Man Among the Living

The moon shines happy in my bedroom window, growing bigger. It rained earlier and a little bit the last few days, so the air is mulchy and cool. A whole new July world has presented itself, sweatshirts without sunglasses and puddles in the dirt. I'm listening to a friend's sister's CD (actually in my iPhone so my statement is anachronistic)...not sure whether to go to bed or crawl out into the wet sage and talk to the rabbits. I'm busy, as they say, but it's so sweet and cool and my eyes don't hurt anymore. The smoke has been composted into the clay and maybe it'll bring new vegetables. A tough start to a summer, the toughest I've ever been part of...but a few days of afternoon clouds and the smell of raisin rain and it's all erased. This is the most hospitable place on earth, after the volcanoes spewed and the land upheaved...if you lived through that you're in the right place. My house is cool and I'll be able to sleep with a smiley face...I felt the smile at 4:43am last night when I rolled over to drink water and caught a draft from the dormer window. I reveled with the stink bugs, lizards and spiders strutting through my room with no issues. We all smiled into the big windows showing the blinking stars and listening to the quiet coyotes waiting until tomorrow for forage. I hear crying babies and slow cars with cigarette red lights spinning crazed into the Mesa for hot springs and campsites and people waiting for days. And I know to tell the soft nothingness here that I'm still around to witness and feel this in my gnarled feet. There's nothing else I'd rather be doing and nowhere else I'd rather be. Sad, yes, but with the taste of the Rio Grande in my teeth, and the sense that the thunderstorms love us and will give us what we need, man among the living.

Chilly Last of Spring

I love this - it is June 20th and I'm wearing a sweatshirt, a slight shiver and purple hew to my lips and fingers. The clouds are low and it is raining in the mountains. We have not had rain since May 26th. It won't be much, maybe a few stray drops, but it feels good, smells like the coast. My black hoodie is bunched over my striped green, breezy, summery button down shirt. I have Jeans on my legs, and socks on my feet - rarities the past 4 weeks. Birds are singing, some swooning. They seem to like the cool and brooding. And my cell phone is ringing on my hip, not the sound of birds.

Back for the Eclipse with Pain

It's been so long my friend. A gentle dusk on the desert on a day of full moon lunar eclipse in Sagittarius. The smoke from wildfires has dissipated leaving a peach clarity to the horizon, lifting up from darkness the pinons on the dinosaur mounds and cat back ridges. I can see into the bottoms of arroyos and catch black birds leaving branches on the escarpments. There is emptiness in my mouth where 4 hours ago a molar once rooted. With a hole in its hull that would have sunk it (and me), it now sits on my altar, a specter of the past, a notch of lived life, a symbol of mutation. It hurts in the bone above the hole and radiates with my heartbeat out toward my right ear. I let it hurt, waiting for the aspirin I'll take closer to my sleep. The full moon awaits out there, behind the Pueblo and it will light up my bedroom in the wee hours. I am tired and know I must sleep on my back. There is writing fluttering in my left ear, and stuffing my lungs. It longs for glistening green spinach and creamy pesto, mason jars of cooled Mate and bags of mixed nuts and berries. It stays quiet, mostly, not in apathy or timidity, but in wait, in breathing, in a slower beat, a half closed eye, a smoothed out foot. It is cocked, not loaded, a ghost limb limbering, a fastball not yet thrown. And it does not matter when the throw is made. We're at a tipping point - me and me, and you and you. I move about wondering less about the games going on about me, out there, in the crackling morning radio, in the faces of people stuck in traffic on the one road connecting dots on the vast high desert. There is still, though, outside of politics, partying, and my skin wanting to be touched, a hunt for security and a fleeing from some force, some hunger that smells metallic and sounds like an army of cicadas. I'm forgetting my face in the mirror, dropping more crumbs in my car, talking less and giving up more. And yet there is a bubble growing inside me that smells of spring laundry, and feels like sitting on a bench and just looking, and looking until I fall asleep without the fear of being slapped in the head. My face hurts where my tooth used to be and it's now dark in my house. Pain sounds like a conversation with myself, feels like rowing a boat in thick water. I think of money and fresh vegetables, and finding my soul in the hole left by a broken tooth.

Dusk Beyond Measure

Spectral, the clouds spinning wraiths/
Sea creatures/
bottom feeders/
knots in the wood of clouds/
4 directions of immensity/
wind in curls/
clouds in curves/
the desert floats in the universe/
mountains kissed by lavender dragonfly wings/
soft clay underfoot/
humps of snow/
roads weakened by sun/
a blue over layers of cloud, silk lit, smoothed, singing blue/
a dog barks toward the mouth of the Rio Grande Valley/
the pregnant woman sleeps in the wind/
Two Peaks puckers/
a diesel truck chugs slowly in the mud/
no voices/
the sage jiggles/
Radiohead plays in my house behind tall windows of watery glass set into mud walls/
I am ringed by mountains, let out of the house to make love to these trembling layers of life/
I know you, I know you/
that lone tree on the wasted hill in Scotland, barren black rocks where sound is carried by the wind/
it is windy and getting colder/
the river is jade and frothy, blond grasses are exposed early while the snow piles deeper in the mountains/
nobody braves the mud at the road's terminus/
deep ruts and a struggling car/
rock-to-rock with lime green lichens/

This past week on Devisadero, I smelled the sugary sap in the pinons, and the dark dirt beneath the snow. And yesterday, the ocean filled the air, brine, a softness around the sting. It's okay, it's okay. The fiddler is making her way. It's different than last year. I know her and she will teach me. I hear laments from the desert, but the snow isn't as deep, the melting not as dramatic. I don't think the roofs are leaking. I don't know if we need a band?

Stopped on the Terminal Road

A scarlet rouge glow at the edges of indigo smudged by finger circles of grape, a vibrant liquid sky skirted low by india ink molds of sleeping braves and pregnant women, nautilus ears and cat backs. I stopped at the top of a hill on the dirt road unable to understand my place in this. My windows were down, rapidly chilling air seeping in, but no sounds. Lights in kitchens glowing out into the sage from houses marooned like ships on the old sea bottom. No cars behind me, I felt my toes constricted in my boots and longed to be naked, to have tough enough feet to leave my boots and my car behind, to breathe out into the desert and find the canyon rim and follow it north to the river's source. A flood of dinosaur memories made me see myself low to the ground, my back arched to take weight off my hands. That smell of clay under a sky I can describe only as modern, more modern than technology, a screen for the movie of old stories absorbing into that blue, that butane cupping the long crescent moon, everything that has crept through this valley from Creede down to Mexico; big cats and mammoths, wolves and mastodons, hunters and rabbits. Down to Guatemala, up to Alaska, bright moons to guide and light the dark pumice rock. And I sat, paralyzed, looking west wondering about the water, feeling wrung, but knowing from the smell of sage that I could walk, just walk, no sweater or hat or coat with a hood - just me in my skin with my own fire and an internal compass to send me north.

Summer City

Creamed coffee in a small honey jar,
the label still showing the beekeeper
bending gently among the swarms and
honeycombs
Two Ravens talking to a magpie
high in a cottonwood pale green
leaves jiggling among them like
regalia against a powder blue
late summer sky
The Magpie warbles like an infant
reminding me of beaches with
gray wet sand and bubbles
terrycloth bathing suits with
blue and white stripes
A tan father, unafraid of the deeps,
smelling of Coppertone #4
and almond sweat
Little sandpipers skittering along
the surf and big bosomed aunts
in magenta and purple bikinis
strolling like marchers with
elbows flung out for each step
Metallic skyscrapers in the last
sun of summer, looming over
the river, the silvered lattice
girders of the 59th Street Bridge
Sand falling out of hair and tickling
crotch, we hurtle into Manhattan,
a beachy, moppy haired family of
browns, sitting quietly hungry for
Italian food
The City is quiet, the train tracks empty,
the streets softer than I remember
hot dogs tingle the air, knishes
with mustard, soft pretzels smiling
in the steam.
Movie theaters hawk the titles of the early 70s
sad men on billboards in cowboy hats
Chinese men smiling, on black bicycles,
dark flattened gum on the sidewalks.
And still the ocean echoes in my ears
like a conch shell, the tide of me
moving in and out,
Nobody talking, and for once,
that is ok, that is what the beach
and Manhattan do to us.
My mother sees a friend on 32nd street
it seems odd, breaks the spell, but
as the two ladies, both dressed in saffron sundresses,
converse, faces close, I cling to my father's hip
and smell the day, my life.

Sunday Morning Ball

A spearminty Sunday early morning. I awake with sad songs on the clock radio and a bounce in the air. I am torn up bodily by softball dives and slides on gravelly ground and apply salve and apply bandages to the most tender places. I am hungry and ready to run and swing and whoop, and maybe win a championship, maybe not. There will be a cookout in the high sun of late morning, the celebration of a season with a new group of guys, guys I've come to like, goofy and competitive, fiery and fiesty and ready to laugh at themselves. They love music and the cousinhood of jam shows, which reveals itself in the dugout and in encouragement on the field. I am not juiced enough with sleep, but I'm rested and ready to breathe the cool, squint into the blue gold sun, win a game in the morning, eat some grilled food, and then figure things out, maybe walk up high again, maybe just read, maybe just write, maybe just trace the big circle.