Dispatch 07: Yosemite

The thing about all this is mindfulness. I am a driver; I drive miles a day, to & from, here to there, back again, mindlessly. Asleep at the wheel, auto-pilot, zoning, meditating, emptying.

But here, I am fully awake. Always alert, seeing things as they appear, reading landscape, learning geography, wishing for more geology, predicting road conditions, absorbing roadsigns, & always searching for those creatures more appropriate to place than this murder wagon rolling up & down these slopes.

This is a kind of prayer, this travel. Counting miles like prayer beads, changing devotions as elevation shifts. It says thank you, protect us, I'm sorry. But mostly it says I am alive, I am awake, I was mindfully here.

Dispatch 06: Kings Canyon

No words. See pictures.

(No signal at 7000 feet in the Sierra Nevadas, hence the delay.)

Dispatch 05: In the Valley

it's 4:30 in the morning,
i am standing in a hotel room
holding our 3 month old
composing this in my head,
i can feel his breathing,
his pulse quicken & slow:
his body is slowly re-relaxing,
he is going back to sleep
as we sway:
                   right
left              right,
left                         shuffle
(think early-teen slowdance).

earlier, yesterday:
i held our older boys up
into orange & lemon trees
in the backyard of cousins
in the valley we never visit
& there we were picking the perpetual fruit
so used to wasting on the boughs, unwanted,
stubbornly holding on to the branches
so that fruit & stem & leaf come off into their little hands
& into the sack & eventually into the car,
but first we sample the delicate oranges
whose rinds seem so hard but tear so easily:
we let the juice run down out wrists
as we squeeze out the sweetest drinks
(as the sixty year old cousin jokes that
that last time they were picked  it was his wife
who drank one of the trees for breakfast with vodka
& that was years ago).

it would be easiest to make this about the weight of children
as they age, getting heavier & more independent,
but that is not what connects this,
this is about lightness:
the way the heaviness of fruit is tossed away in the rind,
the way the heaviness of discomfort is danced away in sleep
the way the heaviness of parenthood is nestled away in hugs
the way the heaviness of dying is appeased by last visits to beloved aunts who live in valleys so far away from home
& worth all the miles.

Dispatch 04: LA

Dear Los Angeles,

I can't tell you I've missed you, but your eyes do shine so & your face is a million faces, each one as unfamiliar as the next & full of possibility.

I can't be sure if I'll see you again, and I can think of 405 reasons not to, but for now I'll remember the way you look from Mulholland in the late evening & smile through the nerves.

Dispatch 03: Goodbye Phoenix

What the sky promises,
The cactus delivers upon.

Dispatch 02: Arizona

Approaching Flagstaff

from the east, the white sun, shrouded, two hours low
above the San Francisco peaks
as they shift through all
five degrees of dimension:
color light shade distance & height.

There might be a better time to arrive at this place, on this road, at 7000 feet, but I find it hard to imagine. It's just too bad this car must keep moving and soon head south for a 6000 foot drop from ponderosa pine to saguaro and desert palm.

Dispatch 01: New Mexico

Something about the way red Oklahoma hills fall
into Texas cattle flats
makes me crave a cigarette.

To stop on the side of the road
& let the westbound sun burn
a bit of me as I burn just one,
smoke curling around me in the wind.

Of course the alternative is just as good, more rewarding even.
I remember this as I tell the boy in the backseat I love him with a simple sign
across a car of our sleeping loved ones.

Two Poems

“Someone You’d Admire”

as many ghosts inside as out,

old selves & no selves

haunting equally:

the invisible is not unknown,

what might have been was,

 and should be minded.

(until there is nothing left

unremembered

there will always be the imagined.)

all of this to get at what can’t be said:

                    so much of anger is regret,

& so much resentment ,

 only disappointment—unspoken:

only missing all the right words.

-------

soon all arguments settled by

birdsong  & journey:

    forest, mountain, a ledge to step over,

old sights for new eyes:

leave the dusty traps behind for silent friends:

there is no betrayal that distance won’t temper into tantrum only.

funny how ghosts (of self) slip away into obscurity

when the familiar slides away like an old commute.

I’ll forgive your changes if you’ll forgive my going away.

This is as much for me as it is for you.

There’s always next year,

 I hope we’ll all be someone to admire,

again.

Right Before My Eyes

nothing touches two-month eyes,

learning expression through patient practice,

impatient cries turn quickly to a look of budding love.

first willing stare: two seas of white, their  blue islands,

& dark centers saying:

                                        dilation, attention, will be love.

you, who already I admire, will learn love & fear

this way too: as we know, love's first

seed is only deepest need.

let that blue not betray:

be whichever you fits finest,

& let there be no debt to doubt.

there is no promise like watching you

become you, right when I need most,

                 & right before my eyes.

 Fleet Foxes - Someone You'd Admire  

The god that ate the world:

Annie's giant waterbug to the shell of a skinned frog,
The plump worm, skinnying itself in the cocksure beak of the backyard thrasher,
Frost's flower-walking spider to it's wispy, gullible moth,
The thick-headed, bovine breath to a field of luckless clover,
And finally, this windshield to what once must have been a butterfly on commute.

Book Club

It will take a visit from Jesus
For me to believe in the words
Of a dead theologian
More than the perfection
Of an ice cube slowly melting
In a glass of Irish Whiskey.