Since May 21, 1996, I’ve marketed myself as an independent, freelance writer/editor, collaborating with some amazing clients. To them, as always and again, many thanks for trusting me.
It’s true, from time to time, I did my own work. Not enough, however.
After twenty-seven (27) years it’s time to reconfigure.
Going forward I’ll be focusing more on my work that has laid dormant or ignored too long.
This is my path. Not to walk it is unconscionable.
#DanceOn…
I’ve been washed in the water
Baptised into another life
You restore my soul
You rejuvenate my spirit
You lead me to still places, even
in the presence of turmoil and
terror
As safe harbor in a storm
Let me drop anchor and hold strong
against torment-tossed winds
I’ve been washed in the water
true home
Welcome me back when all this is done.
______________________________________
Jessan Dunn Otis (c) 2022
, or we don’t talk to the ones
who
know and survive
It is past time
to call you back again
The old ones are dead
Like water bright
in the eye
The brush of memory is too wide
And the surface is shimmered and wrong
Long afternoons listening
to the old woman about
her old women
The algae of remembering obscures
Again and again.
Jessan Dunn (DeCredico) Otis © 1985
The long grass moves
The breeze blows
One opposite of the other
I know where that rabbit is and goes.
(c)2022
The first bird sings high
Sequins flicker in deep blue
I sit writing this
(c) 2021 – Jessan Dunn Otis, Writer
“Begin each day with gratitude – for your life, for the sun, for the rain, for your breath.
Begin each day with love – for your life, for the sun, for the rain, for your breath, for yourself, for each other.” @JessanDunnOtis 6.3.2020 (c)
The beauty of this place
Sweet, salted sea air Pine and palm Sugar sand and St. George Island – sand dollar, shark tooth “TomTom, how you doin’?” “I’m doin’ alright.” Tillie Miller Bridge between here and Tiki – Plump, Gulf shrimp and Apalach oysters Hickory smoked chicken and ribs (no rub) and sunfried jellyfish
Seagulls Sea terns Great blue herons Dolphins spyhop and blow every now and then Distant light on Dog Island in a 2:20 AM blueblacknight
Sopchoppy Eastpoint Panacea Alligator Point
A few days back Julie and Artie left, again, having returned from leaving once before and we all walked this beach, beyond the pine tree point, further than any of us had gone before – sea-silvered driftwood, beheaded brown pelican in the brambles of sea grass and pine needles Warming sun Cool, hard-packed, low tide sugar sand under bare feet Sassy leaping pine-stained, sepia rivulets
The laughing gull has returned each morning, greeting and reclaiming its territory and, more than likely, calling out “Sea urchin!” to the others that, eventually, return — glide, drift, rise and drop, land Eat, stay — then, again, depart — leaving this length of calm, shallow bay to terns, herons and egrets to forage
The beauty of this place is as intricately delicate as the silent glideflight of eleven brown pelicans in singular formation, skimming the shallow wave crests – moving from east to west – becoming, eventually, a pulsing line disappearing into the horizon
The beauty of this place
The red smirch of Crystal hot sauce spilled at the edge of a previous high tide line, scattered with Apalachicola oyster shells from our early evening appetizers, has been consumed by the storm-driven, rough chop of last night’s rain, wind and the approaching full moon Wind out of the Southeast, breaking diagonal crests of gunmetal gray and the red buoy strains on its chains as the tide shifts and the channel churns
There is violence in the beauty of this place, too – ships lost, lives swallowed whole, coyotes grab dogs, alligators grab anything
Waves meet land and visibly reverberate back into water, again –
making unmaking remaking
A broken buoy drifts Freed until it’s caught on low tide sea grass before this tide turns The sun breaches darkening, layered afternoon storm clouds to the West, while brilliantly illuminating the etched, white sandbar over there
Burble of language bounces inside my ear – “Hey! How you doin’?” heard so often it becomes as familiar and unnoticed as the wave and the air and this light
The beauty of this place is as much a mystery to me as you
Bert and Kathy, Hattie and Zack – come and met and gone Orange and onion salad, frittatas made and shared Al and Sandy, Sharon and Larry, Scotty, Doug, Gen and Ted Sun-warmed, woman laughing with Pat — LaVerne with her easy, flashing Apalach smile Kim and Tony and oystering all Monday morning across from St. Vincent because the rip was too chopped
Three brilliant, crested egrets graze along this shore, dolphins pass and blow and continue on, as heedless of us as the swarm of terns that rise and twist and glide away to feed further down on this storm-tossed, driven gloss
WOYS, Oyster Radio, 100.5 FM, plays softly as the shrouded sun journeys further West The playful pinwheel whirls and chatters, stick jammed between the weathered 1st and 2nd boards of that well-worn picnic table Just outside this open window, burlap oyster bag flaps
Steelwater, forbidding wind along this coast of Carrabelle Another invisible finger whips this water, etching new (yet ancient) patterns
Tide turns, distant sandbar, barrier beach revealed Unseen fish school as flocks follow and feed, far off
Damp, salted air Thin, singular electric line that leads from shore to dock light Whisper of wave and wind
The beauty of this place
No matter where I go nor what I do, the beauty of this place will taste like home as salt is in my tears
The apparent void dissolved The horizon I can never reach will always draw me in, seeming to want to go further than my eye can see, when the greatest daring starts within
The beauty of this place…
~ ~ ~
Dedicated to: Suzanne Creamer, Stephine McDowell, Marlene Moore, Jennifer Moro, Albert Otis, Jennifer Pickett, C.J.(Joe)Pouncey, Sassy, Judi Rundel
~ ~ ~
HoHum RV Park/Carrabelle, Florida/January-February, 2004
(c)Jessan Dunn Otis / 2004-2017
T H E C A M B R I D G E P O E M ~ #poetry
Commencement Address – Class of 1990 – The Cambridge School, Weston, MA
Give your regards when you go to the reunion and at the dinner,
say that you were thinking about them They’ll, eventually, recall
your name; you went to the movies with that one, felt the weight
of their life when they sat next to you – they never said a word
All of you are rising friends: one used to play the piano, one once
wrote a play, one even seemed awakened enough to photograph the
fields as the unencumbered with tutored minds and unrehearsed passions
Meet them at the door, they’ve brought the souvenirs of time; a seashell
from the Pacific, the nose of a marble saint, and from the field
a spent casing divulged from the flower bed
Face a rising world bearing its gifts in its hands, kiss your incidental
dreams – rise, move away, take others
Give your regards to the well-protected; you knew them, you went
to school together There’s something to bury when you begin
to move away When you are ready and rich in your wish for the
world, you have a new race to start
From the heart of this darkened quadrangle, I hear the library
hum, an immense chorus of writers murmur inside their books along
the unlit, alphabetical shelves; each one stitched into their
own private coat, (you will have to write your own) together forming
a continuous, enormous breath of language
I picture a figure in the act of reading, shoes on the desk, head tilted
into the wind, a person in two worlds, holding the nape of their neck
as another’s life saturates the page; or, in the middle of a thesis,
moving from paragraph to verse, touring endless rooms (you will have to write your own)
I hear the voice of my mother and father reading and inside their
voices lay other, distant sounds
I see us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of
light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail
that we follow across a page and you will have to listen hard to
hear the voices going away (and, you will have to write your own).
© 1990 Jessan Dunn (DeCredico) Otis
Jessan Dunn Otis|Writer 