A Small Offering

Writing used to be easy, and now it is ridiculously hard. I'm trying to get better. Baby steps into the elevator:

Photograph From the Mountains

Lilies flame in the elbow of the river.

You sprawl on the rocks

jeans splashed to the knees.

At 2:52

your watch stops in the water.

The sun hangs

suspended on the ridge.

Another January

Grass isn't growing under my feet; it is winter.

My days are easy, nothing changes. The sleepy office. The light pours through the glass walls all morning. Feed the fish. Answer phones. Sort the mail. Make the coffee. Clean the coffee pot at the end of each day.

Hours slouch by in lazy increments, measured in rounds of PopCap computer games. At 4 o'clock I walk 2 blocks home, aggressive evening filling my footprints.

He is at home; the apartment is warm because of him. And because our landlord pays for the oil. lift some weights. Hot running water. Cuddle on the couch, then wash dishes, then make dinner. When she comes home we eat together. Then shopping, then laundry. Doctor Appointments and Stopping By Mom's.The daily details of Our Life Together. TV shows and videos and video games, until we can't sleep, or else bedtime and nightmares, and ghosts from the past. old pain like brown stains in the hardwood. Under the rugs, you know they're still there.

It is those old marks on the heart still pulling on me. My feet itch. My thoughts buzz like a broken radio that keeps flipping stations.

Gypsy blood. The kind that ignites if kept still for too long.

The road as I am walking home pulls me; true north to a needle. I wish the frozen ponds were roaming oceans. The train whistle is a fish-hook in my heart. Names that I love are too thick across my tongue. They want homes and houses and feel safe inside the word “Stay.”

“Stay” is a noose getting tight around my neck. A Better Life is the hangman. The outlaw in me wants Dillinger days. A few more before I start swinging.

The sky outside threatens weather. A Winter Storm.

I want to walk home tonight in the snow. To look up at the white swirling down.

I want to turn my face to the black behind the white and fall up into it, away from the earth and everything.

Things Too Heavy

Memory collection fails me; I'm terrible at taking pictures.

Souvenirs inspire me to fiction. It pours like water over the inky facts of the moment and smudges them into impressioned sentiment. Sea glass has me thinking of the day we found Atlantis, not a sunrise spent walking and worrying the future. The smell of blooming lotus; I dream waterlily seas, and sailing to the moon. Drinking by the lake with you is blurred in the reflection.

I am the Monet of remembrance.

So I cannot remember what I said that day, that inspired you to stay with me through so much that came after. I can't recall the secret you said you'd never told before and would never say again, or even the scientific discussion that kept us talking for over 10 hours.

When I think of you I only see the sleepy autumn in your hair, and the weight in your smile

when you realized you loved me.

Zugunruhe

I mixed cinnamon and honey

in my coffee this morning.

I wanted to hold

the desert in my mouth again.

I miss the hot wind

and the promise

of the lonely unexpected.

I miss a sky the color of

all the voices of God.

My cigarette does not taste enough

of the fires of California.

The Nor'Easter outside does not

contain the spices of

the Santa Anas.

I have been too long from the road.