Hiatus, episode I

Road trip. Canada. Not a jetset, but a hiatus nonetheless. I am going to cold, ear-flap-hat-wearing, cheap-beer-swilling, ice-fishing, beaver-trapping, eh-saying...paradise.

Don't send a search party.

I don't want to come back.


Iggich isuat*

Mountains do not end here.
We’re stuck between them, a dry and winding
road throwing us together—

Aurora and three dogs
and me at the wheel,
victims of last year’s forest fires

sentinel over the pavement,
black and withered,
and Aurora sneaks the dogs

cheese crackers
and tells me how she strips now,
her name’s brilliance

reduced to this: blue and purple
disco lights
flashing

on the parts of herself
she hides now in scarves, in long hemp
skirts, just as her face was hidden

when I picked her up,
thumbing her way back to town
215 miles from home,

and we share the last cheese cracker
while the mountains siphon
us from the city,

burnt cottonwoods’ limbless trunks
soaking up our talk like water,
like Aurora’s dream

of planting strawberries next year
is the river they long for,
the glacial blue

nourishment they so desperately need.

All you need is love: They weren't lying.

I wonder if anyone else has ever felt this way: as if there's a vessel connecting the heart to the world itself, to the faceless, nameless, malleable world, a conduit for all its components-

shame, winter, sheets of kelp washing ashore, happiness, the way it feels to lie in a melting snowbank with the sun shining.

For me, it is impossible to block any of this out, to continue life in the relative cloister of my own apartment, the breakfast table, the short & dusty streets between one errand and the next. I know so many people (so many people I love, good people, the best) whose lives consist of this, a sort of confluence of domesticity and fear. They call themselves merely "realistic" or "cautious". They relate stories of relatives who've had their purses stolen, their trust misused. They don't do well at disguising their inherent mistrust of the world, of the people in it, and most of all at their own ability to adapt, to leave a zone of comfort and handle what's being presented to them.

...when I get to feeling like a Dust Bowl-era photograph, I have to leave, or fall in love...scores of people trudging down the walks, heads bent against a punishing wind...

That's what, I assume, it must feel like to be truly stuck, but 'stuck' is a state not of the mind but in the heart, a clogged line, an obstruction in that what we're doing seems to represent that in which we have faith. We had faith,

once, that digging this posthole and standing this solid piece of wood, and framing our lives like houses might be enough,

was what it took to build a life in the first place: a checklist of things one is supposed to have, according to someone else. We had faith that we'd be happy with materials, prefabricated. These people I know-they've had faith all their lives that they'd be left alone, free to

block the interchange of story & song & news about the weather if they choose to. To misunderstand and point fingers. Trudging on & on & on through a world they'd rather be closed to.

My friends have varying opinions. Some say it's ridiculous. Some think it's cute. Most just nod & smile, as if they know something I don't, when in fact they're hiding that they don't know anything about it at all,

the way a windstorm frightens someone into running outside, to cover the plants and hide the tools, forgetting to stand straight into it, to let it sweep through, blow something clean, leave something precious behind.

And they all do that, this rag-tag band of travelers, workers, & erstwhile thieves, the ones I let in to sleep on the couch, to share a meal & a beer, they all leave behind a little bit. Maybe a tiny gift (like the miniature jade elephants that hang from my pack straps, a gift from Shin of China, because I made dinner for her.) Maybe the soil from the soles of their shoes that reminds me it's time to be moving on myself, soon. Maybe just

a dozen different memories, all overwhelming, like something so truly joyous and funny that you've got to throw your head back to let the laughter out.

...I wonder how we survive without this, without the authenticity of other people, without some connection to the world that precludes self-preservation, without the little hairpin turns we take to move away from what's safe and comfortable and toward each other, toward what the world becomes through the eyes of others. I wonder what happens when literalism enters the phrase "You can't see the forest for the trees", when we drive on past the mountains without seeing them, without their pitch & peak entering us somehow, making us a little newer.

This happens to me every day-these minor movements like the pieces of a symphony, these little ways my heart is open & willing, willing even to be hurt or filled with sadness for the ways we hurt the land we live on, the people we live here with.

We all went out last weekend, the lovers, the dreamers, and me. We talked about places we'd already been. We talked about going back. We tore the world apart with our critiques and our senses of humor. We put it back together with our dancing. We petted dogs & walked on the trails,

where the sun over the inlet is like a bowl, its obstructed half full of cloud & snowstorm & blue.

I've never laughed so much in my life, & the vessel that is my heart is overflowing now, a surfeit of new friends & old ones, of implicit trust in the world, of backpacks & guitars & plans for everyone's future but our own. Full of uncertainty.

It feels a little like pain, this fullness of heart, like the whole world is trying to get in all at once, & just as I think I can't take it, someone says something funny, & we all laugh, & my sides are aching, and I think I can fly.

I know I can.
I know I can.
I know you can, too.

Letters I'll Never Send: II. A premature baby, or preemie, is born before the 37th week of pregnancy.

You weighed about 2 pounds when you were born. We have a picture of you as a baby, just curled up in your dad's softball glove. My Mom


Mom,

It isn't fair.

I know you hate foul language, but it isn't fucking fair.

I tell everyone I have to believe in the inherent goodness, of everything. Of people. Of many people thrown together. Of the cosmos. Of God or whatever. I believe this because of you. Because of Dad. Because two people who thought it was the right thing to do picked a scrawny, sickly baby out of an adoption catalog, and paid the money, and signed the forms, and gave that baby a better life.

That baby was me.

And here's the thing: that's all they're trying to do, too, Mom. They're just trying to have a baby and give that baby a good life. And that baby is small, Mom, smaller even than I was, just a pin's head on a chart somewhere, on a screen that monitors vital signs: lung sounds, brain waves, heart.

How do you measure heart? How do you reach in and feel around and come up with the strength it takes to survive, to thrive against the odds everyone's set for you? They just want what you and Dad wanted: a healthy, happy kid. Someone to call their own. He's got needles in him, Mom, and IVs, and every day something else seems to go wrong, but we all keep hoping, don't we? We all keep saying 'it'll be OK'.

Because it has to be.

Because if it's not, it means that awful, unthinkable, unjust things happen to good people. To the best people you know.

To people who deserve happiness in ways that only those who have suffered prejudice and funny looks and snide comments and heartache deserve to be happy.

Because I'll lose it, Mom, if it's not OK.

I have to believe this, that the world is a just place. A place where a couple of good people who love each other can decide to spread that love to another being, can bring that being into the world and can raise it to love like they do.

And here's the weird part, the part no one will understand, the part that sounds crazy: I envy them this.

If you read the things she's written, maybe you'd see the picture too, the tableau in your head of how we hold on, one to another. The misty and blue-tinted portrait of what it means to love, when one's a seething ball of rage and worry and grieving and the other's got her legs in the air, trying desperately to hold life inside, hospital-gowned and prone.

Maybe you'd see what it means to love, when the chips are really down, when the whole table's been overturned. When you think you can't.

Because even if this does go south, even if this does go the way that everyone' dreading it will, won't they really, truly still have each other?

And most days, this is what I envy, Mom. This is where I see you, see Dad at the bassinet in the middle of the night, or in the dark at our house, when the power's out and all six of us are crying. I see the hard times, the penny-pinching, and then I see us all now, twenty-some-odd years later, knowing our Mom and Dad are still together.

Most days my heart aches, and there's no one there to share it.

It's not that love is pain. It's the other way around, the burden we try to take from one another, the hurt we don't try to hide, because we don't have to.

We're all praying for this tiny baby, in any way we know how.

Somewhere in the southern states, they're doing it too, hands clasped, voices quiet. And if it comes to that, they'll still be together, a tensed muscle and a contracting pain. A wave of hurt and an inadvertent outcry. What it means to force it, to strain, to cling a little. What it is to cry and to cry, and to refuse to let it all go.

They'll still have each other.

What is it that's I've got?

Letters I'll Never Send: I. "Thousands of demonstrators stormed a government building and imposed their own "people's governor". "

Scores of people lost their lives. More than 400 were injured. This is the day that changed the course of history in this small, mountainous former Soviet state. The BBC News

Love,

We miss so much here by way of revolution. Our news talks of the 'revolution' of the iPad, or on some runway in NYC. Things are 'revolutionized' every day: the blender, the espresso machine, the vacuum cleaner.

Who gives a shit?

They're revolting over there, love, where I'm supposed to go, an orange-hued spatter on a map of the world that I've rested the next two years of my life upon. Thrown a dart at it, and hoped it might hit. Light years. It's taking light years to reach the dartboard, and yet, in a day's time, the real revolution has rained down on that country, and now I'm keeping vigil, like so many others I know, waiting and wondering. It's a question for a WANTED poster: dead or alive?

It's not just my friend I worry for. I worry for myself, because these things are not, ever, unselfish. What kinds of new bureaucracy arise from an emergency state? I don't know if, or where, they'll send me now. I only know I don't want to be here, here where you can have only as many branches as your social network, who you've had drinks with over the weekend, here where the mountains-the very monoliths I escape into-are closing in around me, reminding me what I've not done, what I've yet to do. I've rested the next 24 months on this, on a village and a classroom and a landscape I've never seen, a language I've never spoken, an absence of things I've never lacked: perhaps running water, perhaps heat, perhaps you.

I miss you, too, the revolution/revelation of the smallness of your bed, the impossibility of sleeping apart. And this frightens me too-the ease with which we disappear into our individual continents: the bodies we shore up against, the dreams we pursue that finally consume us. What if there's revolt where I am too, where I am when I think of you: the certain shape of your lips and the cadence of your speech overrun by water, by the landslide of distance, of the way we say nothing when we do speak.

What if there's a revolt where they send me, where the people have been rising, for years, to this explosion of ideal, of anger against injustice?

What if I never get there?

These days, the sun rises early here. I drive through it every morning: the confluence of winter and spring, clearness and cloud, mountain peak and sky. It's beautiful. It's the most beautiful place on Earth, I'd say, even knowing there's so much of this place I've not seen, will never see. I don't miss you yet, for all I don't know.

I miss this already.

A world away, they're shooting policemen, searching for equal representation. The streets are red. My friend is buried in all of this, not responsive; no on can raise him, though god knows we've tried.

By nine in the morning, the sunlight is the color of asphalt. I'm waiting. I'm keeping a vigil for him, for these countries, for the ways you never kissed me on our first night together, alone.

More recent wall-oems

Note: 'Snyder' refers to poet and writer Gary Snyder. If you've never read him, I suggest you do...

And Snyder's been speaking to me all day, about 'wild' and what it means and how its only voice is ours, stilted with long un-greenness, a young raven calling like a cracked brass bell out across the snow, and there you are in that small town, and here I am in mine, no wilder today than when we first met, talking endlessly of the long way out, sustenance for our mutual loneliness abundant but parched, like crowberries shriveled and dried over winter, like the liquid sieved from the moss.

In seven hours, it's easy to say that one's done nothing, and that we did, winding driving through your favorite canyon, as if we moved through time and space like the stars do, hurtling past one another, stopping finally for black coffee at the diner, where, slowed to our real speed, the snow ceased to slant and fell straight down instead, a white curtain, lines of flakes like bits of data on a screen, dates, times, speed limits, our need to stay together one hour more, overnight, into the next day.

I hurry up and wait: for the ice surrounding the lakes to melt, for the sodden ground to dry, for wild things hibernating to rise and stretch and begin to eat, tearing down the new grass, the blossoms on the willows, the sharp shoots of fireweed that rush up the hillsides. I hurry up and wait: the days are not yet long enough, and the mated pair of eagles, snowy heads and black, black wings, rest hours at a time in the tree across the street. I wait for the hurry to begin, for the frenzy of dinners and drinks and the rush of melting snow, the newborn rivers and streams, the smell of glacier and silt and movement rising out of water that will someday chill, will soon enough freeze, will force us all into slumber, to wait out the perpetual night, wait for the blessed thaw.

"What better way to die, than in the pursuit of your passion?"

Only the good die young.

Great song. Enthralling sentiment. I am one vaccine (a polio booster shot, to be exact) away from completing this damned Peace Corps application. Months. It's been months in the making. Several months, and over a thousand dollars. Am I right in being disillusioned? Is it going to be worth all this?

I digress.

I wonder, and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't often, if my fate is already sealed. I find it difficult to envision myself as elderly, or even middle-aged, no longer as wonderfully mobile, elastic and sharp. As we all do, I wonder what it might be like to die, the moment of it. I realise one doesn't "wake up" from death.

I think perhaps I'll die young, somewhere far away from home, maybe even in Asia, or thereabouts, while I'm off fulfilling my duties, trying to make the world a better place. Or, having completed that task, with a pack strapped to my back, on the way or in the middle of some sojourn to another end of this earth, rattling along via, rail, sitting at the center of a crowded city square, on the trail in search of a body of water by which to rest my head.

I've resolved to work, as hard as possible, to be who I AM, not simply who it seems I should be.

It could be that this Self is immortal. Then again, it could be that immortality rests in what others think of as unrealised potential, as a book with its final pages torn out, the game of chess left arranged on a half-played board.

Wall-oems?

So, for the past few months, admittedly very sporadically, I've been posting these tiny little weird poems on people's Facebook walls. Usually, it's the result of writer's block: for some reason, I can always think of at least 6-8 lines of pure gibberish to spam someone with, while I find it impossible to sit in front of Microsoft Word and write, you know, a REAL poem.

Some might make very little sense to others, as the subject matter stems from my memories of places and specific outings or conversations with friends. One day I hope to see them published. So far, all I've gotten is rejections...But feel free to enjoy nonetheless...


Below are a couple:

*

It happens that way sometimes, a brisk wind all it takes to light half the world ablaze, to throw us into perpetual night, everything choking on itself like that great snake swallowing its own tail. I had not seen you in days, the month the ash covered us over, took into itself mountain and city and sickly, drying river, and though I felt need of your company, how could I have known? through the haze, the lowering yellow cloud of so many things burnt and burning, I could no longer tell: you may have been across the street, behind that smoke so thick I could not see but a foot ahead. You may have been silent, standing right beside me.

And some days we talk about Iowa, the flatness, the silk of corn tassels carpeting the horizon, how it smells of loam and sometimes of baking bread, and then one of us jumps, shudders a little with the memory of cicadas, their creaky high violin-noise throughout the night. We remember the dried husks they make while dying, that litter the sidewalks, that you can stuff with tissue paper: dignified museum displays, no longer insect but the thought of insects, wisps for legs, empty eyes, the thorax flaking off in pieces like old varnished wood, a detritus of once-life that reminds what we lose daily, that reminds us we have a skin at all.

One night when I thought that at least the sleeplessness would take me, I heard your buoyant footstep on the steps, and your voice, and the crystal clanking of the cheap wine glasses being pulled from their shelf, and my sleeplessness evaporated while we sat on the carpet consuming a bottle of red, blinking downy dog hairs from our eyelashes, the walls populated by your books leaning down on us benevolently, the woods outside humming with mosquitoes and bees and what sounded like bloom and bud and leaf, all venturing forth under cover of dark.