Life moves in a current

First night in a different house.
The first out of another:
an old nourishing home that was always too cramped,
that we found a hindrance and complained about.
Still we decorated it gently,
draped lights and colorful tapestries about,
placed ornaments of our conquests and interests.
We loved in it and danced around
our humble space as if it were really our own.
We memorized its many creaks and mistakes
because they too were ours.
A natural extension of each of us, this home.

My wife gave birth in that small living room,
her beautiful butterfly legs familiar yet foreign.
Like a goddess perfect and strong and courageous
she sweated into the lukewarm
water and life embodied rose unscathed--
strange, remarkable life
to breathe our world's uncertain air.

Early spring and we watched in earnest for
blossoms on the hollowing apricot tree,
and Jarom ruined his arm climbing the ladder to pick them.
Sucking endlessly at their pale orange nectar and
crowding them in cardboard boxes and grocery bags.
The house faced south and had character but was still
ugly, dirtied once-white siding edged with metal and broken,
exposing brownblack underside
like a dark secret that everyone knows anyway.
But a rainbow of tulips nudged
through the soil and the grass greened
and was ringed by rosebushes and lilac,
so much beauty,
so much color and life in a new land:
a sacred place to us.

It was easy to leave, to gather
armfuls and boxed labeled belongings and slowly
fill different rooms.
Piles dwindled and we dusted
and vacuumed until floors gleamed and brightened and
cobwebs were finally removed then we turned out
all the lights and checked each room
and locked the doors and drove elsewhere.
A routine operation, clockwork.

But when we happen by once and once again
the haunting spirit of that place
fills us and memories burn again so molten,
reinforcing pathways, etching moments on us
like tattoos or windborne sand stinging your eyes.
These are magic things reborn
(as by the same crouched mother in a blowup pool in that room
when the seasons changed some time ago),
and like everything these too will fade, accidentally--
but our hearts and hands and the deepdown places in our minds
know better.

I'm sorry we left you, but
life moves as in a current
and things change that way too.
Yes you, our trembling house of strife and joy, you
will someday crumble or lie bulldozed but each
of our living memories there
will be recorded and remembered somewhere,
or by someone, because
nothing really ever leaves.
Although it often seems that way.

Now, here, I look around at these cold wooden floors,
the secret downward stairwell and pale
impersonal walls, the long backyard with
winter's shriveled grass stretched all across like dead skin,
the different smells everywhere,
the echoing hardness of this new unbroken place
and I smile
and look to the naked ceiling,
wondering will anything else change.

--- ---


I'm sentimental, it's true. We just moved out of our house of the last four years. It was a little rental house that needed lots of love--and we gave it. Now four years might not seem long to some, but it is. It's a substantial amount of time. One-seventh of my life. We only had two kids when we moved in; now we have three. I turned 30 there. Big things occurred, lots of life involved. We miss that house, but it will always be special. And we love our new home already.

Retirement

Still half asleep, opened eyes barely;
woke at two, three, four and so on.
Packed snowdrifts stream by in subfreezing weather.
Fogged eyes and rear windows.
The motor hums and warms and
spit little bolts of fire inside like
fresh sunburts propelling a new day,
a new tired string of hours,
some chorus of immaterial voices fixed
like ornaments in a Christmas tree--
seasonal and fleeting we hope.
So static and typical--these displaced
priceless things that glitter and gleam
where we've set them, waiting to
be appraised by a future which may never arrive.
We wait for a decisive indicator
that our choices have been good and correct,
that we're working and will work
hard like those tireless spark plugs
until the day our job is done, engine retired
or dead
or maybe a moment sooner.

--- ---

A random poem I wrote in January regarding work and working, routine and monotony. The way things like this in life ebb and flow.

Snow on your day

On your day it's snowing,
wet and pale like your first moment,
all wide-mouthed and noise and glistening
new life.
So small, your tottering form
has never been enough to contain
all that spirit and raucous laughing
innocent joy.
It's more than a little paradoxical.
Except smallness you will outgrow,
and still you'll enliven me,
quicken my purpose and intentions,
and it's surely a wonder
how you smile
your three-year even-toothed grin that
hasn't stopped
since you first looked up
those opal eyes into mine.

--- ---

Happy Birthday Orion. You inspire me.

Found

My little girl, while dreaming last night
I saw your Baby Kitty
sitting collapsed and formless,
mostly black now from exhaust and dust and bits of asphalt,
black plastic eyes still shiny and intent
as if she has been waiting--
That day, inch by inch we searched the meridian in vain
and finally pulled back out into heavy traffic,
you in disbelief that after all these years
and second chances she was gone,
your eyes were full, mouth set and angry,
and the white dashed lines on the interstate flicked by
as you thought about putting
your hand out the window and letting go,
and saying goodbye.

--- ---

I wrote this last October, after dreaming about Bella's stuffed Baby Kitty, the one she had for five years, lost and found numerous times, across state lines and in movie theaters, always resurfacing. She loved her so much, and one day we drove north on the I-15 and Bella held her out the window and let go. It was accidental. We went back and searched and never found her.

The west valley

Watched an airliner cut through fog
over the west valley.
Children play nextdoor
near the parking lot,
shrieking in their
loose-fitting uniforms, ties untightened and
rolledup unbuttoned sleeves.
They jump about their small asphalt schoolyard,
cold chainlink fences enclosing
squat brick buildings.

The bald youth at the front desk
buzzes me in, and I wait and then make
my way to geometrically set chairs
and halfwalls in a back corner.
I sit and stare, speaking acronyms
and cryptic jargon, proving my worth first
with words alone.

Midday, past the parking lot children roam
the broken sidewalks,
clutching their stacked books and hunched over,
edging to and from this industrial-block private school
through mixed-zoning--
the Latino market complex and 7-11,
rows of dilapidated apartments, their
rotted front lawns littered with faded plastic toys.
We park near an old factory and eat Thai.

The mixed blazes of
neon brakes and blinding headlights mingle
like stars twinkling through the atmosphere,
like twin lanes of peppermint red-on-white
or a barbershop pole churning
in endless monotony,
screaming racetrack traffic across the freeway--
is it such an enabling way of freedom,
wandering us home
under a foggedover full moon at night?
We clutch our notepads and thin computers,
ready to close another hazy day of
the same frantic, purposed nonsense.

--- ---

I recently started working up in West Valley City, a long drive, a true commute, next to the airport and its continuous takeoffs and landings, in areas and neighborhoods once completely foreign. There are many ordinary and strange things that transpire--it's just life; they're just kids and people going about their daily routines.

wyoming pictures

I recently put up our photos from our Wyoming trip in July this year. Some of my favorites are below. Check out my photostream or the photoset.

Wind

I can hardly make out the stars,
melted away by the vaporous streetlight haze.
Machinery pounds and pummels somewhere distant,
repetitive, like garbage trucks emptying overflowing
dumpsters again and again.

The train hoots and calls, parades down the old tracks
like some giant steel owl
gliding through the night,
under bridges paralleling the industrial blocks,
past the lake--stealth, honing in like a bat.

Black branches rustle, blown into small
battles with each other. The wind silently
winds through blades of grass, it
sails over the innumerable lookalike rooftops
and rattles roadsigns.
It pushes at my back, soars into my mouth
and eyes;

it rushes into my veins and carries me,
lifting me high over the speckled city--
all pretentious and illuminated like a great
connect-the-dots below.
I look above me
and I can see the stars.

--- ---

I wrote this a while ago, 2009-03-26.

amy, above the wind

Simpson Springs

The dead predawn has snuffed out all life,
all sound,
the centurial dirt road torn into the
desert below is littered with a thousand
hoofprints, trampled and endless and eroded,
a shrine to an age and an instinct
from which we're far removed--which we
ourselves removed and polished and placed shardlike
in houses and museums, books and display cases.
Memories so sharp and honed they draw blood.

Slept with the tips of Cassiopeia's W facing left;
woke and she was right. Slept and
watched the world rotate round on the north star
like spinning a plastic globe;
woke and watched the liquid midnight velvet drain
the sky, disappearing stars hidden only by glare,
Capella the last to exit.

The desert slowly steadily stirs,
no memory, just now,
just a robe of filtered sunlight capping
eastward hills and highlighting butte and rock
and military runway.

The wooden walls of the restored station creak and shake in
the heat of the morning sun. The real ruins tell
their own story with crumbling stone and foundation--
tell of death in place of birth, abandonment and
decay, a man left a widower in a harsh world
when life was more fragile, more visceral--
the liminal space between the dead and living thin
and vulnerable.

We put our hands into the old old dirt,
finger the coarse bits of gravel weathering
from the slight hillside.
Our pores are pockets for the windblown dust,
red and pale and dun, flown in from the brine
left by ancient Lake Bonneville--its salt,
the earth's salt, mixing with our salted skins,
marking us, painting us all as one, a
living mineral touched by and breathing each
element. Mutual symbiotes, products of one another.

We have always been dependent
on these stars, this dirt, these trampled roads.
The orange lights of Dugway may shine at midnight,
the desert may erupt and the earth tremble as the
army tests ballistics during midday,
but nothing has changed.
We are still here, still the same;
like cells crawling a continuous membrane
we are minute and indistinct
yet one and the same.

The sunlight breaks the hills and heats stone and sand
and throws our shadows long like darts cast
across the plane of the world, and our cracked
lips curve and turn upward and bare teeth
and tongue, eyes slit and creased
and noses upturned we breathe and taste the salt,
taste it with every wild heaving breath.

--- ---

sunrise awakening


that road


life among death


--- ---

This was all inspired by or about Simpson Springs, an old Pony Express station out in the west Utah desert where Jarom and I camped last September on our way to the geode beds. There's just something about the desert . . . Written between 20090326 and 20090404.

today

Today I explored. I stood on top of this small hill over Soldier's Pass in the southeast Lake Mountains. Here's what I saw:



It was really beautiful out there. My complaints: too much trash--people seem not to care about the west desert; it's simply dumped anywhere they can let it go. Also, too many shooting relics: shotgun shells, bullet shells, broken and unbroken clay pigeons. The land is still beautiful. Let us try to keep it that way.

Here's where I witnessed it:

View 2009.07.05 rockhounding, exploring in a larger map

other things I saw today:


the graffiti train


a house for sale


West Mountain lookin good


the Wasatch front from the west side of Utah Lake

Spiders

Watched him and his children play
on bikes in wet streets--
a father in his twenties,
everything new and achievable.
A wide world and invulnerable.
That's me,
years past and ahead.
Trying to steady every memory
balanced like a baby in my hand
just so I don't forget.

Moments flow past
like rain slicked across oil on those rainy streets,
those hills by the park where I played baseball each year,
where snow hardly fell but when it did we
stood by the woodstove later with soaked jeans
and makeshift sleds, red fingers and hands.

These thoughts crowd my mind,
rising like an insurgence that must be quelled
and filed orderly into cells,
where generations later they can be
recalled skeletal,
like a young boy's remains
finally found in the desert.

Because they hurt they are so filled with love,
and life is swift and unmediating,
and sometimes we're carried up in the immediacy of
it all, every year, then it's just a blurred stream
and all i want is the swallowing hug of a five-year old girl,
all i want is to tousle sunbleached hair
and explain the curiosities of spiders.

--- ---

These thoughts and more occurred to me early a recent morning. When I get less sleep I'm actually more artistically inspired.