Gray Go The Thoughts

Every thought is the same
It might start with the shoes
And end with the dark night of the soul
Or a student who flew off a cliff outside of Seattle
But the colors are all there, bright or dim
Maybe black and white, but generally gray
Gray go the thoughts, like soldiers 

Sprinting across the pitted distance

Between boredom and terror, their only weapon, words

Some thoughts lean into dismay, or are
Cuddled into the chest of your father

And yet, they all smell at the bottom of your disposal

Its rot always there for you to reach in

And don't forget
How to forget
About that

Make the thought lofty, like the birthday cake you are making for your seven year old
Frost it up without regard to health
Or climate change
And especially what lurks
At the bottom of your disposal

Just put what is real on the cake
I mean the thought
Kick its ass with authenticity
To the ceiling of the cave
With candor like cavemen
Discussing their slow death from disease

Let the thought run away from you forever, unleashed
The fur of which shimmering

Black or white or gray

Bunny Mind

Once more, I've counted the stones on my patio
And measured out this season's branches of peach, cherry and pear
Again, I've contemplated the slow growth of green
In the water of the bird bath
And only now lay eyes upon a bunny a few feet away

We assess each other's risk
Before I keep down in my unsettled journal
It stays deep-staring into everywhere present
I envy how alert it lasts, how the eye
Takes the whole evening in, through the black marble portal
Of its bunny being

The dim light is enough to manage words
While its faint  heartbeat barely creates at all
Wondering with bunny mind, I'm pretty sure
My friend is meditating between the compost and the Buddha
Fondling the very core of a peaceful universe

Most definitely, he feels how lucky this patch of grass
Holding me aloft on this first Fall night
Safe from owls beside this man-being crossing and uncrossing his legs
Scrawling whimsically with a stick in his paws
Whose chest heaves with breath and eyes fretfully dart

Heavy, this three and a half pound brain
Hearing the crickets' raging agony
And not the still hum of our short and cacophonous lives

Remember the Water

I've just learned that Lake Powell is an artificial lake. This is a jolt, as my last name is Powell. Thoughts of inauthenticity flood in. I begin to question the pure-water associations floating the mind for nearly half a century.

I rode around that lake at age eighteen on a Kawasaki, and swam nude for the first time in a deep blue cove where the waters slapped hard on barren cliffs. Though I was feeling extraordinarily free as adolescent on a motorcycle trip, I couldn't escape the parameters of identity as manifested between the name of this paradise and myself. Powell on the road signs, the name of the waters, and there on my driver's license. 

Lake Powell's coastline was warped by massive undulations just like my adolescence. It was longer than the West Coast of the U.S.A, or something unbelievable like that.

Come to find out it wasn't born until the 1960s. Just like me. An electric and recreational project like so many postwar marriages. Glen Canyon would be filled up, yet it would lay there underneath for decades, under the heaviness of water.

It's taken twenty years of drought to reduce its levels to a kind of desert oasis, says the clickbait. Some want the levels back, for boating, the beauty, for the economy. Farmers, merchants, indians, the tax base, they're all fighting hard. And of course the others; the natural order of things.

The Colorado River now moves slowly on its level plains swamped in muddy waters, becoming a verdant hub of plant and animal life. You find things here that haven't thrived since the early sixties, says a biologist.

When you are depleted, your levels lower than decades, consider Lake Powell. Consider the birds on their new limbs, and their meals crawling up trunks. Yet listen to the indian drums echoing off re-emergent cliffs, a farmer snuffing a dirt clod between his thumb and index finger, or a cash register in silent remembrance of higher levels.

But mostly, remember the water, how unbelievably wet and vigorous against the body after a long ride in, lapping, lapping.

I asked a Dalit man if he liked his job.

Upon Asking a Man If He Liked His Job

 
I ask a man if he likes his job
As it’s a dreadful industry, death
Stacking sticks of wood, then shoveling
Their white remains into the depths
 
His torso is varnished in the sun
Its glow and he work side by side
Kissing sweaty on the quarried blocks
Slick and final and steep
 
To the river where the dead
Are wrapped and left for ash
Where holy grounds meet flow
In layers of trash and weed
 
Spent wreaths and ribbons cast
On stone cut rough and polished underfoot
Textiles, awash in waves and wind
Tossed in the sorrow of piles
 
His white rough cotton wrap turned grey
Is soaked in perspiration and fume
The burn and wind enwrap his body
Against a sky that scorches flesh
 
His squint dark eyes accepting time
At the holiest of spots in heat
The incendiary force of which by choice
They are brought in wraps of orange
 
When the wind is wrong, the air
In its ironic humid smoke
Wafts up the steps like barbeque
Still months later in the throat
 
You could call it camaraderie
Beside him in humanity
If my ticket hadn’t cost more than
He makes in a year
 
At the lowest of the castes
He rides these steps of fate
I ask him if he likes his job
And his response lights a flame

His father, and his father, and so on
Six generations to his knowledge
Counting firewood by body weight
Stacking, lifting, shoveling
 
God wants me to do this
He says, through a smile of teeth
Stoic and willing, unencumbered
By the larger question

But by a man lying nearby surrounded
With fresh leaves, an incense cake
At his head, his wife leaning
Over his purple sunken eyes
 
My fellow gazes on the dead man too
Imperceptibly nodding, sizing him up
Slow, like a heartbeat, counting
His weight in sticks and blaze

In the Oaxacan Waves

Oaxacan Waves

Up and down goes the
Parisian woman
Not a day over thirty
In the Oaxacan waves

Not quite sixteen,
My son, the lucky boy
Swims the swells. Blue 
Pacific glee is all around

Together in water, about as much
As life allows a son
Freckles and teeth, as
Her breasts dance the surf

Minnows underneath
Dart unrestricted in their youth
As if, in silver and gold
They too sea

Can I cleave to this, stirred
By plump je ne sais quoi
And skirt the sorrows of the seas?
Can he escape the drowning?

We laugh, degajé to death
The evidence is in
She twirls at impact
As he dives under

You Are Lucky

You are lucky, you tell yourself. You saw it happen: A tree that sprung from the soil two hundred years ago sprawls along the ground. It had bent in winds so much more hurling than these.

This evening, on your walk through the woods, you've seen it fall! The mouth is agape, gathering and gathering. You watch, watch the space the tree had inhabited. Sky pours into it's space.  No one is around except you, and the animals have gone silent at their limbs.

You reflect on the initial crack that turned your head, the slow motion of its falling, and the air that swept up in a warm gust. Yet, you mostly stand at attention. It's as if by waiting, the dissipated sounds might be followed by pheromones, or a breakthrough. There will be time for calculations later. Concerns for your safety haven't even occurred. You have witnessed something sacred in this moment. You stand quiet with ringing in your ears from the cracking and that final snap of its trunk. This is worth more than what you've been eyeing in the showroom, or real estate, or trips you've craved for a while. As your eyes close, you recall friendships as a child, how your lungs filled and fainted with laughter--how everything smelled and everything meant and everything spacious. 

Spacious like the gap in the canopies before you when your eyes lift. And when a single bird begins to chirp again, you know it's time to keep going. And so you do, with the sun now beckoning at its extreme angle. 

What Can You Do?

What Can You Do?

Although the air quality alerts
You're hiking again
For clarity. A determination to
Live some way or another

Or have your lungs
Fill and faint with laughter
When you come across the poor thing
Laying there ahead

In the calm best light
With the sun looking curious
From the haze of the fires in Canada
And there she is in front of you

What can you do
But soak a cracker in water
Lay down a few cherries
Avert your eyes

Step back on the path
To ease its alarm
Decide that you cannot fathom
Ending its life

Watch it spin
On its dusty side
The back legs limp
Make the center

In circles of pain
From a raptor
Affliction, or snapping
Of spine

What can you do
But soak a cracker in water
Lay down a few cherries
And carry on