chimes

old record covers
channel
our past.

how else to explain them,
lined dimly in their cardboard box
appearing from nothing,
from no-sign, last week,
under the dust and greased old tupperware
of this town?

"i must have loved you in another life"....

a lost life of old linen and sun in the morning,
hanging laundry on a line
looking sidelong into
a rocky mountain breeze.

it doesn't pay to be so worked up, so knotted,
so twined around interior cords.
the sound of wind coming up the slope is enough to stop the birds
from twittering.
(i let it all go like scattered seeds for birds).

far-off wind chimes, close clock ticking,
branches changing their shade tracery on the wall outside my studio,
these things are obvious, but
must be carefully noted.

i think they are trying to tell me something.

evergreen

birds gurgling
songs
christian praise music infiltrates under my walls
why must they have their transcendent adolescent awakening in the backyard next to mine??

i watered the yard just now
have cut my knuckles without knowing it,
am alternately
tense, constricted
and vast, open amorphous.

my writing house is yellow,
yellow orange cream with blond wood,
like the thick lacquered photo of a desert mountain range that sits propped against the old air conditioner.

i take pleasure in being casual,
curt, effortless.

the birds in the pecan tree are loud swirls of concentric song.
(i'd recognize those chord structures anywhere, isn't the birdsong praise enough???)

i am content to turn my inside thoughts to physical details like lighter yellow paint on dark, like sun window growing larger each minute of the morning, like sun on the back of my neck, like sprays of water catching light as they hit the side of the house.

i am excited that we have hedges of desert rose,
rosemary plants growing under the dryer exhaust,
cherry trees blooming in a dust yard.

i am glad that we have five screen doors to our name,
and that i can open them in progression
safe succession every morning,
on the whims of the indoor cat
who wants a view outside but remains hidden and curled into a pool of wood-grain sunspots.

the dueling melodies are painful,
how long will this project of charity go on????

as i walk through the yard, i kick old husks of pecan shells, pebbles, and break a last trail through evergreen sap,
raining quietly down from the trees.

thrift

national geographic april 1965
'appomattox'
'brittany'
'new york fair'
'man-in-sea'

suitcase record player,
stack of beloved country records,
'music for dining' in green,
candle-wax spray on the table-top (milky-white),
wine-stain,(blood-red rings on wood-grain),
.

if i make the right list
i can reconstruct the occasion
of objects, who lived-out their wooden life in old(er) atmosphere,

i can raise their ghosts if i want to,
and plug the holes that were left by now-dissapated clouds.

the other night, my things
exuded colors like lamps,
(shades of):
green jealousy,
yellow claustrophobia,
red anger
white clarity.

i don't know what i am trying to say
but i know it has something to do with the light;
milky-rain light of today,
cold wet light of driven-through fog on the highway to alpine,
broken bottle light of mason jars like castanets.

if i understood the quality of this light falling,
cloud-like (first cloud: pikes peak, colorado, more fluffy, less wet),
maybe i could find myself pin-pricked within it,
headlights through fog,
fast appearing and carrying stains of rain on the pavement behind,

or evergreen-tops,
fast spires spinning like green corkscrews,
as we rode by them in loud ferries.

in here it is face-blast-space-heater and dryer hum,
a nostalgia of sound:
zipper thwack on metal drum,
static electric sound of childhood,
(like dishwasher sounds it puts me to sleep).

how little could i leave?
what husk would tell the real story,
the inside tale,
the detritus-key-map-decoder (trailed)?

are the things we find in dusty thrift stores any indications of our real life?

dusted

stillness and wildness in inverse proportion-- the wide spaces here are stretched, they pull at your insides. i want to hide the vastness of this experience in the shells of the mundane. we slip easily out of these day-skins each night, and leave them husked beside our beds. what does it mean to be a permeable body? to be a wide filter that catches things in the breeze?

as i was hanging my laundry on the back-yard line the smell of pine resin drifted down from the trees. it is beautiful and sharp, and reminiscent of my rocky mountain childhood. what does it mean, to have one scent blow through another body? to have the essence of pine infiltrate clean linen, to have yellow indian curry powder color the inside of my suitcase and front covers of books, to have creosote oil sit lightly on the air, to blow through white linen sheets in the bedroom?

now i sit breathing ground coffee in the air from a blue plastic cup, smell wet rosemary and dryer heat hum, hear doves and the shakiness of my own body, here, still getting adjusted, still fragile, and off balance, distracted but sharply attuned to every small shock and vibration of this desert house life. i am thinking about lists, and skeleton-structure, dusty pathways through adobe streets, paths of memory, birdcalls, unseen lenses into a smaller part of life (higher magnification). i am looking for stillness, and like a compass or barometer, trying to settle myself at a still point, re-orientation in a known place, new-life in a place that is saturated with colors and smells of an older life.

even the dust here seems holy, like cinnamon particles in the wind, like juniper berries ground, like prairie dust rising from earth. this life must be a sieve-- and i need to learn to see it, soft-focus on the mechanism of capture to strained particles out of the air: mixed gravel, flakes of mica, particles of mica in schist, powder-residue-lacquer-coated spring breeze.

snow

its snowing on my last night in new york.
the snow has massed quietly while i slept.

when i say 'snow', you know that i mean 'sad',
when i say 'me', you know that i mean 'us'.

in the twilight slick hours of before-morning,
i hold on to what I can own;

snow has grown on the slim windowsill ledge like pulled cottonwhite skeins--
inhospitable shelf,
powder-lacquer,

my lamp must glow from the inside room,
watched from the threads of the outside storm.