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It is all green

and blue, great big extreme blue

bigger and deeper than any ocean

and on the hills

yellow

pink and white

The rivers are gurgling, spilling out

raucous muddy browns

swirling sloshing whites

Small birds with emerald heads

bounce up off the fence wire

opening wings wide

only as big as my hand

suspending themselves

still as a picture

against the wind

that skins up the ridgeline

The smallest, shortest pink flowers

unfurl themselves all over

across the rocky ground

happier than I am

maybe ever have been

It is the state flower – yes

I had considered

but the state of the flower

its countenance towards the awing endless blue

and soaking sun, the hum and twittering

buzzing, eruption of song

its joy, ever brief, to be here

smiling among each other flower

taller, grander

yellow, white and purple

it is the state of this flower

I had never considered.

like a tirade against me, it rains down. Onslaught after onslaught, the house shutters and the skies strobe with light. My dog noses onto my face as I gasp for breath between sobs curled next to the bathroom heater. It drowns out all feeling.

There are buds in those garden beds, how could You be so cruel! I prance out red streaks burning on my face and dash my slippers into puddles, heave tarps over what I can. The pellets are the size of corn chips, some grand as marbles. For the first time in as long as my memory holds I gorge the heaviness in my lungs out into the air like the weakest battle cry. Another pouring spells down, and the smallness of our lives is thrust on me.

He humbles in the wake of His mercy, in the down-tearing of all that is good. Far away through the telephone my man will have no more to do with my pain and suffering, nor will he subject himself to challenge of solution. We run in cycles, he says. He has decided this without mercy. I turn away. Face He who stands ahead, silent with no pity and no grace in His eye. Smaller again I shrink.

In this town I wonder who else is gnashing their teeth to the sky, crying out in anguish. With so little to lose and so little to suffer from, who else curls in the corner as a sullen wet dog? Who stares to the darkening treeline, branches carved out in a black clutter of lines, and opens themselves to the rage that too comes with His love?

On my walk just before the thunders bellowed, I saw clouds quickly descending the hillside. At the time it seemed beautiful, though I drove home quick.

I struggle today in the name of us, a difficult day to find faith in our path,

focus my mind on conversations not yet had, unable to quell parts unanswered.

I know you are busy now, hundreds of miles off and away.

Unresolved in my own efforts to make sense of all that is and all that will be,

losing traction, I am unled. I do not feel led.

Words you spill to calm the water warm as they are lack substance and body,

and worry these are old wounds I can’t help but pick. It is the time and space

between where raw edges bud their heads in the sun.

Are these old habits that fester and pull me to stray? Withdraw into a shell

so small only toes jet out and I am untouchable. A cold home of a child alone.

I am doing my best, believe.

So badly to follow you, a want that feels unquenched, a path that wavers,

where do you go?

The bathwater is half salted by just my eyes and it is hardly noon.

One year ago I wrote that we were falling quietly apart, separate paths pulling us

away as tides. Faith is renewed as I write today, though in source not us.

How far can a sea-swallowed noted bottle travel in one night?

I domesticated myself to you. Us is a bigger concept than I.

Where will the horse go, off lead and alone, under setting big sun?

Just that time of year, I suppose.

Small flecks of snow

move down so slow

in front of the church

out the kitchen window

.

Each moving along

waltzing on and on

like a soul

ground below, then gone

.

There across the lot

it is my flake I spot

drifting free and pure

filled with fear I am not

.

In flesh it’s silly how

I struggle to find you now

oh God, my God

what a gift of life you allow

could it really be 12? because they keep saying 13 makes more sense, 13 moons and all. I used to see it that way, or beg it that way, but it seems like an awfully big lie to maintain for generations. 12 is also a better number, or a safer number, as I see it.

I entered the new year on odd feet, confused in my path and shaky. in all the mirrors I scoffed, at my man threw gripes. thank God he shook me back to myself. there is worry in the pit of money, of ability, I am the ultimate imposter and caught in the act. what good is all the worry and shame, anyway? fixate on the surreal nature of our lives, cash has no meaning (beyond the very threatening, assigned meaning) and am I free by this? no, let it be real and let me push myself to freedom, excel beyond the bounds I have set myself.

tomorrow I can rise, select my biddings, tread on better, stronger feet. I am willing towards what I need, and willfulness goes an awful long way. dear God, thank you for a new year and all the lessons I have set forth on my path. I pray it gives and gives, I will too.

A steady stream of snow

falls down out the window

None of it has stuck

but this round keeps up

and hope stirs as we head

to our darkest days

At least when the sun goes

all the light is held in

white skies and white hills

and takes up all the space

of sound which is quiet

dampened, swallowed

just the hush of flakes that fall

and singe on our skin

/

Earlier I smoked a joint in the bath

as the windows mirrored the sky

and the white earth, frost on glass

in my breath or the smoke

and the steam

Seasons really are feelings,

winter the most obvious

as I sat there like a ritual

Even when all is hot and in bloom

it is the same, even though

it isn’t white or brown or green

/

You’d never find me in a place

like California where you didn’t

get the chance to die every year

and live again

Not being able to put the damn book down, I stretched it out the best I could these past few weeks. In the coffee shop, 3 or 4 pages, and then a pause. My body muddled with an odd emptiness, a sadness, none of which are the right words.

I believe I have been fortifying myself in her character, Dalva’s, that is. Her hardness and her loneliness, her grace and age. These past months I have been in solitude, more often than not. A relative term, when you live in a Montana “city” of course, but still standing. Unplugging myself from old realities and willfully set adrift. Ebbing, the waters have pushed me now back to shore. I finished the book just now and shall return it to the library promptly. I think.

Short of descriptions of her long and tight legs, little is actually said about Dalva’s “troubling beauty.” There is a cover on the book, I wonder whom illustrated, that alludes to her dark, stoic, stunning features. Twice I have been told I look like this, and I wonder to my own face at forty-five. My own notions of love and need and destiny.

I wonder what my grandmother has thought of the book, and I urge myself now to write her a letter while this is all still fresh. Few people my age read, it seems. Likely most are still bogged down in some sort of schooling, ingesting texts with predetermined conclusions and itching not to say the wrong thing at the round table. Suppose I can sit and complain and let the sun wash my face, or begin a book club.

One step at a time.

Idleness is a plague unique to the modern world, as far as science will count anyway. Surely other periods perhaps; when the printing press put many scribes out of work, or when humans became pigs in Rome. But today it is even less intended. Bitter is the fool who questions the world and forges a path his own.

I am sure I will write more, but writing after reading, and reading text so great. I may as well join the airport fiction list.

Grateful, lonely, altogether strange, continue pace one step at a time.

I wake with one eye swollen

and mantra in the mirror

I am seen and appreciated

loved and deserved –

The swelling is going down

and I walk into the early morning

down the road to the river

where the dog runs

lopsided, making a job for himself

and above a small sliver of moon

tempting me, blood soon

I relish her, gaze south to clouds lit up

by a sun that might as well

never show, the swelling is going down

and wind glides from one side

of my face to the other

Despite my lonesome,

I am loved and beautiful

and avoid looking at mirrors

or windows too closely

instead watch the dog

lazily chase a squirrel

who is also, likely, a good boy

and this time I gaze west

where the logged out hillside

glows softly and I can see

ocean one thousand miles off

in the brightening sky, I breathe

the cool morning in,

the swelling is going down

On the walk home the dog

listens well and I gaze south and west

and the moon softens

taking rest in the blueness of

her bed, at home

I look at myself

beautiful, loved, seen,

the swelling goes down so far

my eyes vanish

falling from my face

I cook eggs, alone meal

the dog has eaten and sleeps

now in his chair

The room is cold, I step outside

and feel the heat on my skin

The wind rifles across my body

and around like a cocoon

This I hadn’t noticed before

I am suspended, it is warm

and I see no sun at all

Downtown is covered in a cloud. There is no sun in sight, and time passes without memory. The church down the block wavers like a mast, and beyond all the spiny trees and buildings slowly vanish into the shroud.

These days are like dreams, yesterday too bright and hanging on all the moisture in the air. Now enwrapped like an advent calendar scene, this world could be swallowed at any moment and without trace.

Among each of the homes in the mist is a stove on and a broth bubbling. There are few sounds that pass around, a crow panging or a bus lurching to a stop as a girl in an orange dress and a white dog haste across the street.

The thick air emulates a mystery. Each person removed from another, despite sharing one cloud. We retreat to our depths. Pumpkins slump on door steps with beads of sweat. No one hardly looks another in the eye out of fear of breaking the trance.

In the dreamlike state of this town, each soul is far off, conspiring the demise of their lives as they know it. Seeking foreign pleasure and ill-advised desires that might vanish in the mist as they occur. Those lonely are the most vulnerable.

Those alone are dawdling on, dancing in the dreams that never die. What better measure of self-assuredness, a lone wolf the sole renderer of his fate. In the cloud shroud, separation between the physical and the ethereal is minimal.

That is the trick to self control, rather control of reality? Sleepers who lie alone and wake alone might as well wake to their penthouse and maid, wake to their homestead and wife they pine for. Alone, pining, just as a dream eternal.

The lonely ones pace to regulate, fantasize themselves out of the low spells, only to become reckless in their cause. Desperate in the shroud and seeing reality drift off into nothingness up the slope of hills, morality greys too.

A lonely girl in an orange dress dreams and moans to a man not her lover, a man who passes eyes and brazen smiles. A man certainly alone; a man leading a life unfamiliar and unhinged on another. Why does one lean into these piercing thoughts?

On the stovetops, the broths cool to feed the children. Down the street, birds gather in trees not quite empty of their leaves for some private meeting. Those alone control the scene until the sun returns.

If snow comes, we might never be found again, dreaming ourselves back to and from sleep, the orange girl thinks. She hasn’t woken up in weeks.

and begging a sculptor, its seems

Told no, turned away

or I may cast off my dreams

What is this madness

driving my days, a full moon body

taken by a woman’s craze

It stuns in my tracks, like I am watching a show

and gasping and pleading

not to go, yet there she rolls

fast down a fatal steep slope

pining for freshness, lustful elope

I am a ghost walking in her

flustered at bright and big eyes,

where a hand guides my back

brief, rushes start up my spine

Should it be so easy

to unsettle my soul

the moon is still lurking

I do not yet know

The force propelling

moves along my hips,

these big browns of mine beautiful

I cannot move my lips,

have I truly never been told this?

/

I am looking through a mirror now, watching my life.

The woman playing it out may as well have a knife.