While playing through The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the abstracted aesthetics and mechanics of exploration, coupled with the game’s vast outdoor spaces, dredged up memories of my latchkey youth.
These were times when I more or less ran free through the high desert plains of Wyoming, not as a particularly uncivilized lost boy, but with a somewhat common early freedom to scrounge the neighborhood on a regular basis with few limitations.
Representations of the imprecise nature of memory
I felt a powerful impulse to create ekphrastic poems in response to the game and the specific images from it that metaphorically connected to my memories. As such, these screenshots, blurred and grainy by both design and by the nature of capturing the images from the screen, are inextricably linked to and serve as the titles of the poems.
But they are also representations of the imprecise nature of memory, under the constant processes of decay and reformation; a dilemma that Link must also confront throughout his explorations in a broken Hyrule.
Cheyenne and its slow sunsets—
a dark sheet shook out
to drape the city
at a laborious pace.
We need to wrap
our alleyway business
before full pitch descends,
which we call after the first
wave of bumps and shivers—
the air here don’t quite
carry high temps for more
than a spell.
Occasionally we’d forget
about the drop while our
overbites chattered
beneath the the sodium-vapor
that trails us between yards.
Best to close the back gate
before the last star punctures
black, after the old kids
get wise and reclaim
the swingsets (we’ll do
the same soon enough),
as warm potatoes land
on the tablecloth with
a sliver of blue sky left
to set an extra seat.
There are contractual
obligations to a Saturday
sleepover at Ryan’s—
no complaints about
the mist of menthol or
cat piss fog, no mooning
Uncle Steve (I was already
a two-time offender),
and come six am
I am to accompany
my dude to Sunday
School. Up early for
that dry stroll—three long
blocks under a sun
that slaps our faces with
mountaintop proximity.
The wind flicks a path
along the lingering dew
as we cross High School 3’s
gravel prairie, then up
the yellow hill of the church.
Inside the pre-teen zone
it’s duck-duck-goose and
it’s a table of pastries and
it’s worksheets on Jesus until
all natural light is shunted away
and we’re to watch a tape.
Onscreen bodies lurch
with a loose focus while
the narration rings out:
the world is rough
with untrustworthy others—
outside this room
is a flood of hiss and spit.
Afterwards the pastor
wants to talk confirmation
but I mumble and look
away, focusing on
the walls of chipped brick,
floors thirsty for wax,
a cross of kindling
burdened by dust.
Don’t pump or nothing,
just hold the wheel—
depending on your flavor
of luck, it may just be
a squeaky jolt of the shocks
when you do a lateral one-
eighty over to the shoulder.
We all hit hyperdrive sooner
or later, snowflakes blink
into galactic smears
or wash out the entire
summit you’re crawling.
From there it’s you
and the reliable rhythm
of yellow dashes—the interstate
conducts you using the mountain
as sheet music and you
are onstage blindfolded,
with only the engine’s kick-pedal
and the cramps in your
hands to keep you awake
as time thickens and all
sense of speed dissipates
and you just canter along
until too-close taillights
break open before you
and wrench your mind from
the crevice between the two
kinds of cosmic sleep.
Ben swaddles a grip of sparklers
like firewood, the magnesium
nestled close and duct-taped tight.
With three or four of these fat
silver lemons, we load into
his minivan and roll out to find
an abandoned missile silo.
Rumor has this town as the first
stop for mutually assured destruction,
and we’ve found a fitting foyer for
the end—our welcome sign says
Van Fucking Halen, bordered
by a blurry pentagram and barely
fending off the surrounding swarm
of enemy spray paint. We tour
concrete bedazzled by ground
glass, burn a little film, but soon
the fuses begin to itch. Ben steps
a throw from the highway,
smoldering punk in one hand,
dense egg throbbing in the other.
The woods are ticks, permanent
tree sap, a seizure of smells,
an onslaught of split sunrays,
cottage on a slope, scrambled eggs
that my brother pukes up in protest.
The fields are ticks, only technically
green, crushed under a thin blue sky
and awful for soccer but our team
found a way to lose every game.
The mountains are ticks, trout
dashed against river rocks to stop
their gasps, wind that rakes
glacial scars and wild meadows,
a hassle of horseflies and sneakers
on slicked vistas, a sheared cliff
that slides down to the interstate.
Still, there’s a chapel where
Aaron and Darcie meant to wed,
but this is a temperamental peak.
It’s swaddled with June snow
that fell miles up, we swung by
before circling down
to the backup glen with
a copper cabin and hay bale pews.
I thought I wasn’t much
for ceremony, but this
wait-a-minute weather wrung
something out of me—I saw
a life of constant erosion,
conversation spooled out
for miles, nooks exposed
like photos from this moment
fished up a decade later and
still fresh with hip-fired toasts,
stitches from too much of the twist,
the way a disposable camera
could sneak off with a bit of
secret, glinted beaming.
While playing through The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the abstracted aesthetics and mechanics of exploration, coupled with the game’s vast outdoor spaces, dredged up memories of my latchkey youth.
These were times when I more or less ran free through the high desert plains of Wyoming, not as a particularly uncivilized lost boy, but with a somewhat common early freedom to scrounge the neighborhood on a regular basis with few limitations.
I felt a powerful impulse to create ekphrastic poems in response to the game and the specific images from it that metaphorically connected to my memories. As such, these screenshots, blurred and grainy by both design and by the nature of capturing the images from the screen, are inextricably linked to and serve as the titles of the poems.
But they are also representations of the imprecise nature of memory, under the constant processes of decay and reformation; a dilemma that Link must also confront throughout his explorations in a broken Hyrule.
Cheyenne and its slow sunsets—
a dark sheet shook out
to drape the city
at a laborious pace.
We need to wrap
our alleyway business
before full pitch descends,
which we call after the first
wave of bumps and shivers—
the air here don’t quite
carry high temps for more
than a spell.
Occasionally we’d forget
about the drop while our
overbites chattered
beneath the the sodium-vapor
that trails us between yards.
Best to close the back gate
before the last star punctures
black, after the old kids
get wise and reclaim
the swingsets (we’ll do
the same soon enough),
as warm potatoes land
on the tablecloth with
a sliver of blue sky left
to set an extra seat.
There are contractual
obligations to a Saturday
sleepover at Ryan’s—
no complaints about
the mist of menthol or
cat piss fog, no mooning
Uncle Steve (I was already
a two-time offender),
and come six am
I am to accompany
my dude to Sunday
School. Up early for
that dry stroll—three long
blocks under a sun
that slaps our faces with
mountaintop proximity.
The wind flicks a path
along the lingering dew
as we cross High School 3’s
gravel prairie, then up
the yellow hill of the church.
Inside the pre-teen zone
it’s duck-duck-goose and
it’s a table of pastries and
it’s worksheets on Jesus until
all natural light is shunted away
and we’re to watch a tape.
Onscreen bodies lurch
with a loose focus while
the narration rings out:
the world is rough
with untrustworthy others—
outside this room
is a flood of hiss and spit.
Afterwards the pastor
wants to talk confirmation
but I mumble and look
away, focusing on
the walls of chipped brick,
floors thirsty for wax,
a cross of kindling
burdened by dust.
Don’t pump or nothing,
just hold the wheel—
depending on your flavor
of luck, it may just be
a squeaky jolt of the shocks
when you do a lateral one-
eighty over to the shoulder.
We all hit hyperdrive sooner
or later, snowflakes blink
into galactic smears
or wash out the entire
summit you’re crawling.
From there it’s you
and the reliable rhythm
of yellow dashes—the interstate
conducts you using the mountain
as sheet music and you
are onstage blindfolded,
with only the engine’s kick-pedal
and the cramps in your
hands to keep you awake
as time thickens and all
sense of speed dissipates
and you just canter along
until too-close taillights
break open before you
and wrench your mind from
the crevice between the two
kinds of cosmic sleep.
Ben swaddles a grip of sparklers
like firewood, the magnesium
nestled close and duct-taped tight.
With three or four of these fat
silver lemons, we load into
his minivan and roll out to find
an abandoned missile silo.
Rumor has this town as the first
stop for mutually assured destruction,
and we’ve found a fitting foyer for
the end—our welcome sign says
Van Fucking Halen, bordered
by a blurry pentagram and barely
fending off the surrounding swarm
of enemy spray paint. We tour
concrete bedazzled by ground
glass, burn a little film, but soon
the fuses begin to itch. Ben steps
a throw from the highway,
smoldering punk in one hand,
dense egg throbbing in the other.
The woods are ticks, permanent
tree sap, a seizure of smells,
an onslaught of split sunrays,
cottage on a slope, scrambled eggs
that my brother pukes up in protest.
The fields are ticks, only technically
green, crushed under a thin blue sky
and awful for soccer but our team
found a way to lose every game.
The mountains are ticks, trout
dashed against river rocks to stop
their gasps, wind that rakes
glacial scars and wild meadows,
a hassle of horseflies and sneakers
on slicked vistas, a sheared cliff
that slides down to the interstate.
Still, there’s a chapel where
Aaron and Darcie meant to wed,
but this is a temperamental peak.
It’s swaddled with June snow
that fell miles up, we swung by
before circling down
to the backup glen with
a copper cabin and hay bale pews.
I thought I wasn’t much
for ceremony, but this
wait-a-minute weather wrung
something out of me—I saw
a life of constant erosion,
conversation spooled out
for miles, nooks exposed
like photos from this moment
fished up a decade later and
still fresh with hip-fired toasts,
stitches from too much of the twist,
the way a disposable camera
could sneak off with a bit of
secret, glinted beaming.
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