Utah Mormon
I carry / a landscape in my blood, brown / haunted by green
This poem originally appeared in the collection Homespun and Angel Feathers. It is reprinted here with the permission of the author.
The people you want for employees but not friends. Big families too shiny for belief—we must be paper dolls. Look at me: I'm heavy books, white teeth, organ music and casseroles, but I crank up the radio in my car same as you, scream at God sometimes, haul myself bedraggled through awkward misunderstandings. Half of me fears you see me as wacko; half of me knows you don't see me at all. Still, I'll smile my big white teeth. I'm the suit and the dress, spires and spurs. I am my people, bonneted, ancient, dusty as sage, but tangy. Let me get close and you'll hear the shiver of juniper, the cricket's dry thrum. I carry a landscape in my blood, brown haunted by green. Scrub oak fringes my dreams, and out there, across a weed-scrabbled mountain valley, the cottonwood advertises a riverbed, probably dry. Always the possibility of a house sheltered there, always at a distance. I never arrive. The longing becomes the destination, sweet in its way. Without the motion I'd be bereft: Eve stuck forever in a garden going nowhere. Mormon is the horizontal of the flinty earth, the vertical of spires. Every year a camp-out; every year the farm. We can't escape the land but it is never an end. Permanent nostalgia, a home made of homesickness.
About the artist: After studying art with Osral Allred and Carl Purcell for a year at Snow College, Kerry Soper pursued a B.F.A. at Utah State, working with Adrian Van Sutchlen, Glenn Edwards, and Chris Terry. In recent years, he has benefitted from the mentorship of another Utah artist, Michael Workman. Kerry’s work has also been influenced by the paintings of Brad Aldridge, Gary Earnest Smith, Doug Fryer, Donald Jurney, Corot, George Inness, Winslow Homer, Maynard Dixon, and Richard Schmid.
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“Mormon is the horizontal of the flinty earth,
the vertical of spires. Every year a camp-out; every year the farm. We can't escape the land but it is never an end.”—stunning
Beautiful