winter

the well is flowing over, surging, bubbling, and it runs down the hill in all directions, soaking the grass, creating rivulets of mud. and it rains, it rains and rains. the dry earth at first turns it away but eventually sucks it up, suddenly hungry, ravenous for the wetness. and she slogs through it, in big red rain boots, walking up hill through soggy leaves, over wet pavement, and under dripping branches. she gets to the door, she knocks, and they open it. warm yellow light rushes out and embraces her, and she leaves all the wetness at the entrance - boots, coat, hat... 

inside they are playing games and ask her to sit and she hides in a corner, then paces the halls, then explores upstairs and finds rooms filled with fabric scraps and stuffed animals, in piles, aimless piles, and pillows and blankets and rugs, not folded or rolled, just strewn everywhere. she burrows into them, through them, it is dark and soft and warm, she keeps burrowing, and never hits a wall.

the room was not this large. it is dark, and still. she wears herself out in the process and it is still dark and still. she drifts into sleep, face down, her head in the crook of her elbow. she dreams strange colorful dreams of candyland landscapes and alien foliage. 

when she wakes up it is all folded, and she is in a bed she has never seen before, and there is sun streaming through the open windows. it smells like summer, it sounds like summer, she can even hear children playing and an ice cream truck in the distance. winter faded away in her dreams and she is warm again.

garbage day

she started at sunrise, asking questions to the birds, asking where she could go to know how to find peanuts for apples in summer. someone somewhere didn't know, didn't wonder, didn't want to have any idea about something and what. but she kept moving towards the big black writhing knot, the big black pulsing, writhing knot of velvet fringe-like strands tightening and loosening irregularly, tightening and loosening into a knotted mess of ripped and torn fragments destined for the garbage can.

garbage day garbage day is coming, rumbling down the highway towards us, rumbling noisily in big trucks at dawn, up the broken streets and into our homes, up the stairs and into our bedrooms, then out through the windows and flying upward, upward, leaving behind a trail of sticky food wrappers and broken bits of appliances and cardboard (which really should have gone in recycling, tsk tsk) and shattered glass and plastic packaging (torn open) and other things, things i can't say, things you can't see.

and poof, exploding in the sky into nothingness, or into a fine blue vapor, hanging briefly and then floating away in the breeze, towards the south, towards the always-summer, towards the thick dark jungle under water. where fruits that grow also swim and reality slides slowly into cartoon, thick paint oozes and covers everything into opaque blocks of primary colors, separated by thin black lines to outline their shapes. and then it locks up  stuck  still  like painted over windows you can't open, like walls and framing so thick with so many years of layers of paint it comes off in rainbows and all of the corners and cracks are rounded, as if worn down, but actually covered and possibly irretrievable.

plainly waiting, again
plainly hoping?

somewhere

she waded upstream, knee-deep in fast-moving water, swearing she remembered the river flowing the opposite direction on the map. shoes wet, pants wet, everything wet as she climbed up the rocks of rapids, between towering redwoods and boulders. the day went on forever, the endless day of summer, the longest and brightest.

water
fire

throbbing, shedding, opening,

raw

the desert

flesh and bone

she left on her bicycle, towards the mountains and the sea northward, away from the desert and the endless miles of red dirt. she left them in their tents, in the shade, waiting for dark. they cautioned her and she did not listen. sweat dripped down her forehead but she did not listen. later, in the jungle, in the lush green jungle, to the sound of macaws trading secrets, she looked up and tried to find the sun.

and a cloud moved in, and rained down, and she actually wished for an umbrella. she actually gave up and was soaking wet and at this point everything will start to mildew, turn black with little dots of mold reaching up and over and around on top of the bed covers, into the bags, through the clothes she washed by soaking in an old bucket overnight. mysteriously, water cures dampness and the heat relaxed her muscles and the chill left her bones.

the chill of the desert at night, the stars forever, the moon shadow of one large cactus blocking her way. the strange alien landscape, the trees with no leaves, the unmeasurable distance between rock, the sand, the desperation.

i'm on the edge

endless meadows
endless summer
an endless, warm twilight

then darkness

i'm on the edge
are you on the edge?

of the high dive
waiting for the ripples to fade
waiting for something to change

i'm on the edge

why

only something waiting now
plenty, in the pantry, sunlight,
snow

i know, you know, we know
she ran and ran and ran, into a large-mouthed cave, down into the earth. long passageways of dark and open caverns rich with precious metals. there was no bottom, nothing resembling some ending point at which to turn back, just continuous darkness and cool rock. sometimes something might tremble.

sometimes something might warm, might glow, a soft glow at first, floating upward, until it becomes red and hot and moves with great precision through the caverns, gathering speed toward the surface and exploding outward into fire.

so, what do you do?
do you keep looking for the bottom?
do you run from that building flame?
do you watch, enraptured, the exploding forth?