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

Except for my Sons

School is closed again today

Half way there, I slow peddle to a dock, lean my bike against the railing

The color of lake is the same as sky And the rail is gray with shadows. The grayscape penetrated only by a rising carp about to die

The Court of the Oceans had made it clear that we might sue for their warming

All picnics are cancelled through town. Children will stay on screens in bedrooms while fans churn the air

After the storm, trees and choirs and fun runs and electricity are down.

Down it all

Except for my sons, I would dive into the deepest sky. Hop the rails to some cobalt forest. Close the system down

I would swim to the wide dark center, close to where it all began

Except for my sons, blooming extraforcial beings. And this duck and I, floating on a curtain of dock, sharing this gray and open expanse, free as birds

A Holy Place

A Holy Place

You may sit wherever you please. Here, a menu, there are the services. Fan blades begin to whirl above your table

Burnt oil wafts up and out the open wall over the colors of vendors in the market

Yes, you'd like water and fresh coffee. The market women note you are dining at a place they will never

The one with menus handed to the customer. Where the silverware matches, with tablecloths, glossy, new and red

And you utter thank you again and again. That is a fine choice. You sit proud and contented, the only one in the room

Some places are sacrosanct. Incense proves this, as does the pretty print of Shiva hovering above waters

And the restaurateur standing attentive in a Pepsi mirror

In The Clouds

In the Clouds

In the clouds, there will be no shaking journals or dancing diaries
Zero neatly scrawled pages of velum, with tea stains or tears
Absolutely no outpouring of love, nor bloodletting of any sort
So many confessions will be spared online

It is to say the future will read nothing of our discontentment
Spared the strata of our favorite illusions, in bound pages
Honest, unedited, discovered in its feces and scars
Instead, the clouds will pour constantly of disinfected rain

We will wonder how paper. If rough drafts. Contemplate pens
How the earth could not stop bleeding. But mostly,
What early man scrawled and spat at the rudiments
Of sheets

A few nights on the Uros Islands of Lake Titicaca, Peru

 

Uros
 
You are tired after ten hours on the luxury train
Taxis and dark-sky boat to the floating islands
Tonight’s bed has twenty-four kilos of blankets
You cannot sleep for the flapping corrugated scraps
Clacking and warping to the milky way
 
Yet it’s perfect--your body is saying--says a blue
Blip somewhere on earth that is your body
We are weaving sapphire love in the hovel of a room
Unabashed as the sheet of stars across Lake Titicaca
Aloft, upon wobbly mats of totora reeds
 
The island waves. They must dream of cutting
Hoisting, drying, laying, laying reeds to stay afloat
Could it be that feet sink in with every step?
It could be his knock at 8:37am, handing me my phone
Which has charged in his hut, or how he tells me
 
I have received 4 calls in the middle of his night
It could be Mateo, who is three, wearing my glasses
Whose face is wide as a handmade quinoa cake
Or his sister, Geraldin, in a dance between Mateo
And adulthood. Or, it could be the grandfather on the roof
 
Or is he the father?—dismantling boards to move in a day
A whole building, wrenching nails from the roofbeam,
Sounding in the lake breezes like andean birds
Or last night, climbing the teetering ladder for a
Dissertation, above the lapping waves, on sky
 
An entire island of reeds blown by the wind, creaking
It is to say, disorientation, and you have slept late
into the natural float of time, and coca tea, and reeds
Have been gathered and the man at the apex must
Descend to rap on your door with your phone

Going with Elliott

Going With Elliott

In the morning, nerves crook like they always
And birds sing dirty again, uninterrupted by
Trucks charging double sound below their canopies
I can’t decide if the room is the height of heaven
Or, with these low-slung thoughts, an abyss
 
I smell more like my grandpa every day, while
On the coffee table, a borrowed map I splayed out
With a glossy sky--exotic and crisp--goes limp
After a humid night, draping like a tablecloth
And I wonder if I’ll be punished by the library
 
We will go there, this new woman in my life
This place with border crossings and altitude
With the dead curled into pits in the arid hills
And as interesting as the trip folds out to be
All I can imagine are her breasts in the Andes
 
Gusts make leaves quake on the Fourth of July
Will we get on for weeks in travel’s centrifuge
As we do in clumps of live and wayward hours?
Lastly, will the branches of another continent
Chirp as singlemindedly, beckoning the hoary day?