the thrill of possibilities

I've been madly scribbling down notes from interesting seminars lately, and mulling over possible dreams-to-make-happen for 2012:

#1) Katie & Pekos' wedding!! SB, Feb.
#2) Visit Elle in Colorado.
#3) Run Denver Marathon with her?

But besides this, I'd like to announce that I am now a grad-school applicant, to one-and-a-half programs so far, and one-and-a-half more (at least!) coming.

I love school, I love taking notes, it's been almost three years, and I am so excited!!

However, also exciting: knowing that maybe I will just move to Mexico instead. Wide open skies, honey.

And now to the dock where I arrive each night: to jump or wade into the waters of dreams, worlds where I am immersed, swimming, one third of my life, fluctuating between English and Spanish, kicking and pulling my weight through the blue. There are so many portals, so many doors to enter, and return to.

Sometimes I see you,
even we talk
Does this mean you also dream of me?
Or is it a only a projection,
a mere copy of you
sailing the waves of my mind?

When I dream of you, things are never settled,
never well between us
but perhaps they are getting there
or perhaps not.
Who can say?

Here where the subconscious rises to the surface,
submerged cedars and sitka spruce surfacing for air,
where fear and desire uncoil
loosen and probe their snaking possibilities
in worlds where you are only an actor,
an observer, and yet a participant.

You awake where you began,
to find your testimony forgotten,
and every dreamed truth lost.

But take regard, young one,
do not disdain what you have beheld,
for you will be a witness
on a fogged and shining earth.

should i resist the desert place?

In the Hiawatha Caves, on the trail of the Couer d'Alenes, we traveled in darkness
Pitch darkness I mean, where you can't even see your own hand held inches from your eyes.
Apparently there are creatures who live in caves so long, they lose their sight
generations later, their eyes themselves are also lost
they forget all light.

I pedaled fearful and exhilarated at once, praising a journey that can survive such darkness,
triply grateful for every ray of liquid gold on my skin, shining intervals between the deep
brownness that won't last.

Now in fuller sleep than I've had in months, piecemeal dreams still hover, uninterpretable:
Central American highways and roadside carcasses,
old pick-up trucks and exotic vines,
thousands of miles away from you
dry leaves of a thin reconciliation blown by dusty wind,
but mostly the heavy separation.

Riding through ghost towns, worn brick buildings, decaying into alpine fir,
I listened to the stories of the 1910 forest fire--the one that started in Montana and burned so far west
of train passengers waiting in tunnels for weeks,
water dripping down in the cool blackness
Of animals running to the caves,
a mama bird roasted with her wings spread over her babies,
found still crying and alive:
Love's recognizable silver paint.

There are a hundred pairs of thirsty eyes,
but yours are the ones that haunt my life.

break up your fallow ground

In the hot smell of pine and eroding cheapened soil,
I have not forgotten your scent.
Through tall red grasses, my footsteps beat the trail,
eyes on every crook and bend

I found the body of a locust there,
a cracked and black-eyed specimen
long as my hand, thicker than a finger.

Fields drank dry by these, I can hardly think:
a sky black with them.

Blossoms, red, yellow, pink, follow me everywhere
fleeting unwrinkled beauty pressed into journal pages, paper letters
preserved in mold and shades of grey.

My body, blossom-beauty, is covered in hiking bruises
bronzed by the strong sun, a large and hardened welt on my hip
left by Saturday's Honduran bee sting.
The insects here, like Congolese Driver ants, leave nothing untouched;
even the mouse in my small bedroom does its work.

Body of a horse, washed out in the rain
on the rocky road west of La Venta.
It appeared almost alive the first day,
an accidental slip into an awkward position,
the terrible stench the only actor refusing to play its part.
By the second day, returning, I found its carcass merely bone,
devoured by vultures centuries ago.

At the bottom of a muddy well, maybe twenty feet down,
all I could see was bones
teeth for the strung necklace.

Corpse of a man, left by vehicle in the street,
bag of groceries coupled at his side, blood neatly pooled under head.
His face was covered by a child's tee-shirt
shielding us from dead eyes.

No, I have not forgotten your scent,
or the firmness of your youth against the curve of my own,
and though my eyes are open,
I can't say I know the way in which to walk.

There were fields, I remember, of lupine & crown vetch & enormous dandelions,
and a great, glassy lake.
We were walking, singing songs with throats that needed water,
dressed in burlap and barefoot.
I know not where we were going, only that the journey felt endless
the flowers seemed illusory, the lake a mirage

Step by step we lifted aching feet, displacing grasshoppers by the thousands
And then I saw you, standing at the edge of the field,
you, holding a child's hand.
The child, long-haired and also barefoot,
was dirty not from poverty but only play,
and pointed at us eagerly, beaming up at you.

You were tender, moved not slowly, but with intention,
smiled down at the child and squeezed the little hand,
then raised your open gaze toward us.
Your eyes were guileless and strong, simply waiting,
and all the folk songs were forgotten,
the meanings we had so carefully crafted and memorized lost in a moment,
and there was only you, your expectant eyes, your slightest smile.

And the hundreds of miles, crooked and dirty and drenched and sunburned and sore,
the many moons we had walked became one day, and one golden field
and I ran to you, and had no other loves,
for every world disappeared.

ready or not

"Walk to your house on my lunch break
here it comes"

I am alone, I am not alone. I am water flowing, going, another, another father, another fire, flood, place, tribe. Tribe I remember. I remember your held name, strong, sweet, your forgotten name. I remember name, your woven existence, your fiery, unfamiliar name. I remember your nomad face, your glittering eyes, your carpenter hands. I remember and forget.
[All things turn to fire and flood and you are nomad and I am water and we are alone and not alone.]
Chant, chant your unfamiliar name. Pull vowels forgotten from your stomach. I come from that same dark place. I come from the river stitched by four sisters (or were there five?), broken by soil and sod, sand and red, red brick of dirt under your hardened fingernails. Time’s cellar, a skinless pendulum shortening and lengthening our powwow, our obsession. Your cold river sheets gritty with sand.
I blame that wildfire making hitchhikers out of us, pitching our tents not in romantic, djembed Bedouin ways but in the carving rock of desert slicing into your shoulders, your ribs, your abdomen, into my unfamiliar sister breasts, sandwiched and catalogued between sandy rivered sheets where only the kitchen table survives fire and flood.

Maybe due to a friend's constant endorsement of them,

or perhaps simply because I recently finished Peace Like a River,

but I can't stop thinking about these lately.

Also, how badly I want to travel through New Mexico and Alaska. Some more backpacking this year, please!

Happy New Year!

Inspired by Nelly's It's Going to be a Good Year
And tell me, what do you dream?

The sun still shines, but it presses wearily through fog and branches
The cat sleeps (I feel fonder of it than I used to)
Funny how we measure compatibility by feelings toward pets:
one dog, medium-to-large, outside, beloved.

Well I have made pumpkin into soup, steamed golden squash,
crushed apples into sauce and boiled jars in preservation.
I have crossed our field and picked apples as the sun went down.
My sister and I carried canvas bags
and I will not soon forget the image of her standing in the tree,
stretching to reach each apple.

I have read the words of a carpenter,
those ones that say there is a Shepherd who leaves 99 sheep
in order to find one who is lost and lonely,
in order to pick her up and carry her home.

And I think I want to scrawl Isaiah the poet's words on every wall and corner of my house

They will rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated;
they will renew the ruined cities that have been devastated for generations.
They will be called might oaks, a planting of the Lord.

This morning I awoke feeling an excitement unexplained. In the streets of London, it all rushed back to me: last night my mother gave me a new name, a new middle name, like the ones Catholics receive at confirmation. It was hand-written on a piece of paper; it had come to her a long time ago, but she was just now telling me.

Though I am familiar with the word and interested in the idea, when she gave me this new name, I promised myself to look it up in the morning.

Jubilee:
(1) a season of general joy.
(2) Every fiftieth year in the Mosaic calendar, being the year following the completion of each seventh sabbath of years, at which time all the slaves of Hebrew blood were liberated, and all lands which had been alienated during the whole period reverted to their former owners.

The year of Your favor. May everyone walking beside me know it in their blood and in their bones, this freedom of Yours.

a little of what's been on my mind

(09 February 2009)

Remembering that streaming, dirty creek to ocean at filthy Sugar Beach, La playa pan de azucar, as I cross campus bridge over already slowing-to-a-trickle creek, the rushing, unstoppable water of the past days having reached the Pacific at the bottom of the hill.

I crossed that garbage-strewn creek near a group of loud and rowdy Ticos, beach campers who felt a little drunken, like everything else in that town. On the edge of madness, violence. A tourist, souvenir shop and cervecería wonderland, Pinocchio's Pleasure Island. I crossed near them cautiously, taking care on the steep sandy walls of the creek bank, picking my stepping stones with precision. (Who doesn't want to get wet at a beach? I'm telling you, not this creek. Not this playa). And there, nearby, all floppy and opulent, a colorless greyish white in the sand, lay a long dead snake. Pink and rubbery, maybe three, four feet long, twisted sickeningly. Now I'm not one to fear snakes, but seeing this bloated body made my stomach turn, limp like the penis of the man mauled by a grizzly in the photo I didn't mean to see.

I don't know why I'm writing this, really, except walking back from the library tonight, singing snatches of Radiohead softly, I noticed the water, the bridge, the quick and strong and finally fleeting rains. Only You can heal a barren land. Only turn toward us.

"And none shall be afraid"

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Costa Rica: Pura Vida

our folklore days

put away the canvas, now--it has all been painted white
huddle close, listen, now, to the stillness of the night

the hens running free, the ducks and the geese merry
the weight of a ripe melon measured in your palm
and black seeds from the yellow and red fruit spat pleasurably to the sand at your feet

the days are spinning now, harder and faster than before
and you are careening toward something you can't see
oh, hold on in your dizziness, hold tight

the blooms of shy sunflowers fading now
once saffron and amber, ivory and gold
the roundness of each august peach in your hand
now turning to an apple, an oblong pear

the days are slipping away, dandelions blown by the wind
the harvest is coming, the harvest is here
put away the canvas, let it rest with your sweet summer dreams
bind up your bare feet, braid the wild farmer hair into the attention of your studies

come closer, now, lock your fingers in mine
we will fall into the leaves of autumn
rejoicing, we will brave the winter together

let the shimmering strips of fabric dance on in the shifting winds

rejoice! we are almost home!

Now that my final final, as it were, is taking place tomorrow morn, it seems appropriate to break the studying in order to publish an abbreviated list of summer intentions. And you? I would like to hear yours, too, please.

+Acquire a pair of ducks (friends, of course).
+Read a great deal, especially of Mary Oliver's poetry & dear Annie Dillard's prose.
+Learn to make fig cake. Mmm, figs are so good! (and so Song of all Songs-esque:) )
+Rent French film Love Me If You Dare
+Make my own chapstick.
+Practice coffee art.
+Create a homemade granola.
+Rockclimb, hike, longboard, bike, and skinny dip my way all across Washington, Canada, and Montana.

In the north, the summers seem almost unreal--hazy and mirage-like, where 50 degree latitudes give light well into steamy nights and the berries are pregnant and tender even in the cool of the morning. Here's to the next three months: to orchards and to the Solstice, to photography, baking, weddings, and friends.

outside General today, a fight broke out
whack! hit on the head, one to the other
"you mother-fucker you, listen up!"
and unthinkingly, i get between them
20 year old girl--you know society's rules [it's foolish to intervene]
"hey man, calm down, peace out"

he rounds on me, and now calls me the mother-fucker
i step back, whisper prayers in tongues
"why don't you just call the cops then?" he screams
logic doesn't bode well with the violently drunk
[so should some avoid liquor altogether?]

a cop car drives by and he runs into the busy street, flagging it angrily
"i feel out of my body," christie says beside me

at the end, the cop approaches me
"Would you like me to lock him up, ma'am? Did you feel threatened? Should I take him to jail for the night?"
"No, no, I didn't feel threatened; he just cursed at me."

The cop didn't even ask what happened, completely ignored the hit man's side of the story
[being homeless and drunk and Spanish-speaking doesn't get you far, even when you're mildly assaulted]

"Reinas, reinas," the man says to us: Queens
we smile awkwardly, i wish he wouldn't call us that

and my privilege is power [the power to decide outcomes?!]
and, in my feminity, my privilege [white and a student and employed by the hospital]--
my privilege is protection.

most strange dreams

"I want His secrets, His softest secrets," Arianna whispers to me.

Later, a friend from home approaches. "How are you?" I ask, embracing him. It's been a long time. He falls on me, starts weeping. He has cancer.

So does Francisco's daughter, a Mexican man who works in our cafeteria. In real life, I just interviewed him for a presentation in Spanish.

Two other people in the dream are also very sick. "It will be a year of pain and death," a voice says over me.

Music starts to play- someone is playing music. And I dance. I dance like I'm flying, I'm moving everywhere, jumping and twirling and spinning and kicking, dancing only the way one can dance in dreams.


"I want His secrets, His softest secrets," I wake up whispering.