Fall, City

The morning after the first full moon
(I am back);
I looked at it for hours.
Aware
of the city
traffic, power, humans
trying
to fix everything
from the inside. So much
sound, means
nothing, still

it hums
like a rainstorm, a congenital
heart, so painfully
inconsistent. Here

dawn is sleeping.
Here a squirrel stares silent
from the branches of a fallen tree.
Here a black tomcat’s tail flicks up,
down.
He is so cautious.
My eyes never leave his back.

Where are the strong trees;
the ones baring scars year after year,
that never die?
Where is the blessed moon,
the one that finally erupts up over the
horizon like a silken tide, then
slides its belly behind the clouds,
a cheap farewell.
Where is the fast twitch of a
tail; the consistent

heart, the sudden thrust
of exhilaration upon
awakening

here?

Entropy

If you walk just far enough off the track,
through the mallee scrub, the sugarwood,
through all of the
severe branches, over the driest
of earths, crunching stone and scat
under foot, you will find
the bones
resting
under the smoldering eye of the sun.
Not small bones,
not fresh.

I sit close enough to see the white
adorning the ground like jewelry, and wonder
how and why and
when the bones first fell.

Instinct tells me not to go
where the big predators go,
but here, in the southern desert heat,
it is the cat, the
fox, the wedge-tail eagle, and man
that draws the most blood.

When so many years have passed and
we are gone, not
only from this land but from this life,
and the feathers fall like cotton, blown
in the wind, and
the flesh of everything roots in the belly of
another,
will only the bones remain of some wiser and
more simple
existence?

In my own skin, the bones ache.
For the earth—for a
resting place, for the bleached skin of the
sun to strip away everything and
expose me
from the inside out.

I wonder where they will end up,
here,
or in American soil,
burned in a forest fire in 2052,
ground to a fine powder or thrown,
with a heavy bag of weighted words,
from the peak
of a chaotic mountain
top.

What Love Is

Show me
what I loved
before I knew what love
was. When I thought
love
was cuddling
with the kittens, kisses
at bedtime, drive in
movies; when I
thought love was
Christmas lights, hot
baths, lilacs,
and thunderstorms. Before
it became

waiting
on a phone call
doing or saying
the right thing
being strong enough, slowing
down and hoping
I love you
is all
we will need
praying
every decision
the right one.

Against My Better Judgment

Against my better judgment
I tried to keep you safe
with love and promises;
with storm windows
not nearly thick enough, the glass
beaten senseless by the same rain storm
that’s been beating down
for years.

In the backyard, a childhood
lingers; remembering
my plastic frog pool catching wind,
taking off, a rolling dime
tearing through the backyards.
He ran, with longer hair then, and a
promise that was never kept—
not that day, not the day they were divorced,
not the day I broke down on both knees
begging
with a broken heart.

So when you tell me you are afraid
in the quiet dark of Saturday night, I
do the one thing that would have given me
more than any word could,
and I hold you as if my own life
depended on it.

But in that strange embrace
I think of my father, the things that have been
lost, that were never owned.
Is it a burden to believe that everything
is possible?
I never saw that pool again and I couldn’t
tell you one dream I had
then
that came true.

All I have are these arms, sometimes so thin, so
shaky, but I tried
to wrap them around us both. I tried
to grow roots,
something we could climb for years; something
to protect us from the storms we would
unknowingly begin spiraling toward
one another.
If only

they could.

There Are No Fairytales

The sand girl, structured on time,
with thoughts as fleeting
as the wind. Directed, and distracted,
she is a lover with no home
that sticks.

She lingers too long, craves too much.
(She should be more grateful for her time). An
exploding flower desiring sunlight, water, constant attention
for growth; she unfurls that beauty
one slow soft petal after another. Still,
in the cold nights of September, the petals will always
stiffen, haunting a past of colors and wetness, embracing
an impossible future
without warmth.

She craves to be covered
by the words she misses most-
the symphony of sweetness from a love that is
other than. The things she craves hike in
these distant peaks without her,
they make friends with longing, and
each other. All the while time does its dirty
work, reducing us all to sand. To cravings
and memories; to an involuntary heart
simple and beating.

She always looks skyward first,
in the morning. Her body swollen
from letting go
of another dream.

There are no fairly tales
here.

Need Freedom

James Burle has been many people. Last night, at the sleep lab, he told me he once was a professor of majors. And before that, a movie star. Holding his hands in a V he moved them away from his chest and smiled. “See?” he said proudly. “Move-V.”

Now we’re waiting together just outside the hospital doors. It’s 5:45am and the cold keeps me awake, but James seems unaffected. He wears only pants and a light sweater, his fat fingers reaching for his second cigarette in five minutes. I watch him rip the filter off and throw it to the ground. A no smoking sign hangs nearby, but James doesn’t notice, his whirling blue eyes never settling for a moment. With the thin paper dangling from his lips, he fumbles in the deep pockets of the Dickeys he wore to bed the night before.

“I bought these six months ago,” he had told me earlier, pointing to the overalls. “I wear them everyday.” He finally pulls five lighters from his pockets, sifts through them until he finds the red one.

The second cigarette stirs up a string of coughs so hard I begin to cough too, forceful into the dawn, my own breath puffing up like smoke. He looks in my direction, his eyes watering. He looks away. He hadn’t met my gaze all night.

Earlier, he asked, “Are you homeless?” And I smiled, thinking of my clean clothes and the fact that I was working when we met. “It’s okay if you are,” he said, his voice sincere. “You have rights.” I thought of the mental illness in my own family and nodded, knowing that I, like so many others, was possibly one diagnosis and a paycheck away from sharing the streets and fighting for space with this man.

The wind outside erupts and sends the cold next to my skin; the sun is a gentle orange to the east. “I’d sure like a cup of coffee for myself,” James says into the shadows. “I been drinking coffee for 42 years.” He nods. In seventeen days he will be 53. He twitches his head, his hands, mumbles.

“Here is something for yourself,” he begins, hands already fishing for another smoke. I lose him for a moment in my breath. He forms his hands into a V again, moves them away from his chest. He looks my way but not at me. “You are a movie star,” he says. “That is something for yourself they cannot take away.” He laughs a little, an odd sound coming from his lips.

I am heavy with the silence that follows.

James told me they beat him and the rest of the residents at his group home. He told me the doctors are involved in a conspiracy to take away his rights. They told him he would never be discharged. I brushed it all away like dirt, shrugging him off as a poorly medicated mind. But then I began to wonder. Before, instinct had always told me whom to believe.

I’d barely batted an eye at James’ disfigured feet, yellow toenails ragged. The result of malpractice, he had said, angrily. I remembered the way he stirred his before-bedtime coffee with the pointed end of his comb—oblivious, content. Like a child. I remember seeing scars.

“You know what, professor?” I say, for he wants to be called that and I want to give him something. He doesn’t look at me, his eyes wide and staring straight ahead. I follow his gaze, realizing I have nothing to say. Or rather, what I want to say has become it’s own muddled word salad, perhaps incomprehensible even to James Burle.

We sit quietly, the ember from James’ cigarette a slight nod to the warmth between us. At 6am a white van comes to pick him up. He doesn’t say good-bye as the heavy metal door slides closed; there is no wave as the wheels turn toward the exit, the farewell plume of exhaust like a lung-filled cough. I get up, the sun an orange burn across the pavement.

Back in the sleep lab, I can still smell his skin; still see his wild eyes and thin hair. I look over the lines of the patient questionnaire that James had filled out and to the typed word, Comments. Next to that, I find a space, now filled in with his fierce bold lines, block letters that eerily mimic my own: NEED FREEDOM.

Written so hard the pen nearly pushed through the page.

All Day, In Love

There are humans waking up today
in love, sleepy smiles, sliding skin, lips wet with still
dreams, pale thighs, un
refusing.

Remind me what it feels like?

Running wildly through a seething summer
rainstorm, splashing up sentiments,
of past lovers, dancing in a puddle the size of
Denver. In the baking city streets are
people still like poems?

Sad innuendos, cool alliterations, caving metaphors that
unbuckle all but the most
determined among us. Do we not fall in love
with these passing faces, even for a second?

Floating by like dandelion duff, humans,
eclipsing some of the worry of living,
thick with their own personal forests; individual
worlds, spinning,
desiring, to crawl inside,
turn over leaves, dig in the dirt
of one other, dip our toes in those salty
rivers—the ones with the current so fast
it begs.

Meanwhile, the bees continue their rhythmic tango
from one soft, precious flower to the next.
Life goes on. But even the weeds
suffer from too much growth, all this wetness,
expanding, loosening...in the burn
of the sun the skin actually tightens, a
hard shell, it crawls off the body,
onto another
(sometimes any other) who will
accept it in one soothing cool embrace as
his or her own.

Remind me

(the light reflected in a mad whirl, that
lingers all day, in love)

what it feels like?

Fuel

You would never think
I would be this shy, would you?
Pink hands, soft words, just a
smile, she once said, you always
have that goofy grin.
Shy, like the last autumn
leaf attached to the last
aspen, holding onto holding onto holding
on but in the end
we all fall, into space, into a great
wide emptiness, into a tragedy, a
relief.

I have forgotten how to pray;
how to
kneel, how to
sing, how to
beckon reason from a
faceless god.
I have forgotten how to ask for the things I need
like food, shelter,
peace,

Wine
on Friday and the air is already full.
From my first floor flat I listen
to the leaves scurry about the porch,
scraping like fingernails
on wood, moving about in a small
whirlwind, the trees watch this and I
imagine them growing
envy, with their dark branches and deep
roots, trees that
stood still long before my
birth.

No, I am not
as cold as my skin nor as blue
as the blood pulsing near the surface.
Maybe just a season then, the silent
collapse of the living,
The transformation to something that was
bound to happen
anyway, maybe then
I’m
Fuel.

The Horses

How could he know what lies beyond the twisted fence.
I caught him staring there, one day in November,
a statue, his wide eyes fixed on the nearby
field, the bare bones of the cottonwoods lining the
river, the angle of the sun
falling.

I imagine the sharp edge of the horizon must stand up
like a mystery, an annoying secret.
What could possibly exist beyond the hill.
What of the living things taking up root
behind that gnarled stand of trees.
The thorns of the metal fence keep him staring.
Forever
if they want.

Long ago his legs would have stretched
across the empty miles—carrying
food, water—muscles overlapping one
another, heart flaring at the eruption of
fresh grasses pounded
under hoof, and later,
at the distant idea
of rest.

These days we cage most things beautiful.
Inside four walls where nothing
can escape and never learn enough
to want to.

Does that make them ours?
Does that make him mine?
If he doesn’t belong to himself anymore—then who?
How does one decide what to own and more
importantly, when and why to own it?

I watch him, vacant in his stance,
maybe he only thinks about what horses think about.
Maybe he is content, simple, with the sun
on his back. But every so often
I see a leg twitch, a tendon, a
blink, an instant
when he is as he should be, as he
was born—wet and shiny,
a wilderness aching
in both eyes.

There is light there
nestled
like a soft stone.
There is a darkness settled in close
around the edges
but there
is
light.

It Wasn't The Wind

It wasn’t the wind
that made the day glorious.
Who among us hasn’t witnessed the gallop
of dust and debris—hair swept
silly, lashing into the eye; who has not
walked headfirst into a force so great
it grows
sideways across the earth; it
lifts the arms and then throws
them up and then throws them
back.

It wasn’t the wind that startled us all
into a liberating stance.
It was the leaves.
Thousands of them—millions—tumbling
over one another, bursting
out of the shadows, quickly buried
unburied,
free, the leaves like a ridiculous
autumn blizzard making the streets,
the sidewalks,
even the foliage yet to fall,
glorious.

On any other day,
in any other season,
there would have only been the wind,
a black and white cloud,
life—
I would have
closed my eyes
to the lashing, the repeated
sting, the pile of gold
building steady at my feet.

I would have forgotten.

Peru and the Salkantay Trek June '09

If I couldn't feel the sun, I would surely be done

playing like a child, laughing like a toothless old man

obliviously happy, all the suffering of my middle years

beyond me.

If I couldn't feel the immensity of these mountains I would

be cold to the touch, aching to the bone with longing

for something that much greater (that much more)

that much stronger than myself.

But the sun grows weary of holding up the

weight of each day and if I cannot afford the

calm tranquilo that darkness bestows, I am

broken - like an expanding mountain range that

pulls itself apart to feed the earth below.

La montanita - a little mountain,

that sustains itself through sacrifice, self-preservation

and an ever present blissful exposure to all

that is real, or imaginary, or hard, or

this.

Friends,

Nine women, from America, Canada and England finished the 5-day Salkantay Trek last evening after spending a very fullfilling day at Machu Picchu. Salkantay means ¨wild mountain´¨ in Quechua, one of the native languages of the Andes and it was a perfect backdrop to a thus far very unforgettable journey. I cannot tell you how spoiled I have been! Walking into camp, our tents were already up, a dinner table set (complete with fresh wildflowers and candles) and our 6am wake up call even came with coffee in the tent! Our cook was amazing. Amazing! How will I ever backpack in Colorado without such amenities?

Mt Salkantay is nearly 19000 feet tall and the Salkantay Pass rose to 15200 feet which means I successfully broke the 14000 foot barrier! Of course, now I just want to climb something higher. All in all the trek was roughly 30 miles, very steep and undulating (our guides would insist the trail was plano, flat, but then we´d be huffing up hundreds of meters of steep. Dios Mio!) The last two days found me scrambling up optional peaks (including Machu Picchu Mountain where I had a small ceremony for several of you along with my grandfather - who made this trip possible). I have been feeling stronger than I have in a long time and so open to the love and spiritual energy emanating from these mountains and people.

I have to say, it was amazing to pass through these very poor villages, including La Playa, where the children run from the fields begging for sweets - so "poor", to the material eye - yet they often seem SO HAPPY. I think much of it has to do with family - the Incas believed strongly in family and it was always the strongest bond. I imagine my life back home, how complicated we sometimes allow ourselves to make our own lives, and I want to remember those children running, giggling and looking at me with the sweetest eyes. I am excited for this next phase of my life and to pursue medicine and hopefully lead a life of service towards others.

The small piece I wrote above i just plucked from my journal while I was resting on top of Machu Picchu Mountain looking at the ruins. Stunning. As a writer I love the somewhat game of trying to describe everything, but some things, my friends, are simply indescribable. The Andean people believe the mountains are like great protected mothers - the glaciers feeding the valleys and the people below. There is so much that is beautiful and unexpected but when you get right down to it, these people worship the mountains - a phenomenon I more than feel kindred with.

Today we are in Cusco exploring the vast temples and churches. Tomorrow we leave on a night bus for Lake Titicaca and from there I think Bolivia. I am lucky in that 3 of my traveling companions speak fluent Spanish so I can hack my way through some choice phrases and pick up what I need to get by. Fake it til you make it, baby!

Prey

The fox, a soft tail tucked over
broken bones,
knows
how to lose himself.
Awash in the tall grasses
he waits
for everything to heal
just enough.

The luxury of time
(when we are healthy). And
(when we are not)
how every breath
ticks by – an immeasurable second,
an ache in our fragile, somewhat
forced chemistry.
A match of wits
begins, the most valuable
neurons, that need no rebuilding, that
(predator) prey
stalk, hide--
Love
is like this, hunted
down
as if
it is the only thing
capable
of feeding
a soul.

The fox remains
in the tall blades, sunlight tricking that
red fur to green, into
shades of browns, yellows.
And even the most valiant beast
among us knows enough
to lie down, be patient
and wait
for the glaring eye
of the moon
to rise; a
gale force wind to decimate
every last scent
of desire, a drumming rain to
wash the pain to just
below
the surface,

so we can run.

Caterpillars

This is what I remember:
Caterpillars
rolling
into a massive configuration
the size of a fist,
precariously tipping in the wind
the branch

bends.

Monarchs
she tells me
but I think differently
tiny kings
queens
with white
wings I say, imagining
the beautiful flutter
lifting
into the sunlight
against a backdrop
of black.

The thunder
builds into the afternoon, the hail
will sting
but my skin is waterproof, my father's voice
echoes truths, forgotten.
Is not every day outside
beautiful?

A fidgeting body
ascends.

The caterpillars
crush themselves
into the white fur
of one another
flush
against bark
writhing a
cocoon, something
bold enough to contain
all the beauty

to come.

Comprehensive List of Things to Bring

The list
(sticks, a knife, sunscreen, tape)
written, for a lifetime of ailments
one might expect to find. In the
wilderness we need
protection
from the cold, wind, heat,
starvation; from animals, insects,
each other; from the sacred
solitude, the one
where God finds us sometimes; where
unhappiness often resides like a
plague.

Peel back the layers
of gauze and betadine, the callus
covering the palm, the soft plastic shielding our eyes
from the sun, and one might find
a human
exposed, with
a bewildered stare, skin supple
as wet rock.

To listen carefully is to
hear a hammering
in the distance, structures going up, walls
coming down.
Nothing lasts and even if it does
it needs attention and
support and
blood
mixed with the paint.

How much glue, then,
how many nails and rolls
of duct tape to get through a life?
How many lists created, and forgotten,
endlessly tipping, like cartwheels
in the wind; how many sticks that simply
snap under the weight of our own
breath?