Tip Toe

Hesitant steps into the morning, limbs stretching toward literacy, reluctant glances at inboxes and to-do lists, when all you want is to sink into a good book and wait for snow. The sun rises over frosted fields, the deer tucked away somewhere warmer, the coffee maker rattles itself into consciousness. Everything is silent. 

I had to set an alarm this morning, it tore me from sleep and intricate dreams of yet more travel, more unknown places and a break-up I had not seen coming. Even your dreams have it in for you. I think perhaps I do not need to begin to work before the sun's rays have even reached my window, but I forget there was ever another way. So many things are different now. 

I forget the life I used to live. 

Wonder if I should be making my way back to it. Or not.

Plot

Your word count plummets, your internal morale plummets, you think there may be a connection between your well-being and how much the words are flowing through you. A lifetime in writing, you cannot be surprised when you are a shallow husk without it.

Returns to the valley are surprising, quiet drifts of snow toppling over the mountains and silencing the beyond. Time moves in its own strange machinations, the deer make their way down from the hills, each day has a moment when you think nothing else matters but staring into the sunlight and marveling at the world.

You think maybe you should be making more of those moments in a day. 

November approaches in a speed all its own, your life approaches in a speed unknown, ten years ago you could have never guessed this is how your life would turn out but if you had to do it all again, what would you really change? 

The words come out jumbled, crooked, rusty. But out they come, and it feels like a win all its own.

Gärna Lite Till

I take a short cut over the mountain peak, in windy 30 mph roads through barren aspen forests that just shook off their shroud. Careen down into the valley at sunset like a kerouacian madman, music beating its way out of the little station wagon, not a care left in my lungs. I'm sure there was someone I was before this adventure began, but I can't remember her now, am not bothered by her demons. The nights are cold now but the days are sunshine, the world is a war now, but the mountains are full of awe and I think the answers are lying there just waiting, wondering why we haven't come to unearth them yet. 

Something is brewing in that small space behind my ribs. 

Just wait.
It's bubbling.
Soon, it'll spill
from my lips.

Durango

The remaining days race from my outstretched hands, not so much like rushing waters as a whirlwind that comes and goes, gives you another round of delight. I breathe it in deep, let it fill my chest with sunshine and gratitude, till I have room for nothing else. In the late afternoon, I hike out to watch the sun set over the bone white sand dunes and before I know it, I am all tears. 

I drive out of the desert with nothing but joy in my bones. The month behind me could just as well be an eternity for all the change it wrought. How does one put that into words? It comes out trite, comes out ordinary. 

You vow to try again. The road lies before you. All you have to do is drive.

use poetry

He sends me poetry, asks what magic I have to give in return. My skin is nothing but mosquito bites, my mind is nothing but billables, what could I possibly have to answer. The remaining days in the desert tumble from my open hands, I always squander infinity when I have it, tell me, doctor, what do you have to prescribe me for my sins. 

The hamster wheel spins and spins, rolling around you in shrinking circles. The crick in your neck is back, the violent winds after sunset. 

Who did I come to the desert to be? Who did I become?

The Fates laugh in my face and move
on.

som verkligen är bra

The dog scratches at the door late into the night, the Milky Way already brightly lit across the firmament. You try to walk her home, but she refuses. You think about love, about promises and commitment, how you stayed away from them all, how you assumed you could explain it to adults but never dogs, never children. 

You think maybe the same was actually true for adults, too, we only pretend it's not so, only pretend we can hear what someone says when they're breaking our hearts, when all we really hear is the blood rushing to our feet. 

Time runs out of my stay in the desert, I mourn it already, see the last sunsets slip out of my hands. Where did the time go, where did the life go, how can I not hold on to these few strands of gold that I've so carefully pulled out of the sand dunes, is this what it is to be human. 

I had bigger plans.

of Gold

Time plays tricks on you that all the decades have not taught you to understand. It moves quickly and slowly all at once, you are blessed in all directions. She says I wish you would stay, and you picture your two rowboats bobbing on the desert sea, taking on rattle snakes and solitude from opposite ends of the ranch. The dogs swim back and forth across the waves, making sure everyone is accounted for.

In the late and drunken night, she reads your Tarot cards and they speak only of adventure and discovery, only of clearing mist and you think maybe everyone is on the same journey. Surely not all these signs could align just for your strange walk through the worlds. 

Later, I sit at the shrine and count my blessings, speak them at the nameless god I do not know, think how strange it all is and how nothing really is under our control, after all. Wonder if it would be better to simply give in and coast along the current, see where it may take me. 

Nowhere I've rowed the boat thus far
har gotten me where I wanted to go.

Right

The dogs arrive before sunrise now, impatiently whining at the door. They come in, fur cold, tails impatient. Fall arrived, as though overnight. By afternoon, the sun has washed the chill from your floors, and you walk around the property in gratitude, the dogs following closely behind. 

We have to sweep a scorpion off the front door entrance 

I sit in the temple, meditating, see opportunities play out behind my closed eyelids. He writes to ask if I won't consider staying longer, and I wonder why I haven't thought of that myself. Sit in piles of poetry, letting my imagination run away with me, because such is my to-do list and who am I to question it. My skin grows dry in the desert, my hair my fears, but I cannot be angry. 

Everything paints itself in futures, when you've decided to believe there will be one to be painted on.

Air Quality

Here, take the flashlight, she admonishes, the 50-foot walk back to the trailer plunged in darkness, unknown sounds in the grasses. But I turn the flashlight down and look up, and a shooting star streaks across the length of the sky. Unasked, out of nowhere, but clear as day. You laugh into the dark night, your last steps to the front porch a little lighter, even as you don't know what you're meant to be asking for. 

The unplanned day ahead, with endless hours meant only for writing, tell you you already have it in the palm of your hand.

You asked always for unlimited miracles of time spread out around you. It's proving hard to come by. But it doesn't mean there are paths through the thicket, doesn't mean there is still air left for you to breathe.

Stay

The dogs scratch at the door at all hours, now, have expanded their home turf and found unused prayer cushions on the floor for rest. I haven't the heart to explain to them how all things will be over, how my love is only ever fleeting. It's too on the nose, even for me. I go to bed with a knot in my gutcannot get myself to relax. 

The piles of fur amass in every corner.

You're already running out of time, running out of daylight hours in which to breathe the desert, running out of this one long breath held in the in-between, you are no ready yet to let it all be gone.

Lately

She said "yes", he writes in that melodic way of his, and the years tumble out from under your ragged soles, turn to grains of dust underneath your finger nails he has
built a whole life while you were
idling,
found a footing while you were
desperately clawing at the insides of
a ravine, you
look around the desert for signs of
life
but the dry wind
catches
in your throat and
the drops of dew were
not
yours to put on your
tongue, they

turn to wildfire in his
absence,
send smoke signals across the
county lines, saying

I thought we grappled with the crumbling
columns
together

The desert returns with
nothing but
dustbowls

for answers.

Defeat

A sleep full of nightmares, I wake at unrest and unrested. Walk around the double wide trailer in a heavy daze, contemplate meaning where none is to be found. At the end of the gravel road, I stand in the stillness and marvel at complete silence. The tears wetting my eyes act on their own accord, like drawn out into a vacuum, precious spots of liquid in the desert.

Later, I sit in the strange temple and try to speak to the spirits. They arrive quietly, bringing with them more tears until the front of my shirt is stained and the space inside my head is empty. They told me all I needed, so I do not hold this weariness against them. My neighbor tells me a pickup truck has been driving too slowly past the ranch, asks if I want to borrow a gun. We are not in Kansas anymore. 

I no longer know where I am. Perhaps was the point all along.

Lone Star

The dog scratching your front door is what tells you you've overslept. The sun rises later these days, she comes in with cold fur and points to the open road impatiently. On our way back, the desert sand is already warmer, a coyote runs across our path, also caught aware by the times of day. We are all faltering under the illusion of time. 

I come home, cancel the things I thought I had to do. Clean my own slate, turn off the clocks. The desert is vast, and warm, and impossible to gauge. 

Start there. See where it takes you.

Beam

The sun sets earlier now, I get caught out on the running trail and make my way back in dusk, the first stars clicking on in the east. The run catches my unease, as it always does, washes it away with the sweat along my forehead. I sat in a rich neighborhood of Alamogordo and projected my questions on the yuccas of their gravelly front lawns.

The answers came, as they always do, in familiar simplicity. In continued curiosity and the only way that ever made sense to my crooked lifelines: through words. 

You will write them down,
and then,
perhaps,
you will see how they are to be read.

Way

The night is quiet, so quiet you could hear a moth fly. I walk to the end of the gravel road to the gate, looking for country deliveries dropped off in the night. The dog walks ten feet ahead, always protecting me against the nothings of the world. The land is dark, darker than you remembered it could be, and the sky is a tapestry of starlight. Someone must light them all, you wonder who. Wait for one to fall, but they remain steadfast in the firmament. 

There is a truth to be found in that. 

You do not yet know what it is.

Chariot

Spend an hour crying at puppies and military homecomings, spend an hour wandering grocery store aisles wondering if anything really matters in the long run. There's a great sadness in the depth of your well, and you spend too much time trying to outrun it, instead of bathing in it to find what it is made of. 

You're starting to think maybe the bathing is why you are here. 

Work beckons you for another day, another week, another lifetime. It feels like the last time, just before you stepped off the treadmill, just before you said it's not worth forgetting how to tell stories, to please you. Maybe this means something. 

Maybe the bottom of the well knows what.

October

The dog summons me from the other side of the back porch screen, says she checked her watch and we are late for morning walks. The days are cooler now, the wind brings a chill from the north mountains, your friends dig their heels into hot apple cider but you are not ready, not yet, you are still scared of the darkness that follows so closely in its footsteps. 

Work reminds itself to me, arrives like an unfortunate cousin, while my imagination is far away at sea. I thought I was telling stories, and here you are, asking me for spreadsheets. 

They do not know how to see the starry skies in the desert,
do not know how to find a diamond in a jewelry store.