I have bought
so many books
across the span of the years,
and so sold,
and so gifted,
and acquired yet more,
that from time to time
I catch myself
staring at one spine or another,
as you would your lover’s profile
wondering:
Have I seen you before?
Did I know you
when the pine on the rock outside,
bathed in mist and light,
was still young?
Or…
Even before the rock was old—
perhaps that’s when we first met.
Sometimes, there’s a place where the grass and the sage, pine and cottonwood, rocks and scrub and a cactus or two — maybe piñon and mesquite and yucca and so forth — they all get together and make up a kind of existence that’s mildly intoxicating.
Places like this are important if you’re extra-sober to begin with.
Say if, for example, you happen to be born that way.
Little breezes ruffle and shift the scents around.
Sometimes the wind really kicks up and does its best to rearrange your day.
Mostly, these areas aren’t burdened with an overabundance of trees or houses.
You can see the horizon. You can breathe in deep and feel your mind flatten out.
Memory and time stop fighting each other. Your worst enemy might be a fence or two.
I don’t generally have anything against concentrations of trees or houses — or people, for that matter — but I need to be out in the wide angle, out in the open kind of wild.
You can see the storms coming in of an evening.
Hear the wind searching. Feel the thunder unroll, look at the lightning crack.
You can see the sun breaking in yellow through the mist or dying down red in the clouds, and you can watch it all coming in and get yourself together.
You can give yourself to it. It’s like getting ready for church or mass.
Like a wedding or a funeral.
Folks tend to be fearful of a skeleton.
Something about bone laid out bare to the weather, I’d wager.
Out there, you get reminded you’ve got one inside you. You were born with it.
Things in the land and things within us consummate and live and die all the time.
Out there you can feel it, know it for what it is — a sort of honesty uncontrived.
You can see it all coming, and see it all going.
You know how headlights,
when you’re near a desert highway,
pan across material like a searchlight,
casting incoherent shadows
past whatever they happen to catch –
sage, cactus green and praying to the rain,
hitchhiker’s drugstore cowpuncher boots,
corrugated lean-to slumped up against the wire?
Well that isn’t happening just yet.
Coyote isn’t on the wander right now.
The sun is still walking, heading west,
knowing exactly where to go.
Daylight melts over dust and hardpan,
yellow, umber, ochre, neon hot pink.
Memory melts like daylight.
Those clouds, see. That’s what I mean.
Cirro… cumulo… cirronimbulus?
It rises, dark and thick in the gloaming.
It drinks the melted daylight.
A rush of cool air. Scattering of sand.
Silent stab of arced lightning.
One million volts in a terawatt cycle.
Thunderstorms drink memory like daylight.
They amplify.
They make ready for the night.
You should come tell me what you think.
Silence. Rumbling over the distance of the earth.
Silence.
Cumulonimbus. That’s it.
You’d have gotten that quicker.
Silence.
Scent of the dry before the wet.
Burning gold at the end of the sunwalk
underneath the dark tower.
There. Coyote’s on the wander. Hungry.
The semi-truck moves past
and headlights cast no shadows beyond a ghost.
Thirst.
Thunder.
Hunger.
Arclight.
Silence.
when driving with old music under slated smoke
against the brushstroked horizon
fading along mountains to the west
as the sun-heat of the high desert
reflecting off the scent of sagebrush
gives way to a chill mist
collecting on burnished sandstone and granite
with small patches of veridian moss and lichen
in the wild geometry of a late afternoon
as amber light stretches out into a blanket
under which nothing can harm us
(not even the future
not even the past
[this is a good place to stop
and get out the cameras] ),
our gaze sweeps
the scattered domains of the earth,
of the coyote and the elk
and a railroad track not used in years;
soon,
we will start thinking of good food
and something cool to drink.
20 years into this century
and the West burns,
the land inflamed, unceasing.
It burns in the forests
and the fields,
it burns in the streets,
with fires small and great
all stretching out for the same air,
all feasting upon the same oxygen.
But empires thus
are built of bone
and of sweat,
and within the elements
of things closest to our hearts,
from the private
to the pestilent,
we wait
and we watch
with dilated eyes
the assault and decay.
To breathe! Only to breathe…
The body has a finite amount of blood.
The mind can only take so much.
They will not stop, you see.
They will never
stop.
This is the desolation.
Oh rise now the midnight daughter,
oh rise now the twilight son;
keep your blades sharp,
your torches dry,
your eyes up.
Under the roaming haze
under a descending sun;
late now, the domain of summer,
and the long dark
approaches.
There is but one bastion,
one shield,
one bulwark,
one fire in the night:
hold fast thy memory,
thy faith,
thy hope
and thy love.
You know
in your deep-heart
what is right.
All else is anathema,
all else is so much dust,
for there are no spells
with which to resurrect the dead.
In Memoriam: Patrick H Lee
had to wait a while,
didn’t we?
for the stars to fall in supernova
and the far trails
to be formed and tread
and for the long night
to descend upon us?
and so we did.
be then ignited with me,
you inviolate wonder;
for tears are sacred things
that flow
through the mountain-field
and through the desert
into the ocean,
only so they might be carried up,
and by desperado winds
returned to the earth
as a storm over the sage,
where grace as rain comes down
around the lightning we make
in this love like thunder.
fall supplicant, then,
into the beating heart of paradox;
for only in the binding
of reality
and mystery
will you find truth.
?
sometimes
there are far too many words,
and sometimes
not near enough-
for the heart blooms
in its summers,
and hides deep
in its winters,
following no definable season;
and the soul
no single constellation,
and the mind…
well, does it matter?
there is a moment,
every night,
before I drift off,
when I see you
on this wild voyage too.
____________________
What am I doing
when you look over and catch me
staring,
and a scrap of laughter finds its way out
as you ask me
“What”?
This isn’t exactly rhetorical.
And I know I usually answer
“Just thinking.”
But what happens is
we fall for someone,
and even if we don’t admit it,
we notice
when they read a book
and the morning sun filtering in through the blinds
gathers in their hair
like light illuminating a marble sculpture
as their eyes drift away from the pages;
and they have their own little sounds of contentment
that exit and dance in the air
as they spread butter or twirl spaghetti;
or there’s that thing they do with their face;
or whether they talk or remain quiet in the woods-
whether they know of wisdom or of reverence;
the way they say exactly;
and their endless ocean of silence
made up of every word they never say,
and the why;
and islands, as well-
those secret islands we might bring each other to,
and the maps only each the other holds,
will ever hold…
Consider:
the bird’s feet run, stop, run, stop, run across the sand.
The bird is looking for something,
and the spray and flowing crawl of the sea
whispers the tracks away.
The dog lopes along the snowbanks,
breaks into a run, cuts to the side, stops, turns,
runs back and tackles you.
You have forgotten that he loves you
and so now must be reminded.
It’s not your fault. The dog knows you’re only human.
The horse is stretched out
and running freely into the wind,
which does not slow her.
The fields are deep in green
and the thunderheads are dark of blue,
and she kicks at the striking lightning.
The horse loves the storm, you see,
as the storm loves her back.
Consider
that I have buried many dead things,
yet have unearthed my own heart every time.
Consider all the times we’ve each done so.
So in all honesty, when you catch me,
I’m not “just thinking”
(even though that may sound better).
As you’ve noticed, I like to pay attention.
Must pay it, in fact.
If I could offer a thing more precious,
then please,
tell me.
That’s all I’m doing, my dear.
I’m just paying attention.
It is a simple thing,
really,
but I have decided
that I miss your voice;
or perhaps
the presence of your voice;
or, I think,
simply the suggestion
of the possibility
that your voice
might be spoken.
I think I miss you,
in fact,
as one might miss a piano
that used to sit
in the living room
near the highest window-
waiting to sing the old songs
as sunlight slips softly
through the glass,
or snow piles silently
upon the pane.
Litany_of_the_Lost 