scattered

 

"perception alters not only the past, but landscape itself, and landscape in turn, shapes consciousness" 

                    --Jacquetta Hawkes, A Land

A long road reaches its wispy arm through a desert, extending into the distant mountains.

 Clouds gather but dissipate. The wind whips flecks of trash into barbed wire and tosses tumbleweeds across the road. 

Here bits of me are scattered: a bone there, an old Toyota pickup burned out in a fire rusting in a dune of sand, a dead dog. Lizards scutter across a dress I once wore to a wedding (not mine), and a snake coils beneath the shade of a pile of lumber--what's left of a home I tried to build with my own hands. 

Do we collect or leave ourselves forgotten in the dust? 

I keep walking toward the western mountains, objects dropping off into the dirt in my wake. At the end of this road, when everything has fallen away, I will step out of my skin as if stepping out of a nightgown. I will be nothing but air. I will rise on a thermal, I will circle the sky, higher and higher, and then, I will be stars.

a land

From the sky, the land below stretches out in memory. The Colorado etches her serpentine path through a landscape both familiar and far away. Below the grama grasses, little bluestem, mesquite, cottonwood and juniper whisper in the hot wind as night falls over a land as known to me as my own body.

What is it to know a land?

To love its contours and fissures, its smells and colors.

Is it possible to be so utterly familiar with a place, an Other place, as I am with this one?

My heart aches for lake smells and cicadas droning into the summer heat.

This land is no longer a place I call home, but it will always be the blood coursing through my veins. 

The Devil's Mare

 

Super excited to share the launch of our recent screenplay, The Devil's Mare. A great collaboration with my co-authors Christopher J. Oglesby and Patricia Zamora. 

Check out the Story: https://thedevilsmare.com

1.28

fracture

 

here

the sage flies by,

blue-green clouds along the edge of the road 

until

you Stop.

shut off the engine. 

roll down the windows

open your soul to the 

nothing

but wind and the

Whoosh, Whoosh

of giant wind turbines.

here

the red earth fractures, opens like a vein

emitting whispers shushing up from the cool sand of ancient riverbed below.

like spells.

hold still

and no one might notice the crack

that has suddenly opened

inside you.

the red earth

of your heart

gaping beneath the sky

a long line of eighteen wheelers

surge forth like a Norther'

howling the whispers of the earth into a fugitive memory

the windows close

the engine hums to life

the wound is sutured 

and you travel on.

lovesong at 432 Hz

 in the end

I walked away

after you had turned all the dials

listening 

within my many, infinite frequencies

for a channel 

where I bathed in all my selves

naked, and powerful

and alone.

like a tuning fork

you forged me into a sound

that was at once both familiar and strange

and then

you shattered the stillness of me

by plucking, as if they were tiny guitar strings,

needles from my skin

I will not leave (I said)

not this Time.

You said (take everything that has happened here today with you)

and I did

into the searing light 

vii.

how to mend broken things

I once knew a man

whose profession it was to mend

precious objects, broken

intentionally or unintentionally.

he devised

all manner of concoctions:

epoxies, resins, glues,

to conceal from the eye

the rifts, the fissures, the cracks.

how we mend broken things

is not a recipe.

it is an art,

much like divining 

water coursing unseen beneath the surface, your wedding ring, a stone someone touched recently, your reading glasses.

how we mend broken things

must come with the profound recognition 

that not all things

can be

mended.

it depends on the material: your great-grandmother's crystal, a favorite porcelain tea pot, an ancient tree, a beloved home torn from its roots by a hurricane

flesh

a heart.

some things cannot ever be mended 

and while you may be tempted to reach for the glue, sometimes the only way

to mend certain things, is to leave something else broken

fashion the shards into an expression of the pain of loss

make something beautiful 

from the fragments

of the destroyed world.

 

labyrinth iv

IV

Every stone around your neck you know the reason for

at this time in your life      Relentlessly

you tell me their names and furiously I

forget their names    Forgetting the names of the stones

you love, you, lover of stones

what is it I do?

--Adrienne Rich, Sleepwalking Next to Death

"I would have done anything to avoid the pain of transformation. I would have stayed in that dull, aching pain for as long as I could. But I was forced in another direction--the absolute last direction I would have ever chosen for myself. And all I can tell you is how lucky I was to have been so totally messed up, to be sick and in so much pain that I had no choice but to confront it, and challenge everything I knew about myself. 

Most people go through this world clinging to what's safe, having an idea of who they should be to pass through life with the least amount of friction. This is what we hope for--this is what we think means success. When this happens, we can cling to what feels safe and try to construct a socially acceptable version of ourselves, or we can jump into the void, risk everything we think we are, swim far from the safety of the shore for the unknown horizon, answer the call of every wild, bleeding desire we have buried in us, and use this one life we've been given to vault every edge, limit and wall we've constructed."

--Holly Whitaker