RECOVERY!

Guess what I'm doing. I am rescuing the writing that everyone kept trying to tell me was gone for good! For those of you actually interested in the techie details, here's a run-down. As you probably know, my MacBook was stolen in September and resold in October. However, the thief/salesman didn't bother wiping my hard drive clean (because he could only do that if he had a copy of a Mac OS on CD with which to reboot); he just put all of my folders in the Trash and deleted them. Since retrieving my computer about a month ago, I have been shopping around for data recovery freeware that shows some promise of finding my files. And here it is:  http://www.tech-pro.net/file-recovery-mac.html

It's a program called File Recovery for Mac, and the developer happens to offer a free trial which allows you to search for deleted files and recover any files that are less than 100 KB each. Word files, particularly poems, hardly ever run over 100 KB. So I am sorting, by hand, some 700 word files to figure out which ones are actually things I need to save, and moving them, by hand, onto a flash drive where I can store them until I'm done with the recovery process (I can't save them on the MacBook's hard drive without potentially overwriting the very data I'm trying to recover).

So there's the breaking news. To the service rep at Small Dog Electronics, who said retrieving my files would cost thousands of dollars and I would have to send my machine away for someone else to tinker with it without any guarantee that all the tinkering would work, HAH!

In celebration, here's one of the poems I thought was gone for good:



DEAD TREE

The north wants you.

The west wants you.

The east wants you.

You hunger for here—

this southernmost of islands

in the smallest of counties,

this pettiest of skirmishes

in the thorniest of families.

All you asked was raspberry

and wave,

rock decked with fossils.

All they gave—

a patch, a hesitation,

low snarl, fire doused—

a hiss.

So you leave the smoke behind you,

trailing, bittering the air.

Your difference is this:

let go, sink noiseless,

tap the silence,

simmer,

boil it.

Your sweetness is

a longdrawn labor,

comes but once a year.

Unsure of roots,

eternity,

you drag your feet

through sand and ask

what to do

where to go

whether to go

and what the weather—

What do you bring?

And how do you leave

the cold

                  the dry

                                    the tumbledown

behind?

Lost among promise and conspiracy,

lost without love,

you are lost,

the only map the series

of tactical maneuvers

it takes to live here,

to survive.

Hum like the sky,

electric, hesitant,

unleash yourself at last

and split the trunk,

dive deeper than the roots,

forget the difference

between trees

                  and water.

Forge yourself,

thunder’s daughter.

This is kindling.

This your fire.

Feed something  other than your wounds

with something other than your tears.

None can outwait miracles. 

Few can outwit stars—

first maps—

dying waves, impossible shores.

Strange wakes, to stretch so far. 

Promise yourself you will not marry

                  your future

                                    or your past.

If you must wed,

                  wed not the moment

                                    nor the idea of the moment,

but movement itself,

                  and only if you must.

Marry fury,

marry the taste

of salt and iron

in your blood.

Leave behind time,

its passage your wake,

stare into the sun, forsake

all that refuses to vanish.

Choose distance.

Choose the smallest and lightest

                  of kindnesses.

Abandon even language.

The ridgeline, the road:

                  the only home.

Hold what’s farthest,

                  hold it close.