Dust

The shrouded mountain
is speckled with wet white.
To the south, the sun breaks
barely below a pall of stormclouds,
lighting the faroff peaks.

A single raven hovers, flies,
wings taut and light in the wind;
it descends on a power line.
Horses stand swishing tails,
hooves caked with snow and mud.

Shifting patches of blue emerge
above the tumorous black clouds
A lone shock of thunder crumples the air,
telling of lightning too distant to see.

A century ago--two, maybe--
I would have wanted
my ashes spread here.
Over the scrub oak and boxelders, the
shimmering quaking aspens.
Over the scree slopes and layered limestone
and the valley floors below--
dust sweeping up like a sandstorm
into the thunderclouds.

The valley clean

I know this spring snow,
wet and thick and clinging
like armor on everything it coats.
The slick roads surprise us--
we've forgotten how to drive in snow.
The moon's a pale, waning smirk,
almost lost among
the floating turmoil in the sky.
The mountains are white as bone,
a landscape of hips and teeth and knuckles.
Low clouds form another range,
the same dead-white color,
spun off where mountain meets valley
like estranged cousins.
A fortress of winter encircles us,
an icy crown tightens over our heads.

By late morning the sky blossoms,
the sun emerges from its cloak
and sweeps
the valley clean.

Potential

The streets are empty
like the pews on Saturday.
My scuffed dress shoes sound
hollow against the parking lot asphalt;
they tick-tock rhythmically,
led by my pendulum legs.

The night's faint snowfall disappeared
when the meek heat of the early-March sun
crested the mountains.
The sky is bright, the wind subtle but piercing;
dead trees awaken quietly,
buds pushing from their bare branches.

Winter lifts from the landscape--
its skirt of snow pulls back,
seductively
revealing naked mountain thighs.

My own mind also thaws--
my dreams and thoughts expand, large and swollen
like hot-air balloons,
rising up and high toward the blooming sun,
to fly forever
or melt and join Icarus.

I step up three concrete steps
into the porchway shadow.
I look over the familiar whitewashed door,
raw metal exposed under large scratches
left by couches or children.
I put my hand to the dull golden doorknob--
cold from the air of the changing season--
and turn.

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.

April is confused

With still little flurries
of seed or snow,
the winter months try
to reclaim the land from spring,
to make blossoms barren.
But the rainwater sidewalk
and the lemon dandelions
are discouragement enough.

From the line of mauve bushes
on the hill across the canyon
a boundary is formed
between mountain and grid.
Toxic air crowns
in machinery plumes
(the good old torchsmoke of liberty)
next to the ranches.
And the airborne pollen
that strangely smells of mold
or mushroom
perfumes each mountain desert afternoon.

I'm on that road,
right round the corner.
That same old road;
that lonely creeping canyon road
that still hasn't forgotten.

Pine and fir

You know it's getting warmer
when the flies are pasted to the hood of the car,
not dead but alive in a miniature swarm,
as they pick apart whatever there was previously pasted.
Heated air rises around them invisibly,
55 degrees or so, feels like 90.

Passed the ranches lined with pine and fir,
an arboreal gateway into those mountain-farms,
the same way the students now line
the circular concrete arche-structures on campus,
here and there and on every splotch of grass
like they were scooped up by some divine claw
and scattered about to just listen and write and read
in a deaf world that is shut out by more than just myself.

Drove to Will's Pit Stop, and the boy in front of me in line,
with the out-of-state driver's license, purchased some snuff and soda.
I too purchased soda, two bottles, green and stifling:
like two plastic syringes, little twenty-ounce oral injections
to satiate my hourly caffeine addiction.

Closed the car door and kicked the snow black.
Smeared it across the asphalt;
wished it were now summer and those small streaks
would evaporate within mere seconds
of being exposed to the suffocating sunshine.

Walked above the agricultural tennis courts,
peering down on them as miniature fields of turf and clay,
rectangular like farmlands from the sky.
They were below me. Everything rectangular below me.

Saw the breadbox obscuring the skyline,
lit up as best a starry earthbound building could,
trying mightily to overcome the radiance above,
with success in appearance but failure in actuality.
Though I hoped otherwise, hoped to memorize
and remember again that companionship
I now only find in books and occasional glimpses.

It's all I can do to keep walking, to keep not talking.
This world--
it's never without sound.
And it's comforting.