elegy

for k.c.c.k (9.19.68-1.7.13)

It will always be winter as we walk down the dirt road with our chapped hands shoved in the pockets of our little checkered blue jeans

The wind is so cold it bites the delicate membranes inside our noses,

and our eyes sting in the bitter air

Geese clap into flight

We dare each other to touch the teeth in the grim smiles

of dead coyotes hung along the barbed wire

For some reason these are the things I vividly recall from our life in the old hotel on the plains

I remember your birth-

the fear I held within me that you would come

and break my heart

It will always be your call that wakes me up in the middle of the night,

Baby brother

child of straw hair and blue eyes

 

What does it mean to you now?

Can you hear the songs I sing when I am lonely or

the prayers I whisper in early morning dark?

Do you think of the cold, the rasp of dry bluestem, the sweet early morning call of the Sandhill Cranes passing overhead while we sleep, warm in our beds, just children, 

safe

a wild love for the world

In September I drove home alone from the Texas Panhandle. Driving in a desolate landscape has always brought me a strange peace. On this drive I listened to fifteen years of music I had collected, and as I moved through these mesas and dry creeks I have memorized after years of making this trek, it was as if the music synced up with the landscape and the shapes of both melody and terrain became the same fabric of some great weaving that extended beyond me into infinity. I was just this one fiber, one beautiful, anonymous strain of violin or cello.

Running just after dawn this morning I felt it again, only rather than landscape it was light, and all the variations the sky takes on as the sun moves through the movements of its symphony. I thought of Rilke and his evoking light and air, of the "infinite space we dissolve into," and of Philip Larkin and "rather than words came the thought of high windows--the sun-comprehending glass..." And of my dear friend y.o. and his exquisite video of the subway-window-light.

As I am running I feel the edges of my being dissolving into the infinite space that "tastes of us, then".

fragment

fragment 9.12

almost weightless
in the cold deep
light pierces stillness
only a heart
beating.
calm
suspended here it is almost as if
you. never. existed.

almost as if
my name had never been spoken
by the viper's tongue--

you could never have known
the weight of stones I carried
(and cherished), each one
sinking,
silent
to the depth of this spring
that will never cease
 to love

Song

You’re wondering if I’m lonely:
OK then, yes, I’m lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I’m lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawn’s first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I’m lonely
it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning.

Adrienne Rich

…alas, but that is what we are. Does the infinite space
we dissolve into, taste of us then?
                            --Rainer Maria Rilke, The Second Elegy

Hoh

Many years ago I was fascinated by the Walking Man and the Running Girl. I had watched them, each isolated in a lonely world of traveling up and down Lamar Blvd and the Shoal Creek Trail, waste away with every mile. Just a few months ago I saw the Walking Man after many, many years of having forgotten him. His feet were wrapped in bulky cloth and splayed out at an awkward angle. He trudged along only with the aid of a walker.

Somehow he has made it much longer than the Running Girl whom I have not seen in years. She was rail thin, a skeleton really, always dressed in a pink jogging outfit. I suspected a dire case of anorexia. Had she eventually wasted away completely, or had her family finally made the decision to hospitalize her.

Now there is a new Running Man. A young African American in his early to mid-twenties. He runs shirtless with long braided hair and a sleek muscularly sculpted body. He is always carrying what seems to be a heavy backpack on one hand.

It has occurred to me that he may just be training for something. But always as I pass by, he catches my eye with a vacant look that is somehow at the same time defiant.

I am drawn to these three because I think I find that tendency in myself—the possibly romanticized desire to just walk until I can walk no more, like Peace Pilgrim, but without the mission of faith. Mine would be a mission of escape from everything in this world that is profane. The traffic and the materialism, the grave destruction of the whole natural world for own social gain. I would carve a holy path of harmlessness.

Carl Pope said of John Muir that it was his radical act of just walking that brought him to the Sierra Nevadas and made him into the man he was.

As we hiked into the Hoh Rain Forest the words of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness lingered in my mind:

“We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign—and no memories.”

There were times on the trail when I truly felt that we were in the night of first ages, exposed to the elements, yet taking some comfort in the knowledge that there were others on the trail with us, less alone I imagine miles away from a car or a building or cell phone service than the Walking Man or the Running Girl and the Running Man—whose radical act of defiance created a singular space in the midst of the bustling city.

shrine

I made it to this café, to sit in front of this computer with a beer (although not the most tasty one) after hunting down my son at Yosemite National Park with the expert assistance of super-sleuth Levinski. Yes, my only, magical son, who has dreams swirling about him and histories of grandfathers and mothers who have told me in my own dreams that he will be special, that he IS special and nothing should surprise me. But it does—and infuriates me.

I have made the commitment to do this—I have made a crazy airline reservation and ungodly travel itinerary to fly to Iowa to take a workshop on writing about Place. It’s funny because Place for me is Many Places, but not here—not Austin. It is the cold biting wind of the farm in Dimmitt, or the arroyos and cicada sounds of Palo Duro Canyon—but it is as if this town is sterile for me, except of course for The Springs.

I remember writing a poem (now long burned in the fire) about swimming, about life below the surface of the water. That is an experience almost holy.  Which reminds me of another poem – long ago when Eliza was tiny, about lying beneath the Cottonwoods at Deep Eddy. The orgasmic Cottonwood. Gasp.

I guess I am wrong then. There is magic here. Here be dragons, and magic and grottos with random offerings and burning red dragonflies, and maidenhair fern.

If I were to do this right this would be a weaving, woof and weave, story and naturalism. The shift in my life, the “natural transition” as the Black Cohosh bottle calls it, and the loss of self somehow dovetailing into the life-cycle of the dragonfly, all told in books, not the internet. This will be my challenge.  Or maybe I don’t even know. I feel the urge to explore, to travel, to question and research and watch light shifting over a room, to see what is not being seen. I guess then I would like to be the see-er, the one who wonders what the burning red dragonfly notices about a woman standing by a grotto before a random collection of offerings at the statue of St. Francis and why she doesn’t want to move as long as it holds still, apprehending.