebellion, a boy’s locked heart
with the wildness
allowed inside a playing field.
And after he invented himself
and those he wished to know him
knew him as he wished to be known,
he turned toward the world
with the world that was within him
and shapes resulted, versions,
enlargements.
In his leisure he invented women,
then spoke to them about
his inventions, the wish just
slightly ahead of the truth,
making it possible.
All around him he heard
the unforgivable stories
of the sincere, the boring,
and knew his way was righteous,
though in the evenings, alone
with the world he’d created,
he sometimes longed
for what he’d dare not alter,
or couldn’t, something immutable
or so lovely he might be changed
by it, nameless but with a name
he feared waits until you’re worthy,
then chooses you.

is nearly as enlightening as Dunn’s own commentary called A riff on refuge, it’s one of my favorites of the poems included from Local Time and Between Angels and represents one of the major themes in this section, echoing a theme from the long poem “Round Trip,” which contains the lines, “Later, I’m thinking, each of us/ will have a story to tell/ about the bay and the ships./ We’ll leave out all we can,/ all that is a traveler’s life/ or a sailor’s life. We’ll make our friends/wish they were us, we’ll replace experience/ with what we say.”

Anyone who maintains a blog, is to some extent a “fictionist.” Otherwise they’d be unable to attract readers. Perhaps the very act of writing creates a fiction because it requires us to select details to represent our life. If one selects the positive details, as I tend to do, life will seem more enjoyable and exciting than it is. If one selects the negative details, which is not uncommon, life will appear more dramatic, and certainly less boring, than it may really be.

The concept wouldn’t be nearly as interesting, though, if all of us weren’t guilty of it to some degree. The everyday act of “putting your best face forward” (Google that) creates a “fictional” character, one we create because we hope it will help us to do better than we might otherwise do, especially with those of the opposite sex, since it makes us seem more interesting than “the sincere, the boring.”

The danger is that this fictional self ensures our relationships can never be “real,” and we can end up longing for “what he’d dare not alter,/ or couldn’t, something immutable/ or so lovely he might be changed/ by it”.

I’ve shown many Wood Duck pictures on this site in the last few years. You’d have to be an idiot not to recognize their beauty, after all.

In the past, it’s always been the sheer beauty of their colors that has stood out for me. But I noticed a new beauty when Leslie pointed out the beautiful pattern on the back of the female wood duck. Once I’d seen that, it didn’t take long to recognize the same beautiful pattern on the back of the male.

Small wonder so many people have been devoted in their attempts to help this threatened duck recover.

With rain predicted for the rest of the week, I wasn’t about to spend Wednesday inside, even though the fog was so thick that I waited until nearly noon to go to Nisqually. Even then it was so foggy that early pictures look “faded.”

It wasn’t until I’d covered nearly five miles that the sun started to seriously burn through the fog-like clouds. As I approached a point where McCallister creek feeds into the preserve, I heard a loud squawk and a large heron flew off.

I was reprimanding myself for making too much noise and missing a great shot when I noticed a funny disturbance in the middle of the “pond.”

Suddenly two river otters emerged, and it was clear it was them, not me, that had scared the heron off.

One of the otters, the larger one, slowly paddled toward me, as I clicked away with my camera.

She must have noted my gray hair and beard and decided I was no threat, for immediately afterwards otters began emerging from the water with lunch in mouth. In fact, there was so much action taking place that I couldn’t keep up with who was catching what and who was eating it. Occasionally it appeared that mom was bringing fish up on the bank to feed a younger otter, though it wasn’t at all clear which was adult and which was youngster.

I’m assuming that all of them were well fed, though, because they seemed more interested in playing with their food than actually eating it. Of course, part of playing with it included keeping it away from brother or sister.

Though I was fixated on getting as many good shots as I could, I noticed that some of the otters were looking out across the river instead of watching me.

When I turned my eyes to where they were looking I was shocked to see more otters heading our way.

It wasn’t at all clear how these otters were related, but, as shown below, the newcomers were clearly much bigger than most of those I had been observing though they definitely seemed like part of the party.

It’s only when I began to examine some of the last shots I took that I saw seven different river otter here, four in the foreground and three in the black, none of which seemed too concerned with my presence. However they were related, shortly they all headed out across McCallister creek.

For me, this was definitely the climax of the summer.