Nature

Timestamp

I shake a bucket of grain and whistle through my lips
under the summer sky
and the horses thunder in from the south pasture.

I lose favor with a teacher
because I beat everyone’s score
including hers.

I grow up,
but really I don’t.

She tells me I’m weak.

My folks never hold hands.

My sister is popular,
and skillful, and still mostly humble.
My sister is successful.

I live in the shadows.
I love from the shadows.

My truck breaks down.

I am selfish.
I give up everything.

You take me in a night of rain and darkness
and the universe opens to our cries
and we enter the kingdom of heaven.

I am in hell.
I drink the flames.

I work overtime.
I work two jobs.
Life is a third.

I apologize to my grandmother as she’s dying
because she won’t live to see me get married,
I’m not even with anyone,
and she shushes me and says it’s ok,
yes she will.

Before he passes,
my grandfather agrees there is nothing after death.

Her eyes pass over me.

I lie in bed and listen to the storm.

I tattoo my body with text.
I tattoo my heart with your memory.

I drive down a dirt road.
I fish in the dark.
I sharpen my knife.
I am strong.
I am unbreakable.
I cry alone in the night.

There’s neon.
There’s drifting smoke.
There’s a hole where you should be.

I sell my soul.
I let my heart get ripped out and eaten.
I grow a new one.

He threatens me.
I don’t care.

I listen to windchimes.
I load 1,000 bales of hay.
I stare into the arm of the Milky Way.
I want you but I don’t know who you are yet.

She doesn’t understand.
They don’t understand.
I don’t understand.

You tell me you love me.
You mean it.

I drop out.
I write.
I tread upon paths of stars and faint imaginings.
I live.
I die.
I breathe.

My mother teaches us.
My father teaches us.
They still never hold hands.

You see my soul, undressed.
You tell me of its shape.

I dream of mountains and oceans and deserts.

I wander the museum at 9 years of age
and wonder why everyone else isn’t here.

You’re gone.

Light moves through the trees.

We try to tell each other of the light
we see in the other
and we don’t believe a goddamn word of it.

I watch people destroy the goodness we’re all born with.

You show me your demons.

I punish him because he deserves it.
Then I realize no one deserves it.

I watch children and dogs give freely
from hearts bigger than we’d ever admit.

My nostrils are filled with red dust
and I make money at brandings.

I sign a petition for equality.
I join no party.
I write for the paper and document campus protests.

On Saturday night
I break bottles against old brick and howl at the moon.
I am saved.
I am damned.

I abdicate my throne
and they don’t understand.
I’m late
because leaves and grass fill me
where shiny parades of nothing cannot.

My family wonders what I am.
I wonder what I am.

I wonder.
You wonder.

I’m not confident.
I don’t join the Master’s program.
I’m too confident.
My horse stumbles on deadfall and rolls backwards over me.

I sit in the pickup bed with my dog
and we watch the sun set.

I take you in a night of fire and thunder
and we burn and die and are reborn.

I write a research paper on biological science.
My life is a country song.

I am not practical.
I don’t want to be practical.
I should be practical.

I burst into flames.
I immolate the darkness.
I fan my wings and fly out of reach.

I am invective incarnate.

My fist makes a hole in the wall.

I bury my dog.
I bury my horse.
I bury my flame.
I bury my heart.

I run.
I hide.
I give my old saddle away.

I love.
I dream.
I shouldn’t dream.
But I do.

I love the way you dream.

I work too hard.
I don’t work enough.
I move too fast.
I don’t move fast enough.
I help too much.
I don’t help at all.
I love too hard.
I don’t love the right way.
I care too much.
I don’t care about the right things.

I don’t understand;
but I hope, I think
maybe,
you do.

I shake a bucket of grain and whistle through my lips
under the summer sky
and the horses thunder in from the south pasture.

Darkhowl

My dear,
a dog, you say?

Yes,
and that’s how you might come off,
if you want to.
I do the same, you know.

Nothing wrong with that.
They teach us how to be better humans.

All life is an unfolding, though-
from the penitent,
the servient,
the agreeable,
to the undormant,
the lost,
the restless prowl;
and perhaps,
back again
in that long hunt for the pack,
for a kill of your own.
And even then, back again.

I got quite good
at holding in my howl too, you know.
They want nothing more
than a helpful bark.

Listen.

Who can see what lies hidden
in the secret fires of your heart?
Who can see your eyeglow
at the scent of blood?
Who can hear the sinking sun-chorus
fade into nightsong,
or feel the rain cling to their coat
as they slip through the deep-wood?

The very same lies in wait,
inside the faithful one
curled at your feet.
This you’ve seen.

They do teach us, don’t they?

It’s the same for anyone like us, I suppose;
it’s all in the way your soul walks the earth,
in the tracks you leave,
in the scent you follow-

je suis cage,
je suis libre,
je suis chien du maison,
je suis loup du bois.

Inviolate

You could hear it in the air.
You could taste it in the water.
You could smell it in the earth.
You could feel it in the sunlight.

The western wind brought you your dreams
as you caught the scent of legend,
your soul filling with the breath of horizons,
baptized in the light of 100,000,000 stars.

But ignorant of the price,
how could you not fly into the riving storm?

For the world knows nothing
of the western wind.

This is how we become.

And so we learn to pay the world
with our dreamwings,
with our soulships,
with our heartfire.

But what in return?
What precious return for such a precious sacrifice?

A frail imitation of Pandora’s Box,
overfull with terrors and darkness;
and once opened,
nothing.

Nothing.

The eye’s spark
becomes a feast for the void.

Our heads angle
downward.

And then on, and on.
Anon.

And in the small moments,
those fleeting scraps of time,
when the light angles just the right way,
a little breath of the air brushes past,
carrying… something.

You can almost remember.
It is a whisper, and then gone.

You can almost remember,
because you were written
in a convergence of the violent death of suns
and the birth of worlds ascending.

How peaceful, the mountains in their defiance.
How inviolate, the mote of your flame.
How simple, that wings must grow feathers anew.

Behold.
The wind rises.

Hammer, Nails, Earth, Light

We were, weren’t we?
The opening power chord of the concert,
the thing that deafens the crowd as they cheer for it.

Perhaps, over time
(even in the beat and the offbeat, I feel this),
it’s more like a jazz quartet,
finding all the right grace-notes.

I mean, really- think about it. Just think of it!
All the kitchens in the world no two ever danced in.
What a waste.

But then, I too have shunned life’s gifts,
running headfirst into the wind,
my back to the sun, my face to the shadows.

How they tell us to be. And how we become.

The beat of the heart, of the drum? No. Not for you.

NOT FOR YOU

But, wait, wait… I soared wildly into the night once,
and there among the confusions and hellfires-
there, a lighthouse in this sea of blackness.

How could I not change my tack?
What else would call so brightly?
There is, in fact, an answer.
My own compass, imparted at birth,
long forgotten,
was pressed into my hand.

“I lost my way once, as well,” she said.

These things new and forgotten
were merely of the harmonic,
of the consonant, of life and death;
and of our wings,
which always grow back given the right medicine.

If you’re reading this, whoever you are,
I hope at least once you know
the salvation hidden in the least-expected soul.

You think you know love-
until you actually know love.

We rise out of the ground- all of us
-for a moment (a moment!),
looking up wildly into the stars,
daring the infinite,
before we descend together back down into the earth.

So speak it then, all you-
speak my apostasy into the airwaves.

Even more than this,
more than the perfect publicity,
more than the grand overtures,
more even than these comforts,

I would ask of nothing but her grace.

For which is better?

The glass of whiskey,
smashed on the floor in the back of the bar,
the fire in the eyes,
the unsaid unsaid UNSAID,
the staring each other down in the midst of the storm?
The endless slow-death?
(all this does lay foundations, it’s true)

Or… the hand, laid upon the other’s head,
in those moments when all hope seems lost?
(do you see?)

The fire has purged us both, then;
and whoever you are-
if you’re reading this,
remember what I said on the other side:

I could curse the darkness we both walked through;
but far better in this, I think,
whatever the road,
is to build a house made of her light.

In the Halls of Light and Thunder

There is an aurora tonight,
and my pen is heavy.

Friends drove out beyond the light pollution
to witness this miracle-
out to where I came from,
to where my heart
lies beating in the wilderness
where it was forged.

I did not go,
and I have no answers for their questions.
This pen feels like a neutron star.
My soul has flown south for awhile.
That heart, out in the mountains, seems faint-
so faint from here. I strain to hear it.

I wander to the edge
of these suburbs at midnight.
I have no answers for their questions.
The distant voice of the highway
hums in the dark.

I cannot see the aurora, but what did I expect?

A thunderstorm is gathering, though-
quickly, insistently, intently
to the west;
cutting between the solar wind
and the city lights.

It is silent save for crickets
and I force this pen to move,
because I have to.
I have to.

A scent of summer flowers and water cleansing
pulses
nearer.
I force this pen to move
and I have no answers for their questions.

I cannot see the stars,
but they are where they are.
I cannot see the aurora,
but it dances on the face of the earth.

Rumbling echoes fading in the dark.
Electric arclight stabs and spits and forks
staccato into the cloudwall rising.

I strain my ears to listen.
I breathe.
I force my pen to move.

Heavy it may be;
but how else-
how else to hear your heart beat,
to hear you breathe,
somewhere out there,
under a storm of your own
(and, perhaps, a solar wind)?

How else
to hear my own heart,
softly,
singing in the mountains?

A stray dog stops for a moment,
at the edge of these suburbs,
in the rumble-echo,
in the rising summer wind;
we regard each the other in silence.

Finding no questions to ask me,
he resumes his journey without looking back.