i. The longest night of the year was not so long when bridged by sleep, all kinds, dreams nested in dreams like Russian dolls, brightly-hued, drenched in lacquer, but nothing in the center– there are things the mind keeps from us. ii. Which isn’t to say I don’t still wake often– the newspaper delivered in its arc and impact, or no sound at all but with a different tenor of silence, or white noise, […]
i. We told Blondie we’d see her next time we came back, red rock dreaming before we even left, but maybe masked by rueing her cooking– lead-bellied all the way to Vegas. ii. Muted, it presented a different face, not dry, or running full and sudden, I didn’t know what to expect– one of the key precursors for loving. iii. Loss, too. Leaving gets under your skin more than anything– I picked red […]
What settles? You. A draft. The foundation of a house. This wind picks up but never gets alarming. And I can’t tell disappointment from lack of inertia, as they’re both so drab and gray and boring.
A strange pull, now, and emptier space– no, loftier, what the sunrise lacks in warmth it makes up for in expansiveness. All this time all at once, do I tread it, eat it, rest under it? This is undiscovered land and the things that I so feared are rendered differently now, in safety– with ample room for consideration, less careful now, less constrained. This landscape starts in red-barked saplings, lichen crusts, deep pastures out to […]
There was freedom in those hills– we carried out a bit with us with wind-burnt faces and slightly wild gazes, but it fades so fast– this the hard part of a return, a sense of loss that these piles of rancid laundry do nothing to assuage.
We slept in a graveyard of trees, a cradle of fire, formerly, and the outermost edge of the Southwest desert. The sun slipped away all afternoon as the wind picked up across the further steppes, traced mesas with their new dusting of snow– So we slept early and shallowly, as dreams of deer passed through camp towards the ice-clotted spring further on. Crystalline life, all that I could need, or want, breath or heart, here […]
Strange thing, an allergy. An act of protest— Even at the molecular level I am in revolt. Punky. Itchy. It smacks a bit of betrayal— Why rise up in welts without clarity of position, or at least a list of demands? I say the unexplainable should at least be placatable— each drag of the nail is relief and regret— to say, pick a side, is only reasonable. Here, I’ll even draw the line.
I woke with a want for the ocean gray and desolate, with winter surf veiled under soft, steady rain. A desert won’t be the same, too still and open– the ocean closes in, relentlessly. But the stars, you say, they’ll be amazing– Yes, if only I wanted clarity, but the act of waking was enough. Now I want to be muffled, I want to be hidden, to watch the squall lines build and then swallow up the […]
You said sips of breath but I remembered gulps of air– I’m American, Rumi, a Texan to boot, but still I can do nuance, and know too how the throat tightens from peril, at giving all or giving up— I’m leaving soon for the desert, winter-stark and emptied, with nothing to find, or so I hope, so tired now of looking, but God help me, I can’t stop.
After all this talk of phases and phase changes, of dawns where the fog plays at being water, the air grown palpable, the most regular of things seeming reachy, not quite as we thought, as if caught in the moment when a dream is revealed as such– Yes, that plane will leave no matter what, this modern migration not accommodating of stragglers who stayed up North too long, outlasting the cold, floating past all sense of time and urgency, […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 