Ends

If you’re looking for an apartment in Stockholm, it’s yours, he says, like it doesn’t ignite your illness four decades in the making. Like you haven’t crossed oceans for attractive real estate before and you know exactly how many steps it is from his front door to a downtown dip in summer waters you could linger in through fall. 

Like you weren’t currently itching for a change and your recent hits aren’t pummeling like they used to. Up the dosage. 

You wander through your final hours in Colorado, wondering at how fast July always insists on running, it doesn’t matter where you are. August approaching like a specter, forever both a summer month and a whisper of fall. You think your life isn't turning out the way you'd thought, but from another angle you realize it's exactly what you knew, all along. 

You can beat yourself against this wall all you like,
you still end up with yourself.

Sun Set

Pack the dog in the car, she is confused because she knows how to tell time and this isn't when we get in the car. Gather extraneous errands, all you really want to do is drive into the valley to see the sun set behind these mountains where you shelter, see if Colorado feels different at an angle, see if you haven't tried hard enough to love what appears lovable on pieces of paper. 

You were always bad about loving what pieces of paper said to love. 

I came to the Rocky Mountains to write. Instead it seems I spent the time carving out my insides with a teaspoon, arranging the muscle and sinew and blood in little piles on the deck, moving them around like chess pieces, desperate to knead them into smooth dough, into malleable clay I could sculpt according to another ideal. But these are the chess pieces you were given, this is the only body you are able to play. You father spends his days dying, spends his time bemoaning all that he didn't do, and here you are, 30 years behind and no better. God dammit woman, play your pieces or shut up. 

Somehow, you miss the sunset, catch it in glimpses along a backroad in a Boulder suburb, the dog sleeping peacefully in the backseat. She has no concerns, has accepted the odd outing, knows that as long as you're at the wheel and she is wth you, all is as well as it could be. You realize the sunset wasn't what you came for anyway. You came for absolution, acceptance, came to allow yourself not to fall in love. Your old landlord writes from Red Hook, says if you want to come back in September you can walk right in.

The thing is you already have so much love your heart runs over. 

For anything else to come in now,
it would have to be
fucking
magic.

Indian Peaks

Arrive early, when only a few cars litter the parking lot, a cool mountain air lingering along ankles. You don't know where you are meant to be going, take screenshots of trailheads before cell service disappears into the valleys below. The dog stops in every stream to frolic, you stare at pine trees and wonder why you haven't fallen in love with this iteration of wilderness yet. 

It's not for lack of trying. 

A few miles in, the trail begins to climb. Up, up, toward the treeline, toward the sky, switchbacks across flowering meadows and babbling brooks, patches of snow strewn like afterthoughts, and then, around a particularly treacherous corner, an alpine lake appears at the feet of cragged peaks. Someone once told me if the Appalachians were comforting grandparents, the Rocky Mountains were unruly teenagers, and I can see the resemblance. So much to prove, so much ending up only half right. 

The last mile before we reach the car, the dog is running: she sees the end in sight. (She sleeps the whole way home.) I was won over, for a moment, by the high mountains, but when we reach the outskirts of civilization, the wildfire smoggy valley floor, the perpetual afternoon overcast, it blows off me like dirt on the trail. 

My time in COlorado comes to an end. 

I haven't words yet for what to make of it.

2016

is it not better to be sad and free,
to be overwhelmed with emotion, 
rather than complacent and restrained,
underwhelmed and numb?

I am not, without thse demons,
and I missed them. 

I have no choice but to bring them along. 

On Writing

(The longer you've been away,
the longer you need to come back. 

But when you do, you'll find,
that all the treasures you left,

are here waiting.)

Pastel

The sunsets are long here, drawn out dusks that fade into night, as if saving their splendor for another night when maybe you aren't watching. You walk the dog at twilight, in the precise moment when deer and rabbits turn the color of the air, it's a clever wilderness, the dog loses her mind. Above your 7000 feet climb into the air, the sky turns pastel, pinks and lavenders and mints, you still remember the 80s too well to want them back. None of this pierces you. 

You came to the mountains to be pierced. 

A swelling moon rises, and the dogs of the neighborhood begin their crooked symphony. You feel contained indoors, feel restrained, you want to howl at the moon, too, but you keep the doors closed to keep at least your dog quiet. It's a weird claustrophobia. You miss the cacophony of Alphabet City nights. How well you slept to its melody. 

The dog barks at the glass doors. The night grows dark around you, a full moon hiding behind those forever clouds stretching across the valley. Everywhere you turn, pine trees, reaching for you with their spindly darkness, their heavy winters. You miss New Mexico, miss Montana, miss Red Hook with its Liberty sunsets. You wonder what you've come to Colorado to learn. 

You know you haven't learned it yet.
And so you cannot leave.

Deluge

In case of flash floods
the sign says,
climb to safety.

You wish the instructions were clearer. 

How on earth does one get out
of this ravine.

Creak

Old muscles creak with disuse, like forgetting lyrics to a song you thought sat etched in your heart. You know there was a time you couldn't go a day without this movement, without this tingle at your fingertips, and now you go weeks without thinking of it. The cruelty eats at you, as you attempt slow steps, attempt a trepidatious stumble, despair at your poor attempts at Creation, you grovel at the gods, grumble at the universe, think why have you forsaken me, the ultimate in absolution. I am not responsible for this collapse, this ruin is not my fault, why did you leave me this way.

I look up at the valley below, dark storm clouds spreading across the emerging plains, a cool wind breaking the heat wave through the pines. In a clearing, a broad, unrepenting rainbow stands straight at attention, reaching for the heavens, unwavering, shimmering. Unasked for, except you asked for it. Except you asked for anything and everything, you yelled at a ghost in the sky, pleaded with the Magical Unknown for just a morsel of enouragement. 

The gods can lead their pawns to water. They cannot move their muscles, too.

Petrichor

The heat wave breaks, not in a roll of thunder but in a dusting of droplets. They leave the canyon smelling of petrichor, of warm, humid, earth, of something else. It makes you think of longing, and chasms inside your chest, echoing voids of loneliness, wounds unhealed, just covered over, perpetual scaffolding. 

The dog lies underneath the piano stool as you play. You want it to be a compliment but know she’s simply waiting for bedtime. You think you’d best not get a dog of your own just yet, your schedule would morph into a canine clock, your habits suddenly leashed. She barks at ghosts in the dark woods outside the window. You’ve resigned yourself to yours and wonder if you’d be better off barking. 

There’s poetry in there somewhere still, in the dark woods, in the chasm. There’s poetry in the petrichor and you’ve stopped transcribing it, it litters the ditches like banned single use plastics. 

Because what good is poetry without a voice? 

It clutters the arteries,

strangles the lives below. 

Absence

Two months is a long time when counted in minutes and days, but much longer still when counted in moments. How many moments have I not gathered into my pockets since last we spoke, how many spring evenings and airplane tickets, long morning drives through West Virginia woods and Red Hook farewells with fireworks behind the Statue of Liberty outside a kitchen window; that the stories lie unspoken seems like a cruel twist of a vise around your already crumbling heart. 

I am sorry. 

The truth is I tried to stay away, tried to determine if there were other creeks where my stories could bob and weave, like leaves or boats made of bark. The truth is, I tried to stay away, thinking I had lost a magic that I seem unwilling to accept living without. 

The truth is, I don't know why I go away sometimes, and I never expected you to stay. 

A young dog lies at my feet, a Colorado valley lies at my feet, summer is sweltering in my every step across the American heartland, but the mountains were always cooler, the West was always quieter, I revel in silences not heard in months. It occurs to me I am still out here in search of the Pearl. 

I wonder if the search is what life is. 

The Pearl a mirage at the edge of the horizon.