WHAT WE LIVE FOR

What we live for

Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change

and movement. Isn’t this the quintessential core of what stories are all about?

--Haruki Murakami, (Afterword in The City and its Uncertain Walls, p.449)

This stumble on, isolating scenes to fit who and where

we are, slow coloring in paths plants insects,

the big-eyed animals. Anonymous work pitching out

uneven rocks, pruning trees, ripping out

dollar weed, rearranging sacred vistas. A slow dance

re-labeling the newly recognized idiosyncratic

whole, explaining (with sufficient time) how

narratives connect in ancient stories.

Even half-asleep, accepting the meditation’s

self-contained slither, a snakeskin left as

dark context/so much extraneous we could have

insisted on, if that very special niche could

easily be described. No time/for here comes

the excited child’s late summer giggle,

eyes wide before ghost ribs, fingers held up in fog.

Art, a face twisted in recognition—

an organic breath surprisingly fitting the story

of this season, the telling line connecting.

Again, like we just learned how to read—

waking clear-eyed after a night-journey,

the right nouns alive, aligned with others, a saga

mutating into beauty maturing as a memoir

recognized as us. The lost then found context

of uncertain miles out in no-man’s land.

Eyes once blind to lichen patterns on the mottled tree.

But now the song lives, the natural world

glitters with love, immersed in the swift-carried

whole. The rocky river’s pastels—

camouflage for creatures startled by clumsy intervention.

Evidence in clouds of sediment the current

whisks away. The nature of temporary clarity,

aware only that the process is necessary.

Really all there is, the half-smile in the photo/

the outline of the Ur-text vivid in

light air breeze. Amazing, the purity of blue,

with eyes wide/the vision as if,

for the first time, seemingly right.

When you read

The breathing between lines (slow),

before the story is real,

discovering the threads to be followed.

Backtracking to read again, to make sure she, then he,

lives immersed in the conflict not yet seen

in context, though sufficient ancient scenes

stand alone, as if watching from a distance,

felt more than understood,

unfolding uncertainly, about to surprise,

meaning spilling fast, eyes blinking,

backtracking into what long ago

should have been understood.

What needs to be said, and no more.

A created life on a real map, textured

day-time light taking in while also, giving.

The story, for so long remaining silent,

then running to catch up. Laughing with abandon,

as this drama necessary to understand

becomes more than a sticking complication,

more than a worry about failure,

more than reading labels. Ahead a color-rich

saga with momentum. A reader surprised

a story with a beating heart is dangerous,

protagonists stuck in simultaneous time.

Now savored, gestures magnified,

building this sense of a grand forever as a future

with a present intermixed. Hunger and love

and passion on another journey. Eyes’ connecting

scene after scene. In the best stories

gravity holds tight on a linear road lit

with psychedelic color melting into what

is tentative, capturing what has long been fact.

A once invisible author becomes intimate,

a voice at home whispering convincing,

nuanced logic. Real enough/a form/a title,

a whole as a gift refusing to be neat.

Maybe closure in one more meditation,

this determination to stall—to mull on

understanding, though the page must turn,

getting on, a tributary alive, and moving,

feeding into what right now we call a life.

doppelganger

A dubious business gluing pages into the cartoonish saga.

Like there is coherence in whole days spent

tracking in mud we don’t notice until after the fact.

Then daylight saving’s time springs forward,

with an urgency to believe in the past. New morning

buffoonish ambitions wait for the mysterious flux

that sometimes lurks beneath the surface.

What is known is that Brother David’s doppelganger

(1891-1943), was born in Podolia, Poland, as part

of a restless tribe on the move. David uprooted,

wandering Europe in both World Wars, then finally

arrested and jailed in a concentration camp. Writing

when he could, miraculous how a manuscript can survive,

long after the efficient Nazis burned him to ashes.

So, his clear voice in the painful saga, This World

Awakens to Silence, can speak to our present,

the name on the cover proof doubled worlds

simultaneously exist, as present-day wandering David

explores California Peru Vietnam—poking at truths

buried in the historic dream. Undeniable, the links

caught in the light, the lives (again) discovered.

Pieces back in the puzzle. I know only that,

real as rain, the past is in the present—living on

despite countless dying gasps. The Dad we know

so well dead and buried, but also upright in

army khakis fighting in Europe/soon enough

about to help liberate Dachau. I pause reading

the book my very real brother will apparently

never write, sensing this story demands

more time than I have, to absorb.

Another dystopian black/white movie, an act

of first creation, so much glued into a whole—

the mud and cold and the wide sky, the Danube

coming on strong. Today, once-vibrant books

are banned in Texas, rather than Germany,

though the connections remain. One gesture

enough, to reveal the doppelganger’s ancient

context. The quiver seeing what is real,

eyes staring (as if dead) into the crystal silence.

The Circle of Entitlements

No free rides on a puffy vita. No one entitled

to cruise as a way of life, no designated Blue Ridge God

of permanence. No guarantee one more

ephemeral spring morning rushes in without permission.

But undeniable, son Jack riding his bike

wild on the Sanford Hall 3rd floor/

laughing students scattering before him/

as if one day insists on becoming the colored in

context in the historical record. Like the day

eight-year-old Jacob wailed at the county fair,

tourists looking on, alarmed no one

would accompany him on the Round-Up,

a ride my younger self chose maybe a thousand times.

I walk onto the metal cage, securing myself

with a latch that could never protect someone so tall,

my head arcing above the thin safety pad.

Because you only get a few chances to be a mythic hero.

The great machine lurched, each glacial turn

proving this was another bad decision,

the centrifugal force adding momentum,

pushing the head hard against the steel mesh.

Vertigo said no one my age should be on this ride,

humiliation painted thick as awkward history.

No security in a single narrative, only

temporary clarity, what should have

been obvious ahead of time. No freezing

the complicated past—the hundred courses taught,

a thousand wardrobe changes,

hundreds of assigned texts arranged

with yellow and pink Post-It Notes.

A ringing phone in a quiet office/Little Katie

comfortable enough before class sleeping in

the one soft chair. Sometimes only one scene matters,

and here we are, while outside the broad window

a spring front pushes clouds. Shoulder to shoulder

with colleagues, watching a candidate promised

a brilliant future, vying for my job. A strange smile

understands the comic narrative where I am

already rewritten as a dinosaur. No need

to spell out what this rookie will face,

for soon enough she will have permission

to rip and tear and rearrange. The duty even,

to erase broad swathes of the past, when she

takes on the responsibility of helping the kids learn.

Mark Vogel lives at the back of a Blue Ridge holler with his wife, Susan Weinberg, an accomplished fiction, and creative non-fiction, writer. He currently is an Emeritus Professor of English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. Poems and short stories have appeared in several dozen literary journals. A poetry collection, Further West, (Serving House Press) will appear in Fall, 2026.