Dig

And you call me to come
and I do. 

The wind comes in from Kansas, vows to lift you away to yellow brick roads, whispers of poetic winters upstate. It's like you tasted freedom for the first time and now cannot get enough. As though you didn't have a lifetime of freedom under your belt. 

Resurfacing from out of the rubble of an illness is like rebirth, then, like you had in fact not lived a lifetime of freedom, like you had not, in fact, lived a life at all, but appeared on the map a blank slate, a white sheet of paper. 

You take the chance you were given. 

Decide to rewrite the story in colors all your own. 

But Soft

When I take my coffee outside, the sun is just cresting the mountain ridge. The dogs are waiting on the front porch, and your delight takes you by surprise. The morning is silent -- a week has passed and you have not yet taken the time to truly listen to it. It is a kindness. 

You eat breakfast in the shade, watch the hummingbirds and the pigeons and the crows, while the dogs sleep at your feet. A gentle breeze ripples through the flags, a steady backdrop of sound to the valley full of silence. Your head aches with the noise of months in motion, you hadn't realized. Here is a soft landing, here is reprieve. 

Now is the time for you to dig slowly,
see what gold lingers in the dirt.

to the Ends of the Earth

For a week you do not breathe, only race head first into a thousand deadlines awaiting your attention, a thousand deadlines who do not care that you are a thousand miles into the desert. The dogs walk you in the mornings, but then you are locked away in the sweltering trailer, spending data minutes like it didn't cost more than a long distance call in the nineties.

But then the week ends, impossibly disappearing behind you like it was only ever a trick of the lights. A full moon rises over the mountains in the east as a fire sets behind the mountains in the west. The desert is quiet but for a few late night birds making their way home and a flag waving in the last of the sunset wind. You begin to breathe, begin to think about why you came here. 

It was not to outrun deadlines, after all. 

It was to greet the desert like a confidant, to whisper secrets into the startrail, to rediscover the madness that brought you all the way across the American land after all. When Jack was your age he only had a few more years to live, so you may as well live yours now, not try to save anything for winter. When you were your age, you put what you owned into the back of an old station wagon and drove it clear across the land and you think maybe, maybe this is all there is to life and it's not a bad way to go. The road feels like home, and haven't you been looking for it for so long?

Just because you found the pearl,
doesn't mean you get out the water.

One Hundred Acres

The late night silence is punctured by rumbles. Not a cloud in the sky at sunset, it must be military base practices, bombs detonated into a desert where no one will file a complaint. As you go out for a sunset run - your only attempts at going past the gates all week - your sole neighbor stops to tell you her colleague ran over a man and killed him, then kept driving. By the time you start running, the sun has set: your minutes of visibility now numbered. The land is unforgiving. The dog greets you on your return, walks you the whole way to your door. You haven't seen a rattle snake since you came.

The days disappear in mountains of work. You know there is an end on the horizon. Know you came for other reasons, pray there is still magic waiting somewhere beneath the red sand around you. 

If you were looking to run yourself into the ground,
you could as well have stayed home.

This Land

I wake in a vacuum, dark curtains across the windows and a box fan to drown out any sound - if there was any. Get up to find another sunny day, another light breeze rolling down from the mountains, the mornings are cooler now, and I drink it in. The government pretzels itself into a shut down and you wonder if they can really close the doors to parks or if you could sneak onto the white sand dunes under the full moon. Work beckons, and you do not care to hear it. 

Do they not know there are other things to be doing? Do they not know there are roads, and adventures, and full moons to be seen? Can they not feel the ocean waves beat in their heart? I run through the desert and see only stars, see only endless miles ahead. 

This is the time to gather your courage. This is the time to dare the leap. 

If not, how can you follow where I go?

Run

It cools off just before the sun sets. You have a 22 minute window of cool air before it is dark. The dog greets you upon your return, walks you to your door before loping off into the grass. 

You miss running like you used to, but you lap up the 22 minutes, try to enjoy your burning muscles though they show too soon. She sends a video where a tall, black man says we need at least 8 hugs a day to survive. You look around the farm, think it will be months before you are touched again, it doesn't seem fair. 

You wish you could run another ten miles. 

There are cockroaches in the kitchen sink every morning. It's not the same. But the sun sets over the desert in a way that fills your chest to the brim, you ran a little longer today than you did yesterday, the nights are getting cooler in a way that feels like a comfort. 

There are moments to be had yet. 

Even when no one holds you while they happen.

Kyrie

You begin the day in lather, scrubbing long-ignored corners of the dusty double-wide trailer in the New Mexican expanse. Listen to music composed to carry people across the ocean, to let them look for answers though none are to be found. The duhkha permeates your struggle to clean the desert, as though the grains of sand are not uncountable. You do not relent, you are not yet ready. She sends you an article about a writer excising her demons by writing them out in children's stories and you tell her you are not yet ready to unleash your demons on a character so young. 

You are too busy giving these characters the safety you did not have. 

There are parasites latched to the back of your heart. If you pull them out now, if you pull them out before the walls of your heart are think enough, you will only bleed out. 

This is how scar tissue protects,
in more ways than one.

For What It's Worth

The Southwestern night speaks to you again, in whispers still, because you are new to the ground and skittish around its words. Let's take it one star at a time, you think, but you do not mean it, you already feel several constellations behind. You look for armchairs on Craigslist, because the ascetics of a folding chair do nothing for your literary ambitions. 

When he says, it's always been you, but doesn't appear on your doorstep to mean it, you think only how you grew up with the lesson not to count your money until it is in your bank account. Too many old wounds of disappointing men trickle through the ether, you have run out of bandaids, you will not risk the gash tearing open again. 

Take a cold shower in the trailers dirty bathroom. Write mental lists of the grime you will clean out of your auras tomorrow. The cockroaches gather in the sinks. All you have to do is let them out.

Desert Sunrise

I wake in the middle of the night, stifled, a desert headache full of red wine beating its drum behind my temples. The bed is better than any I've slept in for years, the house so silent you could hear a spider crawl. By morning, there is a cockroach in the kitchen sink and a hundred degrees on the back porch steps. 

I saunter around the trailer like I'm wading through a dream, feeling nothing and everything alll at once. Work beckons but all I want to do is write. All I want to do is wait for the sun to set over the desert mountains and listen to silence until it speaks. 

Two birds land on the front porch, looking around themselves like they're waiting for a routine. You think you should introduce yourself. 

I am here now, you'll say. I'll be here, now. And they'll know
exactly what you mean.

Buy Dirt

Red rock turns to volcano stone, tumbleweed turns to yucca, the mountains flatten into one long desert into infinity. There's a marker where the Trinity testing took place, quietly recording horrific history into the centuries. You pull off the highway to a road with no markers, asphalt leading to gravel leading to dust before you make a final turn.

A turqouise double wide trailer rests in the expanse. All is silent. He calls to tell you the fridge is broken but there's a spare in the back barn, that there are no keys because there's nothing to lock up, that you can make yourself at home because no one else should be around. The wind blows the door open in minutes. a giant spider makes itself at home near eye level outside the bedroom. You feel at peace.

For a short moment, everything is still and waiting, everything is breath held and calm. There's a moment just before you begin to eat the honey that is better than when you do,

but you don't know what it's called.

Kayenta

I race down the canyon, anxious to reach the hotel before sundown, anxious to reach the work that lies waiting. At the traffic circle, the steady female voice says to take the second exit and carry on to civilization. The late evening sunlight washes the red rock monoliths in fire, it feels unfinished. 

I take the third exit. 

At the top of the slope, the road ends at a vista. Enormous bluffs tower over the endless desert, they glow as dusk settles along the bottom of the dry ocean. Rainbow twilight sifts along the horizon, I run to the edge to catch the last rays, run to catch the peace that evades me. At the edge, a most precious gift is placed right in my hands: awe. 

By the time I reach the hotel, long after sundown, I am happy. The uneasy shaking that followed me all day disintegrates. I work, catch up to myself, catch my breath. Another day careening through the desert lies ahead. 

I will follow the GPS only until my heart says 
otherwise.

Advent

The mornings are cooler, now, the nights spent best around a fire to watch the moon rise. I sit on the back porch at midnight, watching the stars and wondering if they might lead the way. The bags are nearly packed, now, the tingle under the soles of your feet eagerly shaking itself into high gear. The desert awaits, the road awaits, you sit looking for shooting stars only to see them tumble in the periphery, this was the secret all along. 

If it was too easy, you would fight for nothing.
Shooting stars do not avail themselves to you. 

You must go into the darkness
to find them.

Giving

There are scorpions, but they aren't poisonous, she says in a lilting accent. The mice seem to stay mostly in the closet. 

You dig your heels into the starting blocks, linger for too long, sink too deep into intertia, the days and weeks packing from out under you. But the horizon lingers, it waits for you when you are ready, it isn't going anywhere. 

It isn't going anywhere. 

So you are.

Flight

The desert is quiet in fall. I forget to wake up, forget to lift myself out of complicated dreams. Drink coffee slowly over morning reads, unbothered by the schedule of a civilized world, you do not take it for granted. The apple trees are reeling at the weight of their fruit, you think it's a metaphor of having all the things you asked for. Begin to see now that none of your life was lived in a box and it only hurt when you tried to make it. You are forever standing on the outside looking in, looking at the warmth on the other side of the window but oh, how stifling that air when you've tried to breathe it. 

Turn around, return to the road.
Find your warmth in the miles under your feet.

Begin Again

Wake slowly in the quiet valley between mountains, watch the late summer sunrise spread across golden fields, resist rising as your bones beg for more time to rest. Your head is full of poetry, again, your heart full of song. Distant voices call to you but they are not here now, they live elsewhere and you cannot follow where they beckon. You are back on the road, now, back in your one track mind, back in magic. September was made for writing, winter was made for waiting to see what comes out of a silence and grabbing it, here is the gift I give myself, the time has come to make good on your promises. 

Everything that is about to happen lies ahead of you. 

All you have to do is move
forward.

Terminal 4

Familiar steps lead through you through midtown subway stations, Long Island Railroad tracks, and a terminal you know now like you lived there. A brief visit comes to an end, a top up of love so strong it risks beating your heart out of it chest, such is life when you've worked a lifetime to get there.You do not mourn this departure, because you know it is but the beginning of a journey, not the end. 

I go west, again, again, searching for treasures underneath the red sand, for answers in the open road, I have no fear because I know they lie waiting there, and I have no choice but to find them. 

Pack up your car, my dear, put your books and your dreams in the back of the old station wagon and turn the radio on. The way lies untouched ahead, and you've nothing left now to do
but reach it.

Bryant Park

You leave him at the top of 30 Rock, the relic of a love affair from which you are ready to pick the raisins, all you see now are skyscrapers and sunshine, are little magics of old studios and the promise of Manhattan below. You're happy to take them and go. 

In Bryant Park, the folding chairs are filled again, you will never forget how it was to hear birdsong in the apocalypse, and you are happy now to share the space, even with the midwestern tourists bumbling in your way. Your to-do list yells at you, but listlessly, without too much oomph, it understands that what you're supposed to be doing isn't necessarily what you should be doing. Fill your lungs with the city, gather ye rosebuds, absorb every last morsel and bring it to the desert, remind yourself the fire that got you where you are. 

The desert whispers promises and starshine, but remember.
You would not be there soon,
if you had not been here first. 

The treasures can only be yours,
after someone gave you the map
to begin with.

Brief

The thing is,
you haven't the words. 

The thing is, you should have so much to say and instead you are left with silent awe, with the feeling that you cannot actually put words to the jumble of peace and joy inside you. I walked down 14th street last night after the rains, and it was like I could breathe for the first time in months. How does one put words to that?

New York simmers in me like a perfect symphony, when everywhere else is the mess of instruments being tuned. It is at once the familiarity of home and the possibility of something new, it is the reminder of seventeen years of building a life that cannot be taken from me, it is a giggle.

I make my preparations for other adventures, look to the desert for undiscovered roads, look to the world for undiscovered melodies, yes. But one day I will yearn for the philharmonic again. 

And then I will know where to go.

Anthem

“It occurs to me that there are other towns. It occurs to me so violently that I say, at intervals, "Very well, if New York is going to be like this, I'm going to live somewhere else." 

And I do — that's the funny part of it. But then one day there comes to me the sharp picture of New York at its best, on a shiny blue-and-white Autumn day with its buildings cut diagonally in halves of light and shadow, with its straight neat avenues colored with quick throngs, like confetti in a breeze. Some one, and I wish it had been I, has said that "Autumn is the Springtime of big cities." I see New York at holiday time, always in the late afternoon, under a Maxfield Parish sky, with the crowds even more quick and nervous but even more good-natured, the dark groups splashed with the white of Christmas packages, the lighted holly-strung shops urging them in to buy more and more. I see it on a Spring morning, with the clothes of the women as soft and as hopeful as the pretty new leaves on a few, brave trees. I see it at night, with the low skies red with the black-flung lights of Broadway, those lights of which Chesterton — or they told me it was Chesterton — said, "What a marvelous sight for those who cannot read!" I see it in the rain, I smell the enchanting odor of wet asphalt, with the empty streets black and shining as ripe olives. I see it — by this time, I become maudlin with nostalgia — even with its gray mounds of crusted snow, its little Appalachians of ice along the pavements. 

So I go back. And it is always better than I thought it would be.

I suppose that is the thing about New York. It is always a little more than you had hoped for. Each day, there, is so definitely a new day. "Now we'll start over," it seems to say every morning, "and come on, let's hurry like anything."

London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it. 

There is excitement ever running its streets. Each day, as you go out, you feel the little nervous quiver that is yours when you sit in the theater just before the curtain rises. Other places may give you a sweet and soothing sense of level; but in New York there is always the feeling of "Something's going to happen." It isn't peace. But, you know, you do get used to peace, and so quickly. And you never get used to New York.”

-Dorothy Parker 

Home

I cried
on the F train again today
while New York looked in another direction and
let me,

I didn’t realize I would, didn’t
know how tight my heartstrings
in its absence
in anticipation in
waiting to see if I still had a home, I
spent so much time without one
after all 

And here
it waited for me,
let me
run around the world in adventure
let me
try my wings
and find
that the one place I’d always
want to fly

was here.

Gate A2

They always put the New York redeyes at the far end of the terminal, a cul-de-sac of late night wanderers. You nestle in among them like nothing is out of the ordinary, like you're heading home for the hundredth time only, only this time home is elusive, is 22 boxes in a storage unit near the water, this time you arrive unsure of the arms that will greet you. 

They say a heatwave is licking the city, burying its citizen under the wet blanket of their own ambition, they say You picked quite a time to come. What they don't know is you've come to this city in its darkest hours, its shakiest knees, you have kissed and caressed its wounds and loved it for all its crooked faults. You will endure this heat, too. 

When he writes to say, I don't know who I am, you think he'd do best to find out. You think this work is his and his alone. At some point you whispered to the city who you thought you might be, and found the whisper reverberate against its walls until it became a song in your ears you could no longer doubt. 

You wait impatiently now for the minutes to pass until boarding. 

For the hours to pass until you may be home again.

Desert(ed)

You spend the time you should be working, looking instead at images of white sand dunes. You calculate average temperatures, altitudes, potential journalism assignments, forget that the work pays the bills because you do not want to remember anything that isn't bathed in wonder. 

The sun rises slowly over your valley in the west. An airplane ticket simmers in your backpocket, reminds you of civilization and a different speed of life. You know you can love that too. 

Know that love is not a limited resources, but a well which overflows with use. 

So you intend to use it until the floods create super blooms
in the desert.

For the both of us now

He says, let's talk. Says, the farm might be free. Says, here is more sunshine to put in your pocket, your dreams are good enough to come true. You google maps of the desert, google how long it would take to add a trip to Pie Town to the itinerary, google how quickly you can pack all your things into the station wagon and return to the road. 

Your father wrings his hands, worried at your homelessness, worried at your solitude. Worried most, perhaps, at your joy. You understand now why it was so hard to come by when you were a child. 

If you could tell that child now all the things that were to come, if you could give that child all the permission to breathe, and live, and carry joy, would she believe it?

Perhaps some things are best when they arrive
in their due time.

Should we say

The desert rains. He writes from across the state to see that you're still there, you write from across the table to make sure the dreams you built together still gleam. All you wanted were starlit nights. 

Fall arrives, the nights are cold but the days are sunny enough for you to believe in a day after this one. You begin to recognize the blood coursing in your veins again: the impatience, the itch to go, the little sparks of creativity zipping just past your line of vision. 

Fall arrives. 

You vow to let it mean something new at last can begin.

Practice

They call it a practice, but really it's a life.
They call it a life, but really it's practice that never ends,
that never reaches perfection, that
never sees you satisfied and resting on your
laurels. 

He speaks ills into the ether,
ignorant of his own hand
in the maelstrom, you think
out of this soil I grew, 

No wonder the laurels are
too gnarled
to rest on.

Cloud

Early morning, reverse commute, long lines of cars make their way up the mountain as you careen down it in peace. The coffee shop is quiet still when you get there, but quickly fills up with people who look like they might want to stay there all day.

You know you do. 

They sit in the bubble of a writing space, concocting stories out of nothing, creating magic out of the firing synapses of their own making. You adore them. 

A weekend stretches out ahead of you, strings of hours serving only to remind you what this time is for. You did not leave New York to sleep early and watch the days pass. You left New York to make more space for the whims of your interior. If you do not do that, you may as well go home. 

Take the road while it is available to you,
See what you find at the end of the headlights
and what you might make of it for the world.