Northwest

When I think about how much of my adult life is

long walks home from work



tired over bridges, crossing streets to make connections

but forgoing the crowded bus



for today’s air



along a street that is a ridge overlooking the bay

closer to the pines



or now up hills past defunct storefronts

from this city through the ocean to a place where I only sleep



hardly

waking up late, rushing to wait, running to sit

wondering outward at so many different, complicated patterns of land



it seems like all my thoughts happened then except one

which is looking out a car window



emerald embedded in a foothill’s fold



none of my friends would believe the beauty on the fast highway

licking a tempo stripe after stripe after stripe



the wet metal taste of rivers



potato salad fed to me by a strange mother

a recipe I’ll always be trying to recreate



I only cry because I can’t paint.




I sit up desperate at night.




How green it was.





The iron smell.






Trumpeting








mountains.









How cold










and gray












the sky














and

















sea.


Epistle 2

Friend,

I realized it today, and I think you, more than anyone, will understand. From the ship, rather than being surrounded by water like I am on land, I am surrounded by land like it is water-- finally perceived as a whole, moving in swells, developing events of pine and mist. It was particular pines and mist that startled me with the realization which is the impetus for this letter.

I have been too long without the acceptance of the forest. Acceptance: it strikes you, perhaps, as a peculiar word to use. Let me explain. The forest is a whole thing, tall, taller than a man, and deep, deeper than a mind. It is a smell and a sight, a sound, a dressing for mangled skin, the flavor of irons in the earth. It being infinitely vast in its Zeno's paradox of scale, the only relationship a man can have with it is to be accepted into it, like sugar into tea. Such a relationship does not make floral sugar but sweet tea.

Something about being absorbed into the forest is necessary, restorative, vital. My room in the village afforded me easy access to the shelter of trees and the nutritive aroma of the soil. It is not so where I live now. I am sick for the forest. I am desperate to be small and in awe. I am brittle without the opportunity to banish my ego and be the air in the lungs of the trees, inhaled and absorbed by them, put to good use, and made indistinguishable from the mist.

The city, too, is beautiful, but it falls apart when you touch it. When I touch the earth, I am the thing falling apart. And falling apart is such a comfort.

Your Friend,

Epistle 3

Play of light on the kitchen table
stitches the kitchen table to another fabric of time,
which occurs simultaneously,

such kitchen table I am sitting at with you
more handling cold lingerings from breakfast than eating.

I stare out the window at the sea
and am all too eager to reassure you
when you ask me what's wrong

that nothing is wrong, love,

that I am wondering what life is like at a kitchen table
without you there

that I think it must also be inescapably wonderful

because this kitchen table exists somewhere
connected to all other tables without you

by the tidal light which plays upon it.

Point Loma

If once the palms were whole
what beast clawed them to ribbons?

If waves are made of wellings up
inevitably, thus, they break.

Life is a topography of questions
and statements.

With my eyes closed and my lungs open
I breathe them in,

and read them back,
and ask, and state, and ask--

Presidio

Oleander and eucalyptus.
Fundamentally, these.
The scent in the air is not oleander and eucalyptus.
The air is oleander and eucalyptus
as the sun exists only in the twirl of their leaves
--such shape of leaves I had forgotten--
as the territory is demarcated by their silhouettes
as I etch our story in the shallow mulch
soon to forget, soon to change.

West of the

Pizza place, we're retouched in gold.
Something desperate it is that you hold wide in you hands
as you
explain
as always.
Maybe I had something to say to you then.
That moment's gone missing.
Pizza place, we're retouched in gold.
Its accolades in want of mantles,
walls, even.
Its accolades hanging otherwise
poltergeistically
in the chill that worries my spine.

Unmouthable Lake

Where we are equals
is a lake with
unmouthable
words for a name.

And crowned in firs.

Your greens are long
drawn through the water
staining ribbons
around my skin.

But I

Oh, I
am fast in the water
and this is why
we're equals here.

If I cannot touch you,

I can be breathed in
by the gills
also breathing in you

so that we are one song

sung
by the unmouthable lake,
each of us mere notes
in its melody

safely just parts of

a music happening
on the skin
and in the spine,
felt, never heard.