seeds

telling secrets underground, deep marshes, in caves, surrounded by unending ocean, tall waves, men in fishing boats, huge nets... they catch and they catch and finally as the fish move on they get in the truck and drive through the hills and then through the mountains back to their families on the high plains, back to the land of wind and sun and cold. they bring dried fish and grain and seeds and blocks of salt. they wait through the winter, they hibernate and then wake and drive back to the shore.

the heat mixes with sweat mixes with glare on the water, staining their eyes a deep dark color, the color of coffee, raised in the hills, where trees shade precious harvests that once fell to the ground unripened, when deep dark yellow clouds covered the earth and forecasted a year of no shadows, a year of thick impossible air, a year of stillness and doubt.

in the end a single white flower rose and bloomed into a field of bare earth, a single white flower with pink stripes, a single white flower that belonged in the deep thick forests of the old world, once kissed by a young girl in a pink dress, once provider of hydration, once blessed by a saint. the petals fall softly, the leaves wilt back, the seeds spread in the field and are sown.

road trip

we sleep soundly, dry throat, wet eyes, tears coming easily in the cold morning, in the cold overcast morning waiting for sunlight. but the clouds thin and clear out, the wind dies, the heat comes and sand swirls around our feet, building into dunes and eventually deserts, and again it is cold as ice in the darkness, many stars up above. we wander, grateful for our mysteriously intelligent animals who can sniff out the water so we may not drown in dust. we wonder, grateful for our inquisitive minds that are never idle, so that we may not disappear in the wind. and we wait, we just follow the path, we stopped looking for the end of the desert, the far off city of gold.

we sit down and sink in and it is mud and we are dissolving like a sugar cube in a cup of bitter coffee on the stained counter of a diner by the side of the road on a long stretch between cities. out where someone is always coming and going and speeding toward their destination unable to think about this barren beautiful land between, populated by hawks, and scrub, and hills, and the occasional row of power lines or cellphone tower.

there is service here and you call while i am stopped for gas in the middle of the night and you probably have something horrible to tell me but it seems meaningless out here, at night. it seems forgotten. it seems light weight and wispy. it seems like you might have said something but you don't and we hang up and i get back in the car and keep driving.

Chicken.

Chicken, fickle chicken. You run about spouting some fantasy, some wish-dream-hope. Run away and down corridors of foreign cobblestone streets, crooked buildings looming, looking, hoping you might trip and fall. And if you do you duck and roll, under a desk abandoned on the sidewalk, transformed to snow and ice, a whirlwind of cold. And suddenly you are still a centerpiece in a deserted square, watching newspapers blow around under the thickest overcast sky. Like it happened after all. Like we really did end up leaving, faster than we came, in one violent moment.

i am a glass jar

temper
tempered

sheltered
shattered

heated
spilling

splashing
crashing

we inflate

day

i had a dream

i was a whirlwind tornado

i was flying debris

i landed, the earth cracked, the cracks were void

i picked one, i followed it, through fields of corn, through fields fallow, down into an empty creek bed, and beyond where it stopped

i laid down in the soft grass

i looked up at the sun, i watched the shapes of the clouds, i closed my eyes

a journey

she sits down on that street corner, on a saturday afternoon - no bus is coming, no other children wait. and she slips under the concrete, it melts suddenly below her, giving way into a small dark room. she floats in its exact center, the exact center of this small cube of a room. it is dark red, and black, and blurry, like it is a painting of a room, but smudged. a painting of a room someone never finished, the subjects missing, lost in the mind of the artist, forgotten as he tucked that canvas below some other works in progress, feeling stuck, not sure how to proceed. he leaves the studio frustrated, walks out onto the street, wishes it were a grey day but it is not, the sun is shining and birds are even singing and what can you do when even the weather won't cooperate?

he leaves the city, walking slowly out through parks and suburban yards and right of ways, passing through stands of tress and new developments, eventually finding himself moving uphill, onto a mountain, through fields of blueberries, not yet ripe. he climbs up a tall but not the tallest peak, he builds a house and goes in and locks the door. there are no windows and it is a perfect cube and he sits and he waits for something to happen.

lifeguard

shrinking riddles, flying up and around through and between you go and wait for certain tea time gestures of polite company giving in and running amok. clothes fly off, nails dig in, teeth come out and you are bruised and they cackle like halloween witches, chasing and looking for you. for your family. for your home. but you hide, so well. you hide and hide and hide and

flip into the pool, a twisted backflip off the high dive, a move no one could have expected, on your first trip out, something no one could have wanted, you, flying, hurtling towards the water below and splash

dive down
remember
touch the bottom
there is a yellow brick there
in the mud

there is a marsh
you paddle through
you recline and stare upwards
dragonflies stop and visit
children run and laugh, but it is silent
the boat stops and just floats, and your eyes flutter

you wake up sunburned and run towards shore, miraculously walking on water, running on water! screaming for someone to come and help you as you sink slowly into land on the shore.

think thick

think thick and tall,
think bold and brawl, run through and around, attack the ground, softly, swiftly, over rhythm and sound. you reach in, you grab me. i keep looking, i keep just staying, still. singing, softly.

you run over, you sommersault over, you come closer and slow down and bring your face right up next to my face and you open your eyes wide and you lean in and down and look straight at

and i turn over, curl in, curl up, roll around, a tight ball, and i slip out a crack in the hill and slip down and through into an entirely different ocean, an entirely different PLACE, this one full of thick air and fog, full of strange smells and orange light. the sun is setting and i shiver.

summer 1993

what do you think i am supposed to be doing?

she jumps down, gets under, around and beside the kidney shaped swimming pool, digging tunnels through backyards, over fences, across tree branches, and down to the cool grass of a sloping lawn. she breaths in deep and pauses. she looks around, down the hill to the marshy area by the fence, then across the sky to the hills, and the lake, and mountains beyond. bees buzz by in the warm air, the still warm air. unusually still air.

she tumbles down, rolling and somersaulting and twisting, wrapped in cardboard, on top of plastic in the snow, getting grass stains.

she lands but doesn't
suspended in mid air

symmetry

through the arch

deeper than under the deepest sea, uncovered

still

solid

cold and contained

a secret

a question

bm.

step by step
but it started with a crawl
really, just a reach
or a blink

a flash, a pattern starting
when does a pattern become a pattern?
when do you become a you and start to untangle the cobwebs

the cobwebs you woke up to, clouding your eyes
the cobwebs that trapped you, wrapping around you

ms. spider edges forward
fangs extended

journey

the forest

and the sea

a little girl

hiding in a tree

what bird hatches

and takes flight

what fire-breathing monster

turns a head to look and see

they come from the west

they come to me

the backyard girl

who are you?

why have you left the room?

gone to hide in every corner

under every bush

who are you?

are you a child? are you a stone? are you a small red potato in the back of the drawer? can you smell the dusty bags of rice? are you cold? do you have goosebumps on your arms, despite the sweater. as if you could hide there, smaller than you are. as if you could shrink and shrink and fit in the smallest corner of the smallest compartment of the smallest box on the smallest shelf. what is it like there? is it dark?

is it silent

or loud?

the bunny planet

is where we move like molasses, caught in an ever sinking boat, a slow motion descent into muddy banks of a river going dry... or flooding the farm land. i crawl forward, you crawl backward, into some tiny opening, some crack of hope that closes on command. i have gum stuck in my hair. you are drowning. forget the punch line or third act, don't look back. the world is ending and you have in your hand a small newborn kitten eyes still closed cold and waiting for morning. we try to wrap blankets around us and the cold still seeps in like our bones are an ice sculpture that won't melt, our flesh clings and then hardens and gets dry. any heat burns and the sun looks like death. so i lay on the beach and i am fire. from that moment all the colors of my universe brightened like snowflakes melting on a rosy red cheek warm from running through the snow, up the steep incline towards the cabin bathed in sunlight gushing ribbons of red and ruthless warmth that pierces our hearts like arrows of wax that melt and drip and stain the tablecloth leaving reminders, marks of remembering a holiday dinner or a wedding party when someone lost a contact and went searching by firelight, went looking in every little corner, went searching and not finding, again and again until she was exhausted, collapsed and staring upward at rainbows of soft dust that fall on your face, that fall and settle there in blues and oranges and reds, on your cheek, on your eyelid, on your upper lip. and you are facing upward, like adoration, like rapture, towards the light.

no ideas, but in things

clear blue sky light fading into orange sunset. silky black purring kitten, resting in front of a purple wall with pink curtains around an empty window, a window you can't see out of, a window that won't open. green smudges, blue smudges, grey smudges and the faint sound of rain beyond thick walls tells us it is cold and wet. warm cotton sheets though, pink and blue. once in a warmer room, a brighter green and gold and sometimes black room, more cramped from low sloped ceilings, narrow spaces, a once attic now bedroom, so close to the roof you can climb out and worry about falling - no, jumping - off.

a bigger castle, purple on the inside. pink like frosting on a cake, dark and full of thick air. the rooms next door are explosions, the outside is like the ocean, gravity pushing it into the space, like clay in a mold, like toothpaste coming out, like birth.

i am colder than she was when she slogged across that empty meadow turned marsh thick with moss and mud and heavy with water from the ever present misty drizzle. it is somehow always dark here. but not some sad dark, just the dark of night, the dark of the sun coming up in a few hours, the dark of sleep and baths and the full moon.

i'm not leaving here, i'm swimming forever, i won't drown, i can breath underwater and i can speak with the fishes about their castles of kelp where secrets are bubbles trapped in the tangle. we swam down, to the bottom, to the silty mud of the sea floor. we camped out and pretended we had a plastic castle to sleep under but we didn't because this is the real ocean, not a tank.

it got cold. it got dark. it got lonely when the fish all left for somewhere else and we missed our chance and didn't follow. but it didn't matter. we were still, so still we caused no eddies or swirls of sand, so still the water didn't know what to do and melted, wrapping us like plastic wrap, packaging us away for storage, for sale, for giving away.

silent partner

in the sun they walked slowly, over that most round hill, over the empty hole where the maypole once stood, where a man came back to life quickly, back on a spring evening. but now it is summer and they walk hand in hand, down toward the water. do you remember she asks and looks at her companion's face. when we were here before, dancing, drunk, rolling, running, playing... a shake of the head.

how can you have forgotten? a blank stare.

and we run out of here and up the steps and into the house and onto the roof and see the soaring orange lights cozy in our sleeping bad and i look at your face and i ask do you remember? when we cuddled here with the great wide avenue of lights and magic welding cables to our hearts and sucking and filling like some special pumping plumbing system for hearts... a slight nod, a slight smile, and a shake of the head.

how can you have forgotten? and we giggle.

so then they moved and moved again and landed and still ready themselves to keep moving because it is never(ever) ending and always beginning like sky magic.

deathbed conversions

and then, you always thought you knew best, you always thought you'd be right and good and successful. in the end you always won at every game and always wanted every just dessert deserved by anyone in all the world. you wanted these things and this feeling and you stopped at nothing to just touch something solid and real and heavy, something continuous and completely satisfying, like a chocolate malt after a hike or a gold medal or a 4.0 on graduation day. but somehow each of these things came, and passed, and you still wanted to live in the infinite solitude of being the best, as if time could stand still at that moment when you won the largest, longest, hardest race, the camera forever trained on your smile and your fist thrust into the air in victory.

but time ticked on and you found yourself older and older, and good at some things and not at others, and prone to making the occasional human mistake, and grateful for help on hard days and the people who helped you. you trudged forward, you watched time speed as the comparative number of years of your life expanded and each moment was somehow proportionally shorter but infinitely more important. you waited until the last moment came to pass, until that last brief in-breath and final sign, but you did in the end accept that your race was over and you had not won and you were not crushed but instead amused and if you had another breath you would have laughed or at least chuckled at yourself but you didn't so your eyes float shut and your brain slows and this you fades away.

the closet

i took my shoes off and it is summer and i feel the carpet between my toes and somehow it is cooler in here. rounded wooden shelves, no elbow room, small drawers but no hat boxes. at least it is carpeted and you store your bike in the basement instead so it is soft and dry here, and i can sit and look up at the high ceiling and imagine painted pictures but it is beige.

if someone comes and looks around they'll see sunshine and strawberries spilled on the ground like catastrophe in summer, an abandoned kitchen, door hanging open, silence. instead i stayed inside and cleaned up the leavings and continued to wonder and wait. it slowly got dark, chilly, and somehow quieter and i closed the door and went upstairs and woke up in the middle of the night looking for you, searching under the covers, in the bathroom, even on the couch in the living room but it was silent, and untouched.

next day, sunday, and you never came back and i wanted to find you and know what came next but you always make yourself unfindable. like it is better not to exist when summer has passed, it is better to fade away into another life. we might even live in the same house, we might just pass each other on different schedules, you might be in the kitchen making dinner while i am in my office reading a book and we won't know. you won't see the light on under the door and somehow i will miss the scent of onions and garlic filling the house. and in the bedroom, maybe we will sleep on opposite sides of the bed, and maybe in the closet your clothes hang next to mine, but somehow we always change at different times, and never linger long enough there to share the space.

faith

that plate is dry

running down red places

sunshine

water

the etched glass

i wanted to go but you said i couldn't. you said, stay here, wait here, i'll be back by dusk but you weren't and now i sit here and i wait too long. i sit in the cold and wait. a man came to visit me, a tall man, all dressed in red. a man came to say i should stop waiting. but he didn't. he saw me and he didn't say it.

so i wait.