Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020

Back to Basics program / JUNE 2022
Tobias Wray
USA
tobiaswray.com
About
Tobias Wray’s No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man won the
CSU Poetry Center’s Lighthouse Poetry Series Competition.
His work has found homes in Blackbird, Hunger Mountain,
Meridian, and The Georgia Review. Poems also appear in
Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology (Autumn House Press) and
Poetry Is Bread (Nirala Press). After some years directing the
University of Idaho’s Creative Writing Programs, he now lives
in Los Angeles.
All There Was
Coming from Los Angeles County, I had a rough time adjusting
to the 11-hour time difference and to the near-perpetual light
of northern summer. I woke most days hours before anyone
else and found solace in a quiet routine. Mostly, I drank a
lot of coffee and meditated on love, on why we need to love,
what love is all about. One morning around 4 a.m., I saw a
large, red fox hunting mice on the front lawn. He jumped on
a boulder in the center of the yard for a better look. A pair of
magpies swooped down on him hoping to frighten him off,
their white wings flashing. But he took his time. I watched
him for maybe an hour surveying the perimeter. I wrote in my
journal (and on our communal board in Timber House): “All of
his gestures are orphaned moonlight; everything about him
seems hungry.” When he saw me, I understood that he saw
all that there was to see, a kind of infinity in his gaze.
At Arteles, I was reminded how seeing plainly is a kind of
love, and healing. I remain grateful for the minds I fell in love
with there, for the times that we so clearly saw each other.
Together, we expanded. I am still working from that, the
ripples of those possibilities.