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.

Hiding on the Desert

I find myself on a dirt hill filled with burred desert weeds that scratch and tickle, looking to a mellow gold sun splattering light against a wide arc of thin clouds going vaguely lavender. High summer has the desert on a day with no storms, the softening of evening massaging my exposed skin, an invitation to sit and sip at lemonade, talk softly in the wind, keep eyes on the west as the sun melts into the low volcanoes. It is now, in this ease and spent, that I don't know anything, or anyone. The fast running thoughts of days are done, and I see pictures of things that spoke, heavy raindrops plunking leaves in a cool charcoal sodium light after a hailstorm and a dharma talk about freedom, of slipping out an upstairs window in the dark and floating among the oak trees in my childhood backyard, of walking tall in the dark talus under the pyramids of the high peaks surrounded by echoes of old times in other lives, of Liverpool streets wet and shining in a sliver of white sun before dusk and the feel of a tight blue suit and black leather boots. And I'm queasy from big bites of untouchable sun and drunk from too much motion and the gulf between me and community. Hiding on the desert, in the open in a low slung matchbox of pumice and coffee mud, silent on the green concrete floor, waiting for a knock, a ring, a calling voice, but shooing such notions away with a middle that flutters for fear of exposure, of reckoning, of spilling from its casing. What do we do with these lives? What is the promise in the wind that allows a breath so sweet and gives a caress so disarming that to die doesn't seem an ending but a float in a canoe on a calm lake? I'm asking questions and I don't need answers. I'm wading and when I walk outside and take in the desert with my eyes, the mountains in my groin, I lick the land and it seems small, moving from all directions to a single point. It is the saddest thing I've ever felt, the vastness, and the inverse. It comes on as love, cushioning and enlivening, telling me in whispers that it's already over, two seasons ahead, buried under snow. And I think maybe this is all I have to tell, sing-songy on the inside, wanting to cry, wanting to be devastated by beauty, to speak in a long language, loopy and hoarse with an endless acoustic guitar strumming in the background, laying everybody low. It is a song that I hear, that I feel, I tremble with it, and it has bits and pieces in it, fragments of blood and the call of the late night, which I know to be another call misinterpreted, a wild horn from the valley. I have walked (and run) with people and spirits, gaining streets and finding sunrises, looking and talking and telling truths that fade with the sea sickness of the day, and seem preposterous, or merely unreachable...until the summer evening, high desert wind, the heat turned to a lover with smooth, cool skin, skin to rub against, skin to dream on.

Breathing Notes of Summer

The moon is a walrus whisker tonight, but light enough to give its round bulk illumination. Clouds in the late dusk take on smokestack puffs and black billows against the ringing dark blue above. This day had a streak to it, and endless motion, a bicycle pedal in circles. It is ending with a chunk of chocolate, my reward for meeting myself in the parking lot outside the Magistrate Court, and shaking my hand, apologizing from my still heart for my barking and serrated words, my slip in the mud. It felt like a bubble, a floating piece of myself liberated, leaving the rest of me airy, spacious, ready to keep moving without muscle flexes or jaw clenches. This day had rhythm, bit, bat, bijat, dat, dat, dat-tat-tat, bijat. Symbols in the sounds of wings when I stopped at a red light near the rodeo grounds. Looked like a redtail hawk streaking off toward the wonder of deep grass between town and the ridge of Blueberry Hill. Maybe it's harder to see the prey with the grass so high? But I see the arcs up there, the seeing, the scouting. They see me when I'm up high, circling my arms, trying to summon notes from my belly to see what they are, let them see who I am, hear them, be them, and release them to the ravens to take to the other side. Today there were smiles. Today there were cute old people, a little hunched, carrying things, but squinting bemusedly in the sun. Today they had things, to sell, to trade, to show in rows on blankets. And it is summer tonight, the bugs, though, staying silent, not done with the smoke after dinner, the nap after sex, the sucking on the green stalks that may never taste like this again. A map says that this place is brown and rocky, rugged like Mongolia, and yet the grasses of shangri la sway with crickets that crawl up through your drains and greet you in the morning shower with a hop and lick of their limbs. They do this with alacrity, and unlikely calm, with a studied crook of the leg, a veteran's poise. Venerable are these grasshoppers, hard kneed and agile, but in a way that strikes of age, of sage days talking to spiders and yippity rabbits, wiggling centipedes and tittering young birds, bloody worms and prairie dogs. Tonight all is quiet, no cicadas or meadow larks, or even magpies with their sing-song derision. It is easy, easy, dark with no breeze, promise of 29 days of moon cycle, at the end of which all may be different, all may be transformed into the high praise of the corn days, the pale blue of the ocean sky a thousand miles west, the sting of salt from sweat in the eyes of a hiker nearing the peaks, beating a thunderstorm up the slope, smelling the end. Already? A season ahead we live, maybe two, and where will we be then? It is ok to be in the quiet, only 3 days into summer, nothing to hold onto, nothing to shed. I can always smell winter and the bones of large animals, but the stew can wait, and I look forward to sleep and that walking I do, out and out into the boundaries, floating along the prickled ground, searching for the notes I keep breathing out.

From Chocolate to Family to Children to Change: A writing practice

Because I don't want to, I am doing a writing practice. Right here, right now, or Write here, Write now! I must keep typing without stopping for 30 minutes. I can type slowly if I need to, but no corrections, no going back and deleting to be literary, hip, cool, smooth, smart, brilliant, rollicking, ballsy, irreverent, fearless, unfathomable, deep, and lustrous. Nope. And here I go, nowhere yet, not sure where to head. Writing practice, writing practice. An empty page (so to speak), and empty vessel. Hmmmmm, chocolate, 70% cacao, is in me, moving through, having passed the pleasure centers of the tongue, drifting choco smoke up into my sinuses and tingling my brain into a sense that I am both ok and wanting, into a slide, silky glide of my own milkiness, my own sense of slither, come hither, the nostrils flared for the soak of the sage outside, turning the desert to apples and mint. It is raining again, unexpected, but a fetch of clouds has swung low over the Mesa, dipping into the canyon above the river, threatening to unite with its kind down in the bottom, water to water, dust to dust, the insects hide in the rocks, waiting for the drips to clear the cups of the flowers that cannot stop opening wide, priapic, triumphant, Ella fucking Fitzgerald, A bald tenor, Go Tell it on the Mountain, Raindrops keep Falling on my Head, it ain't gonna stop, the deluge, the monsoon, big words for muddy roads, but not like in the lower elevations, not tropical but cool, the water shining with a bit of dark blue, a bit of lead waiting for the last rays of the sun to poke through the suddenly lifted edge of the western skin of sky. It's rose fest of cacti, delectable, edible, put in your salad dark red lusciousness, and sexy magenta of a woman just coming of age, just knowing how to sway, to take in a look, and to brandish and lavish. Soft dirt and clay, turning to pudding, years in the waiting, the one time these shapes take hold and horses have a hard time treading the land. But leaden drops calm the hooves, and we play volleyball with bouncing bellies in the bottomlands under the slopes, next to rotting cars with grass peering in the empty windows, and lost dogs tongues waving, smiling, dripping with hunger, stand close to our rippling legs, a low growl, a high whine, and nothing to grasp. It smells so good and we don't care about the drops, the lightning stinging the black volcanoes, the thunder ruffling our thighs, making us want ribs, chicken legs, meats of some sort although we have only heaps of greens and berries, and beer. It is the time of high light and it won't leave us hanging, blueberry skies mixed with the aquamarine of lost-at-sea youth, a color that used to cause creeping sadness at the thought of dinner when in the woods with smudge faced friends figuring out how to eat snails, and light the woods on fire. And it stays with us, giving us a chance, after romance, after the toilet bowl has emptied, after the early dreams have been composted and reshuffled, after the old songs have finally lost their meaning. There is still a chance. We remember bits and slices of times with family, around tables, food spilling over, bickering in the kitchen, hugs in the den, puking in the bathrooms. It is sepia toned as we might expect, doesn't matter if now or in the sepia past, past is sepia, the color of the astral floor, the color of blended muteness, the corroboration of your brothers, and sisters, and mothers, and fathers, and cute cousins, and the strange revelations you knew as a kid, among the elders, hiding in guilelessness, but listening and knowing you've been witness to the Titanic, and the Brooklyn Dodgers winning the World Series, and Man walking on the moon, and the terrible quicksand of the family legacy. Or maybe not quicksand, sometimes the blue-flame of life risen up in everybody, when remembering that their past is built on crenelated lives, hollowed from fullness, splinte3ed from their boughs, but they had heft, and they sprung, and spanked and spelunked through the caves for all of us. And we're doing that now. Me, on the desert, looking out at popping sage, so green it wants to be blue, battling my energies, trudging through late nights to get back to early mornings, feeling sadnesses born of my addicted cells, knowing that I can get back into the soft (yet firm) bed and arise christened new, bells bopping, words flying, breathing my bellybutton alive again. Seeing myself a child in the flower's faces. Seeing myself aloft in the cheeks of the people, pinched, reddish, like dolls, from the other night, tromping from place to place, desert to town, to houses filled with murals and the scent of sandalwood in the bathrooms, having fun, not ready to pay the price of tomorrow, never tomorrow, never tomorrow. And, hey, how did the dawn get away with the day....last night's always getting in my way - lyrics from a friend's song. Sometimes true. And yet dusk is hanging on through this clack, clack, and I hear the soft spilling of rain on my roof. Ravens, getting more plump with the bounty of wetness, shaking off the spatter, smiling and roiling around on the cliffs. People in tatters waqlking down the road, one-by-one, sometimes in gaggles, in groups, in trios, looking sad but found, blind and bobbling, but unboggled. Unimpeded, they keep moving toward the hot springs where they may find some warmth in the chilled rain. children of this earth, old time London backstreets urchins finding flowers to put in their hair,a nd to play drums to the weary, and wary, because they still have time, and time has them, and the world just may turn enough toward the sun that we'll all dry off with them. Music comes to me across the mesa, a sound of flutes and electric guitars, of fiddles and kettle drums, and the rain pounds harder now.

Storms and Roses

First the storms, then the blooms. I'm just out of a weeklong Zen meditation and writing retreat. It's part of an "intensive" that lasts for the full year. These were taken during the week either at/near my house on the high Mesa or on the Devisadero trail in the hills behind Taos. It has been rainy and cool since mid May often with stormy skies and fat, cold drops of rain. The rivers are running high and although the seemingly abundant snowpack melted off quickly (due, we're told, to a high dust content caused by the windstorms of early spring which settled in the snow and absorbed the heat of the sun, liquifying the snow), the above normal rains have made up for it. Apparently, the Rio Grande, which supplies water to Arizona and Texas under water rights transfer deals entered into in the 70s and 80s (boo), does not have to be curtailed (through opening and closing dams) this year to supply the full allotment. This is good news for irrigators/farmers along the Rio Grande and its tributaries (and acequias) in southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico who will also get a full allotment. Since I've lived in the Taos Valley, we have had at least normal or above normal moisture (following 5 years of extrem drought), which feels sweet. Normal for this high desert ringed by 13,000' peaks, is 12 inches. Some years we've had close to 15". The Taos Ski Valley receives about 300" of snow in a normal year (with approximately 60-70" where I live at 7,091'). In contrast, New York City averages 42" of rain per year, South Florida around 65", Seattle approximately 40" (less than NYC, yes, but it drizzles more there), parts of the Oregon and Washington (and California) coasts, approximately 70". Somehow, it all works.

And can you believe the vivacity of these cactus flowers?! Crazy.

From Fight to Flight

I'm ready to fight today. I'm a confused wolverine baring my teeth. I speak calmly, but I'm tired, not a sleep deprived tired, a mutant's tired, the exhaustion from having left myself and returned to a desolate, foreign, too bright place. And the mutant wants out. Me mutant hears false provocations and cannot make camp. He is impatient and hopeless; he is worried that there is nothing, no reason, no purpose, just random emotions. And yet my mutant's ego is strong; it obliterates everything but the light of morning. If I can write this, I think, there is still some light at the bottom of the barrel and the mutation can be dissolved (transmuted?). I am sitting and I am writing. I am expanding in the face of popping balloons. I have been crowded out for a while, pushed to the edge of the bed. And even as I write this, I am still close to the edge, my heart beats too fast, my belly clenches enough to weaken my legs, and my ego is dug in, defiant, making love to the mutant. It refuses definition or the notion that practice, consistent practice, is good for me. It bristles at its machinations being called addiction. It says it's all a big conspiracy theory. It defends its turf. It says I can drink and trip and snort cocaine in the quest for experience. Who could deny that who is not a loser, a wussy, a prude, a killjoy? It carves out spaces for me and even, I think, it is looking out for me, being a matchmaker, keeping me from being the lean loner on the desert. It's also spending all my money and losing my possessions. And who is the one who is hopeless? Who is the one thinking it's too late, it's no use? Who is the one worried about dying? Is that the ego, too? Is that part of the trap? I hear myself saying "don't you want magic? Don't you want to be able to dive through your navel into nothingness?" You're addicted to ecstasy (not the drug) and you don't know it. You'd trade a 7 year process of transformation for a 3-day concert filled with ionized air and one dance with the dark skinned girl in the short denim skirt with the green eyes lit by the setting sun and your seduction - the dance where you lose yourself, that crystal-clinking tingling in your groin rising up your heated abdomen and reaching your eyes where you now know she knows and although you probably won't say anything or do anything, you know you could, in that place that feels like the high mountains above treeline and smells like pine sap and sulfur and lands you in a painting with her on the mossy edge of a dark lake under a soaring granite ledge, your warmth all in your skin, the touching and clinging and clawed ass grabbing; it's a dream, the same dream it's always been. And she's there with you (you think, but does it matter?), this person you see at the three-day concert, between angled red rocks, 100 yards above the stage at the birthing of this gap, with the band in a runaway trance of twisting base and waving guitar, drumbeats picking out individual ribs, surrounded by 10,000 bobbing heads with open mouths, and, closer, by old friends and concert buddies swaying through their own fields of understanding, looking like family, reaching out for you both when they think you're lost, knowing it, too, and not judging but still pulling you back from the high mountain lake where you'll always make love, to make sure you don't because that girl's boyfriend is coming back from the beer stand. And as you come back, before you smile at each other like Adam and Eve, before the clank of the sound comes back as if someone opened the hatch of an airplane, you swim with her in that lake and you know you've known something larger, something you might remember on your deathbed. And then the boyfriend's there; he's new to the scene and he gives you his beer to sip. He's tripping, too, gleamy and amazed, a joyous stretch of flesh and bone, a jumping bean of kindness, and although the music is now loud and your ears have popped and you feel your bare feet sticking to the beer soaked blue tarp, you are in love, not with the girl, or the boyfriend, but with the organism, the whole undulating mass of people, the bats above against the indigo sky, the holy red hulks of rock pointing west, the blue lit city of Denver like Oz 30 miles northeast, and your round-eyed friends passing you a bag of Molly grabbing the meat of your shoulder, slapping your palms - you have made it here, you have made it, you are part of the organism and it loves itself into one piece, and you are nothing but the current that runs through it. Do you understand that place? Is it worth the week it takes to settle back into your body and function in time? Tell me.

6 Days

The past 6 days have been spent with friends, nearby, far away, some new, some old family, some grounding and being grounded. Kid energy, emergent, smooth, an inhabiting of self beginning to occur. There was a pinch of worry and a dollop of woe, a cleaving of the center, a heaving before the ocean went warm and glassy, a snorting from the top before the belly rounded. Some vanity before that storm faded east and left a scrubbed knowing like the desert becoming itself again after the wind. The field of possibility extended in good food, abundance rubbing off on me in loaves of bread, sun-dried tomato paste, an Italian accent full of bounce and circles, stinging grappa and lemon tart, a clean floor and emptied sink, the closed-eyed laughter of a sexy elf watching irises nod in a hail storm. There was a long hike in the rain down in the bottom of the gorge where the river overflowed into the hot spring pools, but not with menace, and not enough to deter two magic tadpoles with freckled legs who talk to faeries and nature divas and remember the river as a bubbling brother. Paintings of mallet-breasted women mixed with the spring and stir of basketball and the popeyed swirl of good whiskey. In the looking back, there is a whole circle. Mixed, mixed, mate and some coffee, deep, bitter greens and plum extract, lean red meat topped with silky mozzarella and long fried onions flecked with torn basil leaves, grilled zuchini and cob corn popping on your canines, slow swallows of quiet water at room temperature then a margarita soothed with a woven basket full of fresh limes. To bed before 11pm after a day of swimming and pine nut tea, the eyes of the children, green and indigo streaked with dusk sky and old tears, dotted around the irises with the points of sundials. 6 days is a long journey, to the peak of Chomolungma and the jungles of Laos, from my Lost China Sea filled with collapsing waves, to the cool, grassy valley of late spring where my masks are off, my clothing optional, my journey ended, again, where it always begins.

Time and Timelessness

A raven said to me, "Don't forget this hiking is your meditation. Some people need to move to be still." Then he asked me, "What anchors you to time?" And I thought, "Shame brings me back to time; to guilt; to will in a degrading attempt to prevent dissipation." To create requires timelessness. To love requires space, a suspension of self-awareness. I am now tired, sleepy, but I know these things. The fear of wasting time, by definition, disappears in the open field. Without time, there is no measure, no comparison. It is never too late. You can throw your arms around the people you miss, you can ask why and what and listen. The veil lifts, the barrier melts, the pathology becomes meaningless. You can write with your wrinkles and sound like youth because there is no measure. Presence is the sound of youth to us who are anchored in time, when really it is the naked sound, unembellished, unselfconscious, unaware of anything but the muscularity and breeze of it. Those words like walking in the mountains, watching moist dust settle among desert volcanoes, seeing the mossy underbelly of the foothills in a silver-plated light thrown from somewhere behind a sprawling thunderhead. There is no time in that view, the bounce of feet on the rocks, the stray drops grazing a cheek. And then a bolt of lightning over Two Peaks sparks the thought, "maybe if I get hit it'll knock me out of time forever and my eyes will blaze with an indescribable fire." And then the next thought, "But will it hurt?"

Ordinary Man

I'm in my cave like office, cool while the sun beats down through the leafing trees outside. Spring has come with layers of fragrance, lilacs and apple trees, dogwoods and astors, cherry trees and weeping willows in full blossom. Where there were scars in the peeling back of the snow in February and March, there is now cushy, dewy, color-mad life. It draws me out, the perfume, the skin caressing warmth, the thickening grasses. Yesterday, on Devisadero, the shoulders of the mountains gave blue-green healing to my computer-scattered eyes. An endless Moroccan blue sky, no clouds for a hundred miles in every direction, that green against blue like food, enabling deep breaths and nourishment. I expected people up there, but they must have hidden or I may have disappeared from view, vaporizing into the rocks I used as springs, miniaturizing into the insect on the dancing astors, their central yellow suns roundbellied. There in the shadows of khaki rocks the new flowers waved out of moss. Scrub oaks started to unfurl their little leaves, rubbery like any newborn, warm to the touch. Up on the ridge, the leaves were slower, still balled, waiting for a mild night. But the wildflowers were ready, waving, jumping, jiggling, so happy to be in the world that they'd give it all now, not worry about the future. I did pass one human, and she was a flower, too, a wide-jawed blond lady in reverie, off to the side of the trail in prayer, stretching her body skyward, making a giant circle of life with her arms, looking like I do on my altar rock. I was singing to myself, a song about an ordinary man, and I lowered my voice, but I did not stop as she was ok with it, two people in prayer, on a mountain, looking at the blue, listening to the birds. And the ravens played, rascally, riding backward in the wind, beaks facing west, gliding east, cigars in their mouths. They made me laugh and they knew it. I wondered about the fiddler, wondered if she wondered about me. I saw a fiddler weeks ago, snow still melting off the rocks, a woman I'd met before, but not the fiddler in green. She may be my teacher. The fiddler I'd followed and seen out on the trail and near the river is not my teacher, though I have things to learn. She is a lover and to know her I'll need to know how to play. The song I was singing yesterday had no fiddle. It was voice and guitar. My voice felt supple and rangy. It's a sad song, a reflective longing, a cautionary tale. "Just the son of an ordinary man/living his life in a gentle rage/living day by day by day/this is who he was meant to be/like taking water from a grain of sand/seeking sin in a pious age/wanting more but can't find a way/to disregard his destiny." It's 4:09 and I may have to leave the cave again. I have levitating to do. There are dinner parties and margaritas, women in sheer spring dresses dancing to ragtag blues looking for a shoulder to lean on. It is the time of the big wakeup. It is a hard time to stay on the trail, but that's where the magic is.

A Call to Pushups - The Battle

I'm running hard, running like a clueless bull. I didn't think I'd be back here again, but here I am. It's 7:30 and I'm doing pushups every couple of minutes to drain the excess energy. I'm hungry although I just ate. I want to go to town and watch sports while sipping beers and then go outside and marvel at the mild night. I want to go to parties, insert myself into scenes. I want to drink coffee and pace, pump my legs up and down, scratch some shit into notebooks, phrases, words, things I should be doing. It's all pushing the dream away. Where is the late night cafe (one thing we're surely missing in Taos)? Where are friends to talk in circles with (they're out there, but I'm gunshy, wanting solitude as much companionship, a strange, tearing dilemma). Why did I not know about the vision quests at the Lama Foundation this past weekend? Why does everything feel so difficult? Why have a drifted from my writing intensive commitments? My teacher? This is the turning point. How do I keep or regain the discipline in spring and summer? How? How do I not berate myself and turn myself into an enemy? Who are or where are my companions in sweet discipline? I know it can be sweet. I've tasted it. 5 or 6 weeks of straying from the core and my nerves are playing the old jangled song. I'm capable of great expressions of exuberance, of profligate wastes of time and money and life force. That's what I need to remember. The commitment of life force to the need, the addiction, the capitalist/consumptive cells. They don't need that much, but they have fallen back upon asking. I am not going to give it. And yet I do not want to be a dictator to my soul. No. No. There is a middle road. Pushups, situps, running, climbing, biking...and then I can sit, and write and read (160 pages since mid yesterday...so not too bad). Yes, tucked back in, everything expanding, taking artistic chances, opening wide to people. That's what I know. That's exciting and calming. I'm getting those calls again from the vampires. They disappeared because I disappeared. But you reappear and your blood still tastes sweet. This isn't easy. This is confusing. I don't want this to be epic. I'm dramatic, but, man, if you could look at me pacing my house, dropping down to do pushups, opening and closing cabinets, circling, checking the computer, picking pennies off the floor, unloading the car. I have more energy than 10 men, and more exhaustion, too. I want to get off wanting. I look forward to again being sated, open, alert, understanding, empathetic, gleam-eyed, and slow. It won't take long. It's just underneath this buzzing. But the buzzing is hard to tune out. This has helped. I don't know if I'll publish it. It's rambling. It's jibberish and gobbledegook. It's real, though. I'm in a challenge. I want to be able to do whatever I want and at the same time I want discipline and ease of heart. When those things match, which they did there for a while during sweet winter, I am in the open field. Time disappears. Now becomes enough.

Caveman of the Bonzai Forest III: The Law of Least Effort

"Your walk isn't the same as it was in the winter."

I hadn't seen Harris in a few weeks. I'd been traveling and biking, doing other things. He was sitting on the rock throne at the top of Devisadero.

"Whaddya mean?"

He paused for a minute, looking at the ground then up at me.

"You know."

"Dude, you act like you know me. I've seen you a few times on this trail and you live in a cave. You don't know me. I don't have to deal with this. I'm on a hike. I'm on my own. I don't know you; you don't know me."

Truth is I was glad to see him. No more than 10 minutes earlier I was craving human connection; thinking I was becoming too much of a loner. I could feel it in my stomach, no different than a deep hunger for food, but without the gurgling. I was also hungry for food. In fact, I was all hunger, seeking, needing and feeling sad at the emptiness, an abandonment. But I hadn't been abandoned and I'd eaten plenty.

Harris stayed quiet and neutral, letting my little storm pass.

"You're an athlete now, not a traveler."

"What?"

"You're powering up the mountain like you're in a race."

"I'm no faster than I was in February."

"It's not about your relative speed, it's about the lean of your body and where your eyes are. You're not seeing as much."

"And you saw this in my last 10 strides as I approached you here?"

"No, me and Great Wing have watched you coming up the front side the last couple of times. He knows you know he was showing off last week when he made the big circle around you using his wings as ailerons to hold steady in that gale. No wing flaps at all, right?"

"Yeah, I remember. Pretty amazing. He came within 4 or 5 feet of me and I could hear the wind against his wings."

"You may not know it, but you have a few friends up here. Great Wing happens to think you're alright. He's noticed that you're walking like you did the winter before last, all swinging arms, stomp-footed and mouth breathing. I wasn't here, but he told me."

"He told you. Cmon, Harris. I believe in a lot of things, but how can a bird tell you something."

"Keep coming here and raise your head up and you'll probably figure it out."

Like all my conversations with Harris, I half wanted to smack the guy and at the same time I knew what he was telling me was true and I knew I needed to hear it. It was always like a dream up there when he showed up. It didn't make sense. He didn't make sense...but he did.

"He did come really close to me that day and I thought I heard something, not a voice, but something that had meaning in it."

"The ravens on this mountain have a lot of ways to communicate."

"Seems like it."

Harris nodded and for the first time I noticed he had a green backpack on.

"That pack new?," I asked.

"A guy left it up here last week."

"And you took it? What if he comes back looking for it?"

"Then it'll be there for him exactly where he thinks it will be."

"Like my sunglasses?"

He smiled with his eyes cast down."

"I have to go find Mutton. I'll see you again."

I had no idea who or what Mutton was, but in the couple of times I'd run into Harris the encounters ended this way each time with the phrase "I'll see you again." Not "I'll see you soon" or "I'll see you around" but "I'll see you again." There was a certainty in it and there wasn't anything to say back so I nodded and knew it to be true.

On the way back down, I stopped to hug my brother tree. I stood in the soft dark dirt and leaned my third eye into the skinny branch that sticks out. With my arms around his trunk, I asked my brother for guidance. He made no sounds this day, no creaks or groans. But before I pulled back a memory floated up. I was in my car driving from Boulder to Taos a few years ago and Deepak Chopra played on the CD player. He was talking about the law of least effort. And then I saw the vision of Great Wing hovering in the wind, letting it take him, not moving his wings but for a subtle side-to-side adjustment, and then after floating above me for a minute, letting the wind propel him into a great arc out over the cliffs. He rode the wind. And it hit me that the phrase I thought of that day with Great Wing over me was "law of least effort."

I let go of brother tree and jangled down the trail, a little hungry still, but nothing that couldn't keep.

I Went Down to the River...

I went to the river, rode down the ruts, curving through the sage and juniper hills remembering where I was and who I am. A purple dust storm spread its churn just below the sun and just behind the walking volcanoes like a ruffling curtain. Aquamarine sky, the peaks quiet and far away, snow spilling from the tops but starting to peel back, retreat, and I standing on a jutting talis rock letting the wind blow through me and realizing that spring had come, and when it had I was not looking. There were snows in March and April, four storms after March 21st, and there may yet be another, but I was whirling out there, traveling, surging, forgetting, leaving my mesa home in the dust. I stopped paying attention and became again the man who walks with Mr. Frodo, searching for a way to Mt. Doom to destroy that fucking ring. My gaze fell in upon my feet and no longer out the window following the moon and the ocean sky, no longer keeping watch for the fiddler in green. I stopped seeing rabbits except in the road darting across or frozen on the side, afraid to move. The dogs were gone, I was gone. My writing room was virtually emptied and abandoned for an office in town. Coffee crept back into the routine, joining the mate, and bars again seemed the natural follow to a power hike driven more now by the need to clear the computer glare out of my eyes and the fear of losing my leanness than to visit the ravens, my brother tree and absorb the magic at the confluence of the worlds. The house got dusty and the cupboard bare, but for mustard, an old yogurt and some rice pasta. I came home to a stopped up bathroom sink and an ashy wood stove flanked by piles of old newspaper and food packaging. It occurred to me that in the mornings the house was now colder, much colder, than it had been when I inhabited it nearly full time in December, January, February into early March. This owed as much to the higher angle of the sun as it did to the draft of my absense and the lack of fires before bed and early in the morning. It became harder to write at home (as you can see by the dwindling entries the past couple of months), the big wood table almost naked, the battered laptop sitting there with its screen hanging by one hinge. It was good enough to check sports scores and my email in the morning, but not inviting to create or even spew. "Where did my muse go?" I'd say to myself on the few nights I was here before dusk or darkness. And now I hear her saying back, "Where did you go, motherfucker?" And, of course, we both know. I went exit stage left to the office and the town draws, like an allergy, like an old itch that you forgot about for a while that you have a cure for at the bottom of some plastic bin under the sink in the bathroom. Six months gone from it and yet the same people were out there, Sam and Marky and AJ, Glenny and Fast Angie and Clyde, Alyson and Candy and Janet. Like family, they'll always be there to take you in. It's like you never left. And there's some solace in it, you know, but a month with that family and it's time to hit the road again, back home. I don't know. Again, I don't know. What I do know is that I was out there in March, sitting in the melting snow, watching it swirl around me, smelling spring in the caliche. I knew it was coming, and I wanted to see and feel the turn, but I missed it. At the river tonight, birdsong filled the gorge and the wind had no bite. It blew hard from the west but it caressed and bathed instead of cutting. Winter was gone and with it the snow that had lasted since November. Even the gullies were going green. I had some hugs out there in town, some moments of knowing the love in all the noise, the sass in the world, the altered, rednosed workshop of smudged saints, but I can't stay there. My workshop is here and my work requires everything I have. "Don't be dramatic" the muse says, "you'll need that family here and there." True, true, I think, but not now even though spring has this ram ready to butt and bang and jump chasms. It is time to create and to create I need abundant life force, and to have abundant life force I need to pay attention and to feel and to show up. Here I am again.

Home in Texas

Hello, it's me, I haven't been here for a long, long time (credit to Todd Rundgren). A barnstorming couple of weeks that took me from the snowy 13,000' peaks and upscale but hollow carb infested town of Breckenridge to the sea level debacle of repeating chain(store) DNA that is Houston, TX. And now I'm back in a place so different from the rest of the USA that I am reawakened (again). I'm still staggering from the 16 hour drive from Houston to Taos that spanned Sunday into Monday, but something happened out there in south Texas. There is hill country that rises like green sea swells after the lushness and big muddy rivers of places like Flatonia, Iraan, San Angelo and San Antonio. Into a long, glowlit dusk after San Antone, I drove Montez into a rollercoaster of sandstone ridges and valleys where the air cooled and dried from the swampy oil slick of Houston, and frenzied birdsong echoed in the thick, lowset oaks, magnolias and mulberries. A talkshow station crackled in from Dallas, a woman writer of a Christian book called "Angry Conversations with God" bantered with two hip male Christian hosts about the book and her prideful, reckless foibles on the empty road until she wound her way back to God. It all made sense, what she said, and they had such a self deprecating, knowing hipness that me and my friend who was traveling with me, both of us pagan buddhist animists, were riveted and called them the Hiptians. But, as all good things do, the reception faded into the static scales of the engine's fluctuations and we went quiet as the dusk held on, orange and low flame blue with hints of cranberry and blueberry. And the road rose through cuts in the white sandstone where you could see the bone of the land, the layers of lifetimes piled up in wavy rows. I looked out to the north and the south and breathed into the trees knowing this place, it knowing me. South Texas, somewhere between San Antonio and El Paso, Mexico just a little farther south, a place I'd never been before, but I knew it, and it gave me peace, a crack in my heart to release the scent of home. My breathing went downward into my belly and I felt locked in, like I could drive forever. It reminded me of the Bonzai Forest, this place of hills and knobs and chilly, dry air. Darkness finally came springing loose the stars and, low on gas, I pulled off at the historic town of Sonora where I had to drive four miles to find the gas station downtown. It was a sleepy place with the leaves just popping on the locust trees and a pickup in every driveway. There were a few historical markers but I was too tired to read them. Strangely, the clerk in the gasmart had no discernible Texas accent, but then again, this place was nowhere and I knew it, so it wasn't necessarily Texas or the dot showing on the map. Like those mad singing birds filling the giant magnolia in Flatonia hours earlier, I, too, heard the hum of a place in my dreams and it just happened to be called Texas.

Showing Up

Easter morning, April 12th. It is snowing heavily on Taos desert, the mountains shrouded, everything brought in close. I look up into a fall of feathers, it doesn't seem possible that snowflakes can drop thousands of feet, not when a small wind can blow them sideways in a crisscross pattern. It is 7am and the bridge looms over the gorge filled with bouncing snow, its road surface covered with a slick whiteness. It's at once improbable and expected, and as high desert dwellers are ready for anything, and love all weather, there are 70 people huddled under the open air wooden shelter facing the yawning gorge. People are layered up, hats pulled down tight, the dark haired heads of toddlers and infants swimming in giant parka hoods of blue and magenta. Older men greet me with crescent pouches under their eyes, smiling, not old as much as broken in. Some of the women are wearing colorful scarves wrapped around their hair; it reminds me of my childhood in the 70s when more women seemed to wear them, and project mystery and bright eyed destiny in the face of boredom. The reverend Steve Wiard, a Kansan with a broken voiced optimism, a cornfield skipping boy of 60 who loves the red sox and amber beer, paces before the huddled group in his red tartan blanket coat with charcoal crosses in subtle relief on front and back. He is smiling, his salt-and-pepper ponytail spilling and curling out of his blue baseball cap, and telling us that he does not know exactly what happened that day of Christ's resurrection, that it's a mystery. But he knows something happened that turned those people around that day. And he knows that showing up is the key. 70 people in driving snow, 27 degrees, singing songs of peace, and listening to a preacher with a sun faded blue red sox cap whose voice cracks with excitement and wonder and who injects the still unmarred buoyancy of a ten year old who knows anything is possible. You can't see the mountain today but you know it's there. And I don't know what it means, but it feels good to be around people at 7am listening to a guy with whom you'd trade baseball cards and drink beers while watching a ballgame. As he spoke, I looked out to the west to a lone cottonwood standing firm in the snowfall; a single, sturdy tree on a desert at the edge of a massive gorge allowing the snow to collect on it, at the edge of my visibility, nothing behind it but a field of gray while people sing and recite and hug in many colors also on the edge of that wide opening. Something? It reminds me that I read an article last night on David Foster Wallace, a great writer who killed himself months ago at 46. In his last novel, an unfinished work, he wrote of an IRS agent who found himself in the grip of such immense boredom that he thought he'd never recover without hurting himself, or hurling himself away. But he finds a way to stick it out, to be right in it, to use it as practice, and the boredom fades into another state where there is nothing but openness, and he is joyful. He doesn't know what this is, and it doesn't seem like anything but he is spacious. I took that with me as I fell to sleep last night, and I had it with me at the sunrise service in the snow. I don't know what it is, but it exists. Practice, showing up, even if it's mechanical, will lead to joy and peace. Believe me, I know how simple and even trite that sounds. And it doesn't happen right away, and maybe not for a while, but it happens. And I'm not preaching Jesus or any religion, but there's something about showing up. And there's something about being there. I don't know what it is, but it's something.

Starting a Howl

Piles of tires
below a bridge
in New Jersey

A song on the radio
"What the world needs now
is love sweet love."

Nobody talking
the tires fading
from my perch
in the back
of the station wagon

On the way to Rockaway
the cousins,
mud in the backyard
from endless sprinkling

Dad switches the radio
to WNEW
a deep voice
recites the news

127 VC dead
only 4 Americans
there is movement
in the jungles
it is 88 degrees
in Hanoi

Brian, my counselor, is there
Colgate toothpaste and
Winstons taste good
like a cigarette should

Mom lights up
Dad rolls down
the window
my brother and I
choke in the back

The air smells of eggs
and leather
still no one talks
and the trees of Jersey thicken

Neighborhoods on the sides
dirty white and green houses
lean away
in the woods

I remember the tires
and see that commercial
of an Indian on the roadside
with a tear on his cheek.

Happy Hiker

April 6, 2009 at 7pm: Back on Devisadero in Taos, snow melted, sunny and mild, no need for helmets, 5 layers, or blocky gloves. I'm watching ravens fly over the cliff 20 yards in front of me. The 3/4 moon, misshapen but bright, had already risen high behind me but I couldn't quite get my arm out enough to include it.

Postcards from Breckenridge

We had mid winter conditions at Breckenridge April 3-5. It snowed about 10" on Saturday, after several feet during mid-late March. The temperature at 13,000+' when I took this picture was approximately 8 degrees with a northwest wind at 20 mph. Invigorating. It was, as they say, "hero snow" - powdery yet formed enough to keep you on top of the snow. I had not skied all season, but my ankle held up, and I was able to drop off the summit ridge and make turns on the steep bowls. It was so inspiring that I am getting a full pass to Taos Ski Valley for next season. I have to be up there, an ancient home for me. There is something at once immense and intimate above treeline. The world congeals into an atom up there. Although you can see for hundreds of miles, distance fades to a room made up of hushed strokes, sheer mountain walls flatten, and you live in the hollow smell of cold and the rotation of your knees.

Caveman of the Bonzai Forest II

This day I was hurting. Something had sapped my energy. I wasn't sure if it was the food I ate, a bug, or having overtaxed my body over the past few weeks. No gas. Sore muscles. A sagging spirit. Also, I had no socks and it was chilly. I'd left them at home, on the bed lined up perfectly to be noticed by me before I took off for town, but I didn't. I wanted to wear sandals. It was sunny and my feet wanted to feel the breeze and the sun. Oh, well, I did have my climbing shoes and they're so old that the fibers have softened and formed to my feet. They know me well, these shoes, we've hiked thousands of miles over rocks, snowdrifts, downed trees, and scree. The wind got under my jeans, just a little, but not enough to bother me.

And so I went feeling a lament, needing someone to talk to but at the same time not wanting to. Sometimes I feel like a rack of bones and I can imagine someone or some force scooping me up and laying me down on the edge of a creek under tall trees cushioned by the sponge of moss and matted straw. And in that imagining, I submit because that is what I am, a rack of tired bones with no sinew left who wants to be left to rest in the softness, listening to the creek for a long, long time. But I kept walking as I always do, knowing that there are things up there that will wake me up, teach me who I am, and who I am not. The wind kicked hard from the west and two women passed me, one whom I knew, but she did not recognize me with my new sunglasses and black hat pulled down tight. I said hi to both, but did not betray myself as I didn't have the strength to chitter.

Once I wound up through and over the boulder-strewn gully that is a steep shortcut to the trail higher up, I was feeling better, not good, but good enough to keep moving. Still, I was in a state where I couldn't pay attention to much, I just kept moving, head bowed forward, eyes soft focused about 20 feet in front of me. I had my camelbak on, but the water, like everything else that day, did not taste good, it had a metallic tinge and I sipped some and spat most of it.

A long, wavy purple cloud, like a prayer flag being whipped west to east, reached toward Tinkantananda, and cut the wobbly setting sun in two. I stopped and took a picture with my cell camera, but it cannot deal with the sunlight and the picture looked like a nuclear blast or a supernova over the desert. I erased it and kept moving, twisting up into the heart of the bonzai forest where it flattens out and rides the ridges above the Pueblo.

Sooner than I expected, I was at my lower sacred spot, the one I stop at when I'm feeling lethargic. It looks out over the velvety juniper and pinon covered meadow of the Pueblo rising toward the base of Tinkantananda and its brothers. Also, to the west through the jiggling branches of the rounded pinons you can see the Pedernal, the flattopped butte sitting south of Ghost Ranch that Georgia O'Keefe made famous in her paintings. 70 miles away on the horizon, it looked like a chunk of dark chocolate covered with a thin layer of raspberry sauce. My hunger sparked for the first time in several hours.

For some reason, when I was approaching the prayer spot, I had a feeling that I would find the sunglasses I had lost two weeks before and given up on. I knew I'd left them there, on a rock, while doing my prayers, but when I came for them the next several days, they were nowhere to be found, not hanging on a tree, sitting on a rock, or tumbled down the slope in the pine fluff. I was dejected for a few days by the image of somebody picking them up and pocketing them. That's not the etiquette or spirit of the trail. But, this time, as I came around the bend near the spot I started scanning the ground, the rocks, the branches. When I stopped on the rock where I do my motionless gratitude prayer, I felt my heart beat for several minutes and then turned left toward a tangle of dark dead branches that I'd looked at 5 or 6 times before with no luck. This time they were there, my sleek black Sunclouds, exactly where I originally thought they'd be. It was as sweet as seeing an old friend, and the fact that I'd just bought new ones that day (Sunclouds, too, but not as comfy on my nose), did not dampen it. A small miracle. Where had they been? Had I not been seeing?

I did my prayers and felt a bottom lip-protruding tenderness toward everything, a sense that things are "given back" or that they "never leave." I mean, I know these are sunglasses, but I really liked them, and they returned to me. It's hard to explain, but it was like forgiveness. It was quiet up there in the bonzai except for the wind. No animals stirred, the ravens were elsewhere. I was left with my heartbeat in my ears and the sun slipping under the purple cloud. I wanted to share this with someone, but it seemed ridiculous thing to tell. Then I thought of Harris, the guy living in the cave another 15 minutes up the trail. I had not seen him since that first time when he told me about the ravens. It had been weeks and I figured he'd moved on, maybe up the hills toward Angel Fire, maybe further east over the Pueblo. I wanted to talk to him. I had a feeling he'd put the sunglasses there for me to find.

The Sunclouds slid on like butter, giving me a synced feeling at bridge of my nose. It was getting dark, but I kept them on as I hit the trail down, and I found myself yelling up into the forest, "Thanks, Harris!"

When I got down, dusk was still hanging on and my legs were shaky. I went to the wooden bridge over the creek that leads to the South Boundary Trail and looked west along the water, listening, smelling the vapor, and noticing the tree shadows dancing on the young moss rising off the banks.

Seen/Heard today in Taos:

Thorny tumbleweeds blown up against my door while isolated snowflakes whipped by, and the mountains stood snowy and blue-black against a chaotic sky of purples, grays and blues.

4 horses trotting north on the sidewalk along Paseo del Pueblo Norte, a chestnut, a white stallion, and two coal colored mares, eyes wide, scared, determined, heavy-headed, passing a line of traffic near Cid's, along the Valverde meadow.

People in the cafe talking about the downfall of capitalism (doesn't register), problems with unregistered cars in accidents (don't really know), asking me about bankruptcy and credit card debt (I wipe it out for people who file bankruptcy), asking me about military issue ammunition at Walmart (no idea), asking about the breadth of a US Passport (no idea). Others talked of yoga, releasing the hamstrings and so releasing the hips and so releasing the shoulders and so releasing the heart (inspiring, want to do it, need to hang and stretch my trunk today).

A long line of people at the electric coop paying their electric bills near shutoff time at the end of the month.

An elder man from the Pueblo, dressed in turqoise slacks, with rich, dark skin, smiled at me in line at the bank, and we talked about the cold and his new blossoms that may die tonight. When he was done with the teller, he turned to me, smiled again and told me to "be well."

Caveman of the Bonzai Forest

I stopped in the cave on the north side of the Bonzai forest. He was there, near the entrance, squinting in the sunlight. Crows circled overhead, a murder and a half at least, maybe more. A brown knit ski hat, pulled down to his eyebrows, and bending backward in the breeze, comically, where there was extra material, space for a cone should he grow one. His face was vertical, a long nose, but also sturdy up around the muddy green eyes, muscular cheeks, all lines leading downward, a mouth covered by brindle beard, sandy, red undertones, gray creeping in and scraggling down over a sharp chin. His eyes were set wide, propped up by the points of his cheeks, and it was hard to focus on both at once. I could see him riding with King Arthur, or Ghengis Khan. He said his name was Harris, which didn't seem likely, but he was genial, and unfaltering, and, although slightly hunched in the shoulders, there was a strength to him, a sinew of having lived outside and climbed for thousands of days.

The first time I came upon Harris, I had dropped off the trail to pray to the four directions in a place where the Tinkantananda could see me. Her eyes were made by the outlines of two circular stands of spruce just below the final antler velvet hump of talis leading to the peak. He watched in silence, leaning against a tree. I didn't notice him until I had bowed the last time, to the north, and saw his feet in sandals, hardbitten toes with long nails, the little toe on each foot pried away from the rest at 45 degrees.

I rose and looked at him. He was wearing a black hoodie and shadow covered his face.

"I like your ceremony," he said.

"Thanks. What are you doing here?"

"I'm spending some time up here. There's a cave over there. I think bears lived in it a long time ago. It has some good ghost energy."

He pointed down the slope and to the north. I was annoyed, maybe a little spooked. It wasn't that he was menacing, or even out of place, it was more that I liked to be alone in the bonzai forest, with my thoughts, the crows, the rabbits and the groaning trees. And he spoke slowly with a smile that you'd have to call wizened. But Taos has a lot of people like this. They find their way here through the cracks and pipe through the streets and up into the hills, sometimes out in the sage on the desert. At times they speak brilliantly, other times in tongues, but there is a rosy-cheeked rogue quality to most of them. Things are bad, but they could be worse, and here they generally leave you alone to skip along the creeks, and hide out in the brambles. If you want to die out here, you can.

"How long have you been up here?"

"Can't say, but probably a month."

"I've been up here 20 times in the past month and haven't seen you."

"I know. I've seen you a few times. Really like this ceremony you do, especially the part when you circle your hands for abundance."

"You've watched me do this?"

"A couple of times. When you go to that rock at the top of that ridge," he said, pointing up to where I often do my ceremony. It's a place where a lot of people stop.

"That's messed up, man."

"Nah, I don't pay much attention, and nobody sees me. Your the first person I've talked to since I've been here. It's no different than those ravens up there. They're watching you, too. You don't have a problem with them, do you?

"No, but they're not checking me out."

"I don't know about that. I'm not checking you out, just observing nature."

I wanted to get going. Dusk was dropping down and I really didn't want to talk.

"Well, good chatting with you, man, I gotta get going."

"Harris."

"What?"

"My name is Harris."

"Got it. Good to meet you, Harris. Hope it works out for you up here."

"Did you see those two ravens the other day, the one with the wing missing a swath of feathers, and the other large one with the loud caw?"

I had and they'd made an impression on me. The bird with the proverbial broken wing, but it was still flying ,and it looked like the other one was playing with it, helping it.

"Yea, I saw them. I was amazed the hurt one could fly with that chunk of feathers missing."

"I saw you that day up on the rocks rotating your head to watch the birds."

"Dude, that's strange, you watching me like that."

"I was watching the birds, too, and you happened to be up there. The things is, I've been watching those two ravens since I saw the hurt one drop on the rocks above the cave. It's a young one, and the big one is its brother. I thought it would die, but when it couldn't fly several birds came by each day and brought it food, and one day the big one picked it up and brought it somewhere else. But then they came back a few days later and I watched as the big one put the hurt one on its back, spread its wings and like a plane towing a hang glider, it took it up high into the thermals and let it drift in the wind until it started faltering and then it would swoop under and catch it. It was amazing. But the most amazing part of it was the laughter. These guys were having fun. Ravens are magic and they heal with laughter. I know there are all these dark, horror stories with ravens, but really, they're goofballs, and they like to play all day. And I could tell you noticed the same thing."

"You could?"

"Yea, and I wanted to talk to you about it."

"Alright, man, I really gotta go."

"Good to meet you, ah...?"

"Alex."

"Alex."

We nodded and I started back up to the trail. I wasn't sure what had happened or if Harris was really living in the cave. Part of me hoped not because I wanted to be alone up there, but part of me hoped I'd see him again. There was something in his eyes. And the weirdest part was that I'd watched those ravens for a while and the thought had come to me, "two ravens healing each other with laughter." I wanted to write that down, but I didn't have my pad and I didn't want to put it in my phone, so I forgot. This time I wouldn't forget.

Dancing on the Point of a Needle

It is Sunday and I'm in a new office in town. Nobody is here. There is a kitchen, a fridge, 4 bathrooms, freshly laid wood floors, supplies neatly stacked in cabinets, a copier/printer/fax/scanner that spits out 40 pages a minute. I just put up my giant pad of post-its so I can suss through where I'm at, my goals, my leavings, my bubbles, my awareness, small things floating on the ocean. Also, I hung a little painting by Michael Wojczuk, who was just in town with his wife, Niko, from Boulder. It is called "The Rabbi's Garden" and was painted in Girona, Catalunya, Spain (north of Barcelona). The walls are a little softer than they were when I arrived. I have rice pasta with pesto in the fridge, and a new container of Antonio's hot salsa for nosh. My right leg is pumping in its customary way, up on the toes, 120 beats a minute, maybe more. My forearms sit comfortably on my new desk, dark grained wood, smooth finish. I'm breathing well, in a way that makes me want to stretch my trunk, hang on a beam and let the ribcage expand. It's been a strange 9 days, some splurges after a six month cleanse, a reintroduction of comfort foods, a reorientation to disorientation, a celebration of spring, my exuberance, my excesses, my capacity to dance on the point of a needle in unbridled joy, not feeling the prick, face oblivious to feet, destruction in every direction, and yet the warm puppy tongue of life force licking me with devotion. I saw it all in 9 days, and I know what to choose, how to play, the changing rhythms, the song variations, the bodily systems that pump, feed, clean, sense, warn, throb, hurt, prickle, and power down with a sip of mate laced with Ume and honey, so that I again sense the earth under my feet. There is work on the table, more coming in, trips, writing to pour through, pour out, like the black mud after a spring snow. There was a red-cheeked joy on Thursday night, at 2am, in a blizzard of a crazed snow, directionless, spinning, spumes of it rising and darting off, Sahara sands of blown texture, a bicycle buried up to the seat, a car lost in the sea of it, and me with my green herringbone sportjacket on, an old yardstick in my hand, no hat, no gloves, searching for spots where I could accurately measure the snowfall and report my rapture to the National Weather Service office in Albuquerque. And I reported 13.5" at 2:12am. It was the best I could do. The drifts around my house were over the yardstick, and the sage was like an island chain of sandbars and trenches, at times thigh deep, at others swept off leaving starfish crystals on coffee clay. I was in and out, but I couldn't get enough. I watched the snow invade the light over the door, a swarm of it in sufi revue, and I had to feel it. So, I'd mount the wall and roll into the powder in the sage, crawl around on hands and knees so that the flakes filled my nostrils. Ahhhhhh, I said, many times repeated, ahhhhhhhhhhh, the kind of ahhhhhh that comes from the center below the bellybutton above the balls, and leaves you breathless, but not in need. And I came back in, finally, and wrote. I was still buzzed from the whiskey and my fingers were wet and numbed on the keys, but I road a flexible flyer of delight that I wish upon every sentient being. My love was full upon me, overflowing, out to you and it, this and that, a soft focus for it inclusive of everybody, and I wrote that it is "the moment I live for." And I wrote, "I love you." And yet I erased that the next day, embarrassed, hung over, my possibilities downsized, my love pocketed, my fears reawakened, my headmaster summoned. But I come to you today pockmarked and preached to, stretched out and bled, hieroglyphics etched on my forehead, an itch in my toes to hike up high, and I feel a pinch of affection for the bars I don't need, Chancy and Gil, and Blake, Joanne and Donna, people I don't see anymore, same old same old, but in that there's some light shining through; underneath the habits is the desire for connection, resurrection, reflection, endlessness, espirit de corps, fathomless, a return home fresh and bountiful (but something you need to put back in the fridge after you shake well and sip plenty), Rip Van Winkle-eyed, win-the-lottery grins, and shy smiled yuks with even the darkest hipsters in the room. It can't last, and it eats everything else in its wake, unsustainable, beat-your-brain-able, your Zen turned neon beer sign, your boat dry-docked until the next tide, your last tickets punched. Nope, can't do it, but you can't blame a man for seeking the headless, heedless joy of dancing on the point of a needle.

Before Work

The desert is still and cold this dawn. A quarter moon, tattered at the southern edge, drifts alone in a soft blue sky. All the stars have retired into the light and there are no clouds to anchor with. Frost on my car windshield and my bicycle seat, but it will soon melt off; it is not the cold of deep winter, of early January, but a simple morning cold, settled down into the canyons, and walking slowly among the sage roots and grass stalks now fully free of snow. Winter still resides up high, to the north and east in the peaks, the blue gray snowfields above treeline spilling in tongues through the spruce forests. There is more up there than before, it snowed several feet in the past two weeks, and you can see it in the thickness of the white, a settled depth, something to last until late spring, something to give to the river and the streams. It snowed down here, too, but it did not last, the ground is warming, the days are longer, the sun higher, nowhere for frozen things to hide in the desert day.

I am busy with work, busier than my swirling energy likes; "I" burn off myself like fog, in wisps, off and out, into the air, not back in where I am left empty, making slack faces, not knowing, not sure, lost in an unattended space.

Last night I dreamed three dreams and my sinuses went dry, filling up behind my eyes to moisten the walls. My mom flew me over the coast in an open contraption, an ulta-light, over east shore road, toward bayville, a late season snow on the beach and the lawns of the coastal houses. My brother was down there somewhere, and I knew there was more snow on this coast than in the desert, and that bothered me, but my mom had to show me. She was instructive, maybe telling me that the teardrop shaped bay I grew up by is beautiful, as beautiful as anything else I've known. We flew over twice, one time during summer. I did not know the driveways and the people, the cul de sacs, and the seaweed colored water. Or maybe I did, but have forgotten.

I walked to high school along the streets of a city. My pace was fast and I had a bundle of hot dogs in my hand. I did not know where to put the hot dogs as I approached the school with its brick facade. It felt new, a place where I might run into somebody unexpected. I felt disheveled, too much stuff, the hot dogs cold and thick in my hands. In one version, I remembered I had a backpack and stuffed the meat in there. In another version, I walked the hallways with long, buffalo hot dogs in my right hand, protruding out like fat, bendy pencils.

In the last, I was walking with friends, a woman with a small child. We kept approaching a plaza, like the one in Santa Fe, springtime, buds on trees, pigeons warbling and strutting. I felt close to an understanding, not feeling bad, but still a tightness in my solar plexus, something not quite landed, not quite sure of itself, something still tied in a knot. She seemed to know and asked me how I was doing. I told her I was doing well, doing well, and I meant it, but the tightness remained and the moon was in my window. The clock said 4:47, but I was still in the dream. My friend, who knows me, said, "You look tired." And I knew this, knew the tightness had been interrupting my sleep. I nodded hoping we'd approach the plaza again and I would be less tired.

On Saturday, I hiked Devisadero and went to my brother tree on the way down. A raven played with me, riding the wind just above the canopy, crowing when it got out over the cliff. At the tree I put my forehead against the sharp, thin branch that juts out and put my hands around the bough. It was calm, no wind. And yet this tree swayed at its core and I felt its heartbeat, vibrations into my hands. I looked up to confirm that there was no wind. There wasn't. This tree moved for me. It waved its trunk and I could feel its life.

Everybody Haiku Tonight

Still raven on sage
black on green waiting for snow
alone, muscled, wings ready

Canyon wall at dusk
echoing in my belly
boulders holding sound

An early darkness
turns the house to memory
of people not there

Of Tugboats and Crybabies

Holy shit. Holeeeeee shit! I didn't think I had it in me, man. I didn't. But I had to get to the river. Down and up the dirt hills, snow squalls circling the desert, ringing the peaks. A lone light across the gorge, up on the Hondo Mesa like a tugboat calling me, an icebreaker in the caliche. Wind taking off from the west, down the cerros, up the broken hills. A sky of india ink spilled to the northwest, dark blue, then darker still, verging on purple, wanting to drip. I got there, not so bad for the front side of the ride. Alone in the ruts until the edge where an old red truck with a rust stained camper top sat in the depression at the outlet of the Manby trail to the springs. I didn't go there. I didn't look in the window. The bike dropped itself on the lava rocks and I clambered down a few to stare at the river. The water was a camouflage green, the jade overrun by mud, no sun to pick up a sheen. Wind rubberized my ears and I floated off myself with some vertigo, out over the junipers for a time. When I came back I looked to the east and the moon was full riding above the dark clouds. I was confused because last I saw la luna, she was little more than a slushy half. Where was I? On the gorge rim I thought of flying across to the Hondo side and searching for that tugboat, but my knees wobbled and I didn't have a superlight in my backpack. It was darkening and time to get going. I knew those first few hills going back are harder than those two long hills coming in. Steep and windy. I had some energy elixir in the cambelbak and that helped with the piston action on the first rise, but, man, that second one starting kicking my ass before I pushed a quarter way up. And this is the thing. I went from nose breathing to mouth sucking, chest heaving, but the legs were filling up with can-do muscle twitching. Halfway up that long and gnarly second rise I felt the crybaby singing to me. Head bowed, ass off the seat, biceps pulling, hands gripping, wrists twisting, tongue going side-to-side, I swallowed heaps of that solar-plexus drain swirl of lament, the no-no-no-no got....to....fucking....stop...legs not gonna do it...falling, falling, falling, fainting...want to give in, give up, let myself down, drop soft and pliable into the defeat of it...And yet I'm still moving, pumping, swaying shoulders, gaining the second half of that hill, seeing the top, and then...the...tipping...point, and I know I've passed the max torque requirement, it's getting easier, I'm going to top it and get to drift in the flats until those last long curved swales that are easier, much easier than these two fucking roller coasters. I'm sweating under my layers now, and at the same time the westerly blow is cutting through me and snow pellets slap my right cheek. It's almost full dark and the clouds have swallowed the moon. A car a few rises ahead, hovering in the near dark vastness, shows its break lights, two fresh lit cigarettes burning red in the snow. I'm on the decel, knowing that I've slayed the hills and it's all easy into dock from here; and also knowing and still tasting the crybaby who wants to give up, his wail, his willingness to submit, to be dropped off, to crumble knock-kneed to the ground and be picked over by strays because he deserves that fate. But the crybaby didn't have it so easy tonight because there is more, much more inside, and I know it, and I cannot reconcile the crumble, not now. And I've been through it, and I know that once past those hills it's easy, and that energy used on those rises is recycled, sloshing in the tank for a long journey, longer than I ever expected.

March Voices

Like a lion March has swept in with winds so loud you become part of the roar if you stay out long enough. But with that wind has, thankfully, come some moisture, pebbles of snow and hail, lashes of rain against the pocked pumice walls. We're in a constant gale, windows rattling, sometimes curving in parabolas, the tips of the sage plants shuddering, closing their eyes against it. And that sage has, in the span of days, gone from olive and sepia to dusty blue-green and has kicked into the world the swirling aroma of late season grapes and a tenacious cleansing spearmint. I am drawn out from this desk into the unraveling cold, the serape-slapping southerly rip, into the crumbly, scarred yellow clay, where the whistle blows through my chest, and presses my temples. I am barefoot on the gray gravel, claw-toeing my way to the sirens, again to lay low among these plants that rise only a few feet off the pliable earth; snuggle in with the zephyrs diving, rising, puncturing, dancing back, hovering, fainting, and then pouring in on the back of a gray whale. It is snowing in the mountains, open bowled Wheeler Peak - which cannot be its real name, Tankwantanda to me - baptized at the highest reaches in a winter white thunderhead, spilling its riches onto the back ridges, opening a mouth toward the sacred mountain, Pueblo Peak, Tinkantookoto, to coat the still ice covered Blue Lake. Tall aspens shiver and sway in the narrow, winding canyon trail up toward the lake, rising over the folds of the mountain that show from below in shadowy triangles. An inner sanctum tucked deep in the kingdom of this mountain, a source, a birthing canal, a place where the ancients of this land can tell you where you are. I cannot go, friends tell me, although they sometimes tease, but in the not going, I am there. The bark of those aspens is familiar, the funneled wetness seeping off the high ground has reached me from El Salto, riding an easterly in the summer, and, today, in a tempest of this world-reflecting teacup, a battle of seasons at work in the sky just over me in the sage. I lay down on my back and close my eyes facing west and listen. It is late afternoon, March 7, 2009, a whole world of talking going on beyond my border, but here all I can hear is the wind and my toes are being tickled, they are not cold, and my right hand feels the sting of a cactus hidden in the clumped straw, and my ass feels nothing but easy ground giving up some moisture, but not much. There are people in the wind, voices and information, headlines and backstories, histories. Dust to dust is what I think, people in black huddled around a grave. Here it is, I'm sitting in that dust that has turned to clay and I also see little animal bones and ash, pollen drifts along the dark roots. It is late afternoon on March 7 and nobody is here, no cars, no dogs barking, no rabbits sniffing, just the blue rises and volcanic chimneys, clouds masking the sun, and the tilt of the earth toward the south.

Patience

I didn't have any today. It was a ball rolling across my floors, rock on cement, moving north, wobbling, picking up speed, heading for the wood stove. Nostrils flared. 75 push-ups. Eyes sucked into the monitor, phones poised to ring, already ringing along my pelvis, permanently in those bones, even at the top of a mountain those bones ring, and they talk to my ears, and I reach for a phone that has been left in the car. But I know somebody is calling. I know somebody wants me. I know the other side of town is blinking with red lights and someone in a truck, stuck, window down, smoking, has a phone on her ear and is waiting for me. I'm up there looking for the fiddler, trudging, lurching, gulping air, looking for the dance step, the shuffle and spin; but not yet, it's not there, forward I go leaning into the mountain, heading into a need, a filling mouth, a call to arms, a siren for the wealth left behind and the fires ahead, a stumble on the rocks. And she is not there, or maybe she's up on top, looking down at my galumphing figure moving side-to-side in the trees, splashing mud puddles, and maybe she thinks I'm wounded and need healing, but that's not something she does. She keeps moving and I follow, but I know that following will not get me there. And the phone keeps ringing.

A Live Quiver in Solitude

I'm in buzzes and swirls, heartbeats in my calves, congas in my ears. Stepping off the bicycle under a Uzilevsky sky of candied lines leaning red, rose, jolly rancher watermelon, and finishing west with a cotton-dipped Close Encounters mars-tinged saffron. Bending layers of velvety, rolling clouds spread east to west and lowering over the puckered camel hump of Two Peaks. Toward the gorge from which I came, there is a an eye-shaped sky hole of marine blue looking at my house. La luna, a thickening crescent with the hint of a nose sits high among shredded night clouds, leaving Venus well below in the building cloud wash. And I stand outside, listening to nothing, no sound, the houses settled, no cars, no planes, no wind, the gears not turning, the underneath at rest, the sky drifting, my feet pulling up a vibration, but not from the ground, from themselves, the soles summoning me, standing still, arms loose, a human liveliness in my skin, sore muscles figure-eighting from the exertion of the ride. I am alive in the midst of the immense quiet, energy running out through my fingertips, my teeth in pin-prick ripples, through my eyes that drop with the light toward the sage sitting without fanfare in a calm sea all around me. The ride is over, that last juniper tree on the west rim, a perfect spade, in silhouette, sits behind my eyes and reminds me of a similar tree on a hill in Boulder that always brought me back to early childhood, some knowing of loneliness, a wanting of it, to be a point on a horizon, a live quiver in solitude, something to sit under and gaze out from, nothing more. At the rim, the air rapidly cooling, I hopped among the lichens covered lava rocks until I found a wide one on the precipice, sitting above the still snow pocketed slope, above an over sized pinon where eagles sometimes perch. I looked down on the river, flowing thick in milky jade, early snowmelt swelling it up onto the matted west bank. Its roar from 700 feet below vibrating my shins and stilling my ears. I could sleep standing on that rock, on the edge of a long drop, hoping for mist to reach me. On the way to this point, riding the rutted road up and down hills, looking into the draws for snow patches, and lost horses, hidden tree thickets and bobcats, I waited for words to come, ideas, something from the parts of the New York Times I'd read earlier, from the NPR story on Hasidic rabbis molesting young students, from the week at Mabel's sitting in silence, listening to people lives, but nothing came, nothing but a sense of things bigger than myself, things that encompass all of the streams, things that leave the world quiet, the gears seized, the lone tree on the rim to suck in the last light.

I'm Not Ready

This season is throwing me. I'm not ready for this warmth. I'm not ready to lose my winter muse, she, with La Luna, playing in the frozen strawberry daiquiri sky and dancing across the creamy snow out my windows. Those two, they called me to my home floating like a houseboat near the edge of the Rio Grande Gorge. I'm not ready for the social explosion of spring when my butt does not want to stay in a chair. I'm not ready for the gears to roll the soil and pop the buds on the tips of the branches. No. I'm still romancing the hulking, sharp-branched cottonwoods, gnarled fingers jiggling an accusation, the boughs yawning against the wind with sideways snow glued into their creases. I'm not ready to push the clocks ahead. For now, I come home after a back country ramble and the light drops; blueberries and pixilated cranberries and, sometimes, electric salmon snakes waver over the dark covered nipples and humps, pursed lips and haughty buffalo flanks of the caldera. I'm not ready to give up the mourning for the people I know who have not slept all winter. The vigil, in my bedroom, on the satin blue zafu, looking southeast, the light already poured into the building navy of night. Looking at the foothills and the snow-streaked rounds above treeline leading to the pinnacle of a circus tent that is Truchas Peak. Sometimes the stars shine like a Bunsen burner blue gleaming razor blade and allow me to see shadows against the snow, silver clouds from the west lit from behind by the moon. And you can feel somewhere in the bowels and down through the legs the echoes of an exodus that happened a long time ago, and gets played out through shadows on snow over and over throughout the winter; the dying of something large, the leaving behind of the story, the bending of time. I'm not ready for that story to end. I'm not ready for the caress of solitude to be driven from me by my tensing muscles, the thrust coming up from my feet and feeding my thighs. But it's coming, the end of this and the beginning of that. It is too early. I see as I hike Devisidero in the mid afternoon, the warm wind blow-drying the mud and decimating the snow. The Taos lowlands are back to burlap, that patchwork I wrote about in November, those last days I followed my green velvet fiddler up the trail. I heard her again in late January when the roads first turned to mud after a wet pacific storm ate away the bottom of the snowpack. Back then, we were all in our houses playing fiddles, guitars, mandolins, banjos, listening to the snow drip through our roofs into pots and tin cups. It was then that the rabbit man told me she was dancing in the mud, playing, barefoot, heading for the canyon. I knew this and felt her pull me, she was wearing green silk this time, and I was pressed to my window feeling the cold against my nose and lips. I heard all their prayers kneeling in front of fires, playing for her, playing for their own ears so they could know how mired they were. And the fiddler, my fiddler, skirted the kissy lips mountain they call Two Peaks and went off with the purple tendrils of cloud lurking over the desert, looking for something to cling to, anything. I'm not ready to give up the mire, the depth, the slog. It is too early to be sprightly, to be bright. That time is coming, and I will be with it, I will dance to that song. But still I want to mourn and I want to lay down in deep snow, die properly, peacefully, the wind kicking through the trees teasing me. I came home this winter, to die with my eyes open. I came to be buried in that snow and I am not ready to be revealed.

The End of the Ceremony

Rumors among the tribe, being seeded by Tayo's old friend, turned enemy, Emo, that Tayo is living in a cave in the hills (which he is, in harmony with his medicine woman, Ts'eh, and looking after the resilient cattle he and his uncle had purchased the year before and he had tracked down as part of his journey/ceremony), and thinks he is a Japanese soldier, has the army people, the tribe (even some of the elders), and the BIA government people, searching for him to put him back in the hospital (or kill him if they have to). Emo, along with some of his other old friends, Harley and Leroy, are getting close. Tayo is holed up at the mouth of a closed uranium mine.

"He had been so close to it, caught up in it for so long that it's simplicity struck him deep inside his chest: Trinity Site, where they exploded the first atomic bomb, was only three hundred miles to the southeast, at White Sands. And the top-secret laboratories where the bomb had been created were deep in the Jemez Mountains, on land the Government took from Cochiti Pueblo: Los Alamos, only a hundred miles northeast of him now, still surrounded by high electric fences and the ponderosa pine and tawny sandrock of the Jemez mountain canyon where the shrine to the twin mountain lions had always been. There was no end to it; it knew no boundaries; and he had arrived at the point of convergence where the fate of all living things, and even the earth, had been laid. From the jungles of his dreaming he recognized why the Japanese voices had merged with Laguna voices, with Josiah's voice and Rocky's voice; the lines of cultures and worlds were drawn in flat dark lines on fine light sand, converging in the middle of witchery's final ceremonial sand painting. From that time on, human beings were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers planned for all of them, for all living things; united by a circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles away, victims who had never known these mesas, who had never seen the delicate colors of the rocks which boiled up their slaughter.

He walked to the mine shaft slowly, and the feeling became overwhelming; the pattern of the ceremony was completed there. He knelt and found an ore rock. The gray stone was streaked with powdery yellow uranium, bright and alive as pollen; veins of sooty black formed lines wit the yellow making mountain ranges and rivers across the stone. But they had taken these beautiful rocks from deep within earth and they had laid them in a monstrous design, realizing destruction on a scale only they could have dreamed.

He cried the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together - the old stories, the war stories, their stories - to become a story that was still being told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time.

He turned. The moon was rising above the last mesa crossed from the east. A transition was about to be completed: the sun was crossing the zenith to a winter place in the sky, a place where prayers of long winter nights would call out the long summer days of new growth. Tonight the old priests would be praying for the force to continue the relentless motion of the stars. But there were others who would be working this night, casting loose countermotions to suck in a great spiral, swallowing the universe endlessly into the black mouth, their diagrams in black ash on cave walls outlining the end in motionless dead stars. But he saw the constellation in the north sky, and the fourth star was directly above him; the pattern of the ceremony was in the stars, and the constellation formed a map of the mountains in the directions he had gone for the ceremony. For each star there was a night and a place; this was the last night and the last place, when the darkness of night and the light of day were balanced. His protection was there in the sky, in the position of the sun, in the pattern of the stars. He had only to complete this night, to keep the story out of the reach of the destroyers for a few more hours, and their witchery would turn, upon itself, upon them.

Arrowboy got up after she left.
He followed her into the hills
up where the caves were.
The others were waiting.
They held the hoop
and danced around the fire
four times.

The witchman stepped through the hoop
he called out that he would be a wolf.
His head and upper body became hairy like a wolf
But his lower body was still human.
"Something is wrong," he said.
"Ck'o'yo magic won't work
if someone is watching us."

Richard Hugo on Work and Luck

From "The Triggering Town" on writing by Richard Hugo (p. 17):

"Once a spectator said, after Jack Nicklaus had chipped a shot in from a sand trap, "That's pretty lucky." Nicklaus is supposed to have replied, "Right. But I notice the more I practice, the luckier I get." If you write often, perhaps every day, you will stay in shape and will be better able to receive those good poems, which are finally a matter of luck, and get them down. Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don't work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work."

Darn it! Genius or no, it takes work.