And Every Year …

i. As spring rains all over you you find yourself water rushing the culvert and you find the river, become river (because it’s home) and all who live along it know its name and yours and all that you did (or did not do) is river, part of the landscape as each day bursts its filmy sky, pain already in the wind and birds are singing and singing hurts (more than silence) more than the danger of burst bank and levee, long wash of spring flood and every year you pray you’ll escape and every year you find yourself water ...

ii. Just another overheated summer and you awake to the alarm of the clock (in imperfect light) and the hills on fire, windburnt sky, grey smoke suspended … admit it’s ridiculous –you’ve hijacked a god who can (and does) cremate a landscape, track black carbon footprints over your heart and you are only one amongst a multitude (neither saint nor sinner) called into a world where even He is not above flouting the protocol.

iii. Open autumn to empty air and the god-like power of wings, of sky (litmus paper blue) and you (white bird) loving its emptiness –no control, no shadow, no sign pointing anywhere and then it seems impossible to be following this road –every house, every tree, every sidewalk (where you are most at home) shedding daytime heat.

Nothing can come of this (unholy event) you say one day but what you thought could never come has fallen, a ripe apple into your hand.

iv. And you unmap the cold caves of winter where everything has been born in the dark (yourself and myself) in the hour before dawn and a shiver runs through while the world’s at its coldest –hearts beat rapidly whenever/however we lose (moment by moment) our network of bloodkinship and comrades-in-arms and god-myths, insist the past is a dead-and-buried land yet somehow familiar like fresh snow on a street full of bitter silence that is not beginning (not ending) and even that door slam, small voice helloing, car revving, can’t find its sound.