Mick Kelly

The old 1898 school, being restored--
a squat block of brick and wood and
newly placed, sharp-tinted windows,
with a slanted steep roof and some scattered shingles,
some plywood angled up and high.
The heat of early March, nearly spring,
and in the purple light of the disappearing sun
I scaled up to that unfinished roof,
up three floors and past grey exposed sheetrock and
pale twobyfours, to a small propped ladder against the sky.
I walked lightfooted and straddled the peak,
the warm wood against my legs; I watched the
darkening light, blazing slowly down behind the distant west mountains,

and I sang out like Mick Kelly--favorite songs,
about existing and knowing it,
about love and dying and holding hot hands,
palms sweating near the lake in the summer,
of being young and hungry and unspoiled, untainted--
fearful even at the bigness and greatness of life
and its sorrows and joys.
About reality.
About all being connected by strands, links to each other,
to soil and cloud and human heart and animal eyes
and a common soul--
a sweeping-blue oceany soul, made of sky and sea and depth.

That sweet taste of reaching infinity,
between all of us and our minds
and uttered from our lips
into a common stream of need and hope and
love.

Eye tonight

I am drinking rooibos tea flavored with gingerbread house icing and lavendar honey.
I am writing about James Joyce and Stephen Dedalus and Stephen and Daedalus.
I am three days behind with this assignment, my seminar paper.
I am almost done with the semester.
I am still awake and it is three a.m.
I am worried about taking four online classes at once.
I am not always motivated.
I am very full because I have eaten a lot today.
I am ready for a departure.
I am prepared for a change.
I am now home from the library. I was there before seven and I left at 1:45 when the cello-orchestrated Nothing Else Matters started playing over the loudspeakers. An orchestrated version of The Legend of Zelda themesong follows that, and tonight I missed it.
I did come home for one hour from 10:30 till 11:30, though.
I was able to successfully find all BYU's archived and bound copies of James Joyce Quarterly.
I am a procrastinator, and sometimes that worries me.
I am dry in this Utah weather.
I am dry though it snowed all day today.
I am wondering whether the mountains look as beautiful hidden in the dark of night as they do during the sunset.
I am wishing that certain magical and wonderful things happened to me.
I am thinking, thinking, thinking, and not getting anywhere.
I am not Einstein.
I am no fabulous artificer.
I do not have a strange name.
But I'm me all the same.

Shadows, seeds

I came out into the high spring evening sun,
my tall shadow trailing behind me--
it looks like me, connected to me,
black and fearless it is me.
I thought of James Dean and his Spyder on Highway 46,
and I walked past the junipers,
the sweetgums and birches,
planted purposefully in green hilly mounds.
I slid my hand over the chafed and chipped handrail,
all rustbrown except on top--
scraped bare to the metal,
the pavement-clacks of the skateboards told me why.

They too had slid across it,
scraped it, and made long shadows
all colorless behind,
brightened and blocked out on hot pavement.
I stepped forward with hands on that cool wounded rail,
the warm setting sun soaking me and coloring the
greens and browns
of the trees, with their soft hanging catkins,
and dry winter branches
sprouting pale new shoots of mossy green,
heavy with bloom and seed.
I sat on a hill and watched the world washed
in color,

while the day pressed to an end and the sky rotated round.
Time did not exist.
I felt this emotion, in this moment:
just a feeling
that I can't express--I could never.
I can't say what it is I want, or what I sense;
it's just a feeling.

So I sat and thought of that colliding car,
of Santa Barbara and crisscrossing highways
and youth and growth--seasons of planting and harvest
and rebirth,
of all the seeds that would never take root,
all the abandoned ideas and half-thought thoughts,
all the lives that would be lost at twentyfour,
such stifled vitality.

I held the prickly brown seed from the sweetgum,
knew that it was like living:
painful and inflicting, yet full of potential,
spines surrounding germs of hope--
and I was the writer without words,
the rebel without a cause.