A Child Born in Fall...

A child born in Fall is born beneath the Moon.

The Moon is full in Fall and’s crisp above all, and Fall is when the Sun goes cold.  In the morning Sun comes down in rays to leave morning chills on pink noses.  Fall in the morning is when words escape from vapor-mouths into the atmosphere.  Is when words go misting steamily off the tongue, and twirl around the cheeks for an instant, and continue on rising toward a sky that is young and blue (like a child who’s lost grip of her balloon and it goes fluttering out of small-arm’d reach up and up and up and oh!).  –In fact When words go misting is not entirely unlike how branch-tips concede their color-full and leafy summer stories to the forest floor for final absorption. Fall is seven sniffling continents of pink pumffly noses.

Fall shares snickering laughs with Spring, his cohort the trickster season.  (“Her name was November, she went by Autumn or Fall”).  Fall catches you taking an afternoon nap, and you suddenly awake in a shiver, wondering “who’s there…me?”  Winter and Summer are different; for example, in Winter you may say, “Ah, here is Winter.  I have my mittens in the drawer.”  And as another example, in Summer you may say, “Well finally here is summer – what a long and rainy spring it was!”   We anticipate Winter; we assume ourselves a Summer.  But Fall does not come gradual, nor slow; Fall leaps the stage unannounced and screams, “Coup d’etat!”, and eats his dessert before his salad and scoffs at groundhogs and meteorologists alike.

In fact in this case I know the very night, to the hour, at which Fall swept across the mountains of Southern California.  And I’ll tell you……. She decided this year to come in on the Chariot Wind, and she would not be overlooked.  While we were away she came (like how comic thieves in black baklavas go pink panther-ing across the lawn at night) and upturned the lawn chairs and toppled the trashcans.  She blew the windows open wide.  She came and ripped the screen doors off of their ever-loving hinges, and then, (after taking deep breath and reloading gusts of wind) she proceeded inside to tussle the bedspreads and to twist the ceiling fans into wild and obtuse angles, and while in there decided to read the entire bedside novel, page for page, and slammed the final cover in disgust when done.  And for the sake of emphasis, before leaving, picked up the front yard and tossed it to the back.  And Moon just shook her head and sighed.

The next morning, walking through main street, a change was about the town.  The village people spoke only in whispers – like an early America on the cusp of war – the type Paul Revere’d go riding through – they all spoke in whispers saying: “did you hear?” and “could it be true?”  And knew a new season had arrived, unholy, un-prophesied, inscrutable.

That night Joel Brad April and I sat around the table on the porch by light of Moon, checking our phones to hear the news of one October child.  We sat around the table and tugged our ears and shifted in our seats.  And when I opened my mind’s eye I saw, with a smile, every other small and excitable congregation doing likewise: one in the bay area, sitting around a similar table and checking phones and pulling wrists; a few of course in the northwest, huddled together under dim lights of evening, checking phones and shifting restlessly in seats of remembrance (perhaps remembering when they too…), and others across the Midwest and on into the South – all the little island congregations across the country – and all of us eager to prepare a gift, shoulder a pack and go a-cameling across the land – all the while whispering “did you hear?” and “could it be true?”

A child born to America in the Fall will open eyes the first time around a thanksgiving dinnertable wonder of wonders.  Will innately understand the warmth of family and discern this sharply (crisp) with the howling bitter cold of dastard wind from through the flume. Will lay awake at nights to gaze through windowblinds at winking harvest moon, and dream of wooden fingers scratching gently at the walls.  Will go from the hearth through life with a heart of hearthstone and chill.  Will forever see through fog.  Will come into the world a knowing child.  Will know and will wait patiently to crawl until undoubtedly inspired by the blooming wonders of spring and summer, and all the rosy secrets that loom and lurk mysterious in the corners of one wild-eyed imagination - for how else did a Mother or a Father ever come to know?

Awwwwww baby. We gotta go now...

on crumbly dry and summer hillsides

A lizard scuttles ‘long my roof, reminds me, “crane your neck!”

Mizz humming-goes-birding balanced there across the oak twig reminds me “lighter is best”.

And all the squalling jays come chorusing in the morning, reminding each other that “Over here? No over there. Over here perhaps.”

Meanwhile and just downhill, the ever-highway sends engine roars to echo up-canyon and dissipate.

Can only write it as it’s felt.

A weathered and wily, still fortunate son am I.

Mountains trees and rivers without end. I lay down to bask and cake atop the baking hillside – the hillside who’s no choice BUT to lay in the sun.

Put it all down in ink and somehow become alone again.

Slugging through the center of my apprenticehood to reality, and asking everywhere are you the teacher of fish?

and are you the fisher of fish-hooks under skin?

and are you the friend of deer?

A world full of women and men with bark for skin.

With death in every corner of the globe,

and Spring too.

Close your eyes and see if you can’t open the Hand of Thought

Let those concepts grow forceps

And scuttle away.

I was out for a run this morning when I happened upon a coyote.

We were both very simple,

silly even.

He stopped mid-trot

looked at me as if to think – “will it eat me?” and “will I eat it?”

I kept him in sight for two miles

before disappearing to the brush and middle way.

huntington

Zooming up coast from Dana Point all the way to Huntington proper I was

smiling out the window whipping by,

singing to praise whosoever proffered me this Sunday

yet another.

How devastatingly beautiful, I think, is

the black lab, leashed and lapping along, also

the wino, shuffling sidewalks, hands-a-pockets,

the joggers blonding ponytails go Swish! Swish!

storefronts glimmer in the early earthly glow

and by god the Bikers! - those sinew-sleek and anatomic bodies

humping their sleek machines uphill.

I stop to fill gas (!!4.29 a Steal!)

And watch big-screen television while minding the pump,

think: "this is the donning of the age of aquarius,"

lean against my car door and starearound

the other strangers leaning on car doors too,

all of us an island - a mountain underwater.

Back on the road keep zooming till I reach

Laguna! - 'la pieta' draped across the knees of coast,

ellegant as her name, I think, 

if famous to the world she came then famous she'll return

into the sea - streets, shops, palms and all...

Laguna with her perfectly groomed every-thing's,

nature tamed and manicured you know

it's all a lot a picture show.

Laguna with her snowy-white teeth,

sun-kissed shoulders and,

bourgeois-blue eyes.

(but before Laguna or even Dana Point this morning

remember leaving San Clemente...)

San Clemente where the curved roads go curving

in curves o'er hills of swerving swells,

where all manner of surf shops, pubs and parlors,

suburbia of Pendleton Military Base and outgrowth of such,

San Clemente where I awoke

(on memorial day nonetheless)

on the roof of said suburbia.

San Clemente where I awoke to the sound of palm fronds breezing,

on the roof where the whole gangofus had slept

in a jumble of drunken comforts and pillow-arms,

on the roof of Southern California with stars close as my nose,

where because of rain throughout the night

the whole gang one by one had left, grumpily wet,

- except for Elliott and Me, who've slept in puddles before and didn't mind.

And so now I go zooming up the Highway Pacific 1

--that ocean-hugging highway where a couple Octobers ago

E and I had gone rushing South through foggy gloom

with mad goal to cover old Oregon's coast in a single weekend,

and also in order to throw the huppiest halloween bash this side 'o the galaxy,

and also to swim in seas of midnight naked and free,

and also to look up and see that nocturnal flock of gulls go squawking overhead in

one big white feathery omen'd troup, as if to say to us: 

"Ahoy, feather your friggots boys, wa-hah!"

And so now I go zooming North up that unbeleivably self-same highway,

halfway believing, for the wonderful power of these memories, that

I'll run into E and Me (any second now...)

coming the other direction.

O sweet spontaneous 

earth how often have

the 

doting

    fingers of prurient philosophers pinched

and

poked

thee

, has the naughty thumb

of science prodded

thy

beauty .  how

often have religions taken

thee upon their scraggy knees

squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive

gods

        (but

true

to the incomparable

couch of death thy

rhythmic

lover

  thou answerest

them only with

   spring)

-Estlin Cummings

my fire eats everything

Though at first I was responsible

(flint spark to scaly schist

over dead twig and dry leaf),

just as a word, once spoken,

no longer belongs to it’s author - so this fire went free.

And now

 

My fire eats everything

 

Decaying heartwood of a

once hearty hemlock,

malignant maple or

aging oak,

young proud poplar

never thought he’d see the day -

my fire gladly receives and

gladly burns.

Eats 'em all up.

 

My fire remembers nothing.

Knows no language, age or fashion,

where it comes or

how it might should act.

Cares not for reason,

entertains no concept of progress and

never envies.

Only ever sings the timeless tune of

Cackle-spark and Flicker-flame.

And a fickle song indeed,

capable of sustaining life

on freezing winter nights,

capable of purifying water,

coal, gold, earth.

Capable of consuming entire

forests

mountains

homes and

villages.

Eats 'em all up.

 

 

My fire comes from a long line of fires:

heat for the first man

brother to the first rain

harbringer of illumination all types

and all gods fashioned in fire-likenesses:

From the earliest Pyrolaters

Tonatiuh for the Aztecs

Ra who oversaw the pyramids

Sacred flame of the Vestal Virgins

Bodhisattva of the sun 

and the burning bush to Moses spoke.

Fire who, once harnessed,

became the catalyst of modern man, the modern family

and modern warfare.

 

And for all this I ask,

“who is the God of fire?”

 

Which upon hearing nothing

I return to sitting

and thinking how

Dark the night,

how silent the world,

save for the cackling of

my fire.  My fire who eats everything

- there see it!

See it in the night.

Watch it flicker,

spark defiant,

watch it something fierce

piercing scalding warnings toward

the whole world of darkness

unafraid.  As if to say,

"I was not the first, nor

will be the last."

And issuing me now a boon

in the form of a spark.

My fire eats everything

and when my fire finally dwindles

the universe sleeps.

once I was a seabrooder

Ah shoot it’s nearly been a month and what to say!

On a Saturday too...  Suppose I should peruse pictures and journals and contemplate all Saturdays of Past, what then?.  And I bid you think: how many Saturdays have thine eyes be-winked?  And how many of those swam, sung, slurp’d and slept through?  How many spent in company of friends, or strangers who'd later become friends, or all alone with only your woebegone face in the mirror brushing teeth?  How many Saturdays spent on mountain tops, waking cold to nylon walls of tent and sky, or wandering with full pockets in halls of malls or making Sunday plans in corner booths over stack a pancakes?  But besides yourself how many Saturdays are being right now lived across the green and blue globe?  I’d like to take my hand and spin the globe and while it’s spinning touch my finger down, and wherever it lands I say, “Saturday in Slovenia of course!”  For example where are my Saturdays in Spain I had and loved but lost?  I spent a few in Canadia not many… And what’s the business of a calendar anyway?  In the morning you know a Saturday’ll last forever, when the sun comes peeking through blinds you see her hiding there, toes poking out from underneath big heavy drapes you spy her there…   Like scrubbing my left ear and accidentally turning some hidden valve in there which looses all Saturdays to come swooshing around my temples in plain memory’s view:

May 16 ’09 one of the first I see (picture above to prove it):

“On this particular morning E and I awake perfectly bleary eyed and discombobulated from sleeping like tombstone’d mummies on hard-packed dirt and rocks – but waking up like born again persons wearing smiles.  Taking once more that salt bath in the sea splash offered exclusively in West Italia for a limited time only.  Breakfast with the boys (eggs over toast is translatable) before kayaking through limitless sea blues and sea breezes feeling free.  Afterwards running into Wil and the gang on the beach and going with them to big pizza feast.  Talks on trains and rocks down by the water in Riomaggiore, after which we say a few good-byes naturally.”

Or September 18 ’10 so ordinary:

“Cleaned the house today all favors and flavors – and 't was a dust bunny siege!  A grit and grime guerilla war.  Man the laundry ahoy there!  Man your scally-rags and swing the jib-broom!  All for one and whitely done.  Sparkle shine into the horizon victorious – plop down and read a book.”

Or just a few, not so long ago May 28

“In a hotel room where all’s familiar,

morning juice and a hot shower does

healthy for the soul.

Headphones in and hanging heavy on every word of

“Slaughterhouse 5” (once a year)

While childhood brothers Mike and Joel,

(also having just hot-showered their hearts clean)

lay watching hockey on the box

chatting casually like they did 15 years ago

on floors of homes rug’d and safe.”

Or the very next week as I’m trying ta leave town but get caught in a mad carnival of memorial day yard sales:

“Zooming through streets of Saturday Wrightwood to music, saying to myself, “out of the way pa!” and “where’s the junk, joe?” and all the stuff-hungry families meandering on manicured lawns saying “honey, should I?” and “a nickel for another yah?” and “well hell, it fits me well!” and through all this comes me zooming ‘round corners and up hills, skirting rows of parked cars and parked junk, whole hordes of men with junk in their eyes and poor children destined to ingest junk... but there goes me whip, revv, zoom!  Finally bursting into the open freedom downhill descent towards L.A. and Old Friends and Miss Pacifica too, another weekend in the railroad earth ahead.”

How hilarious and sad and lovely those past Saturdays, those past me's and you's - which would I could contain each one in it's very own snow globe, I'd line the walls and bookshelves all of them... and at any point in time I walk up and peek inside one to view a 'former me' and a 'past you' playing ourselves and spinning around to music while Saturday snowflakes swarm overhead... every Saturday I ever lived... I peek in one and see us sitting around with bottoms to sofas, conversing absentmindedly as if there's no snow overhead at all... and I've got 'em all lined up in rows and rows and shelves and stacked high, so as I grow older the house becomes filled and cluttered to the roof with snow globes! - globes in cabinets and across the mantel and heaped in corner piles and photos of more snow globes hanging on the wall and snow globes in the fruit basket... and coming home from work in the evenings I put coffee to boil, begin a fire in the woodstove, pluck a globe from off the dinner table, walk across the room and go "pahloomph" into my easy chair, set my globe upon the arm rest to light a pipe, pick it up again, study with sadness, raise an eyebrow in question, then turn it upside down and chuckle to remember another Saturday I'd forgot, and I bet I'd peek in there and ask out loud as if anyone could hear me, "aren't you cold in all that world of snow?"

A Jeweled Necklace

Nothing makes a happier me than sizzling sterile asparagus heads.  As finally a warmth returns to my cheeks after a chilly and wind-blown dusk.  And now being sung to revival by the day's-over song of the nuthatch, a three-noted whistle: with the second note always higher in pitch than the first and the third note always the deepest - a shrill and resounding song for a guy 2" tall... Left work late this day so was forced to hike farther into the evening than I planned, and eventually pitched camp in a no-where spot, which I suppose is fitting as any campground anyways.

But I just wish I had'n'a seen that coyote, the one I so aptly interrupted during the private purity of his hunt and who became paranoid of me everafter, though I suppose we shared something during our equally startled meeting of eyes (and up on top of mountains during an eery and all-encompassing fog nonetheless, which made everything magic and arden-like to begin with).  So now by the fire scratching my head over how I've long accepted I'm an animal, but now must come to the terms with the fact I'm an asparagus head.  Glad to be here now, especially since earlier setting up camp in the quickly fading light with frozen fingers got me all hurried and hectic out of sorts.  But of course I realize was just the wild reminding me "kid it'nt all roses and romance up here like you sometimes suppose" and was necessary.

Though thanks to the fog I saw perhaps the most miraculous view I suppose I've ever seen.  As earlier in the evening I was traversing a high ridge side and finally beginning to feel all alone (and thus at home with everything) and climbing higher higher higher.  And this being during the universal fog I hinted at previously: I could see clouds rolling like waves up the mountain side from down below south, all the way up and right through my hair and keep on going up to the top - but they never ceased, never broke, never gave any hint that there'd be a final cloud, a caboose-end to the misty procession.  So here I am plodding along this ridge-road, up there and exposed but really seeing nothing in any direction save for my feet and perhaps a few yards of path ahead.  And right about the time I have accepted my lot, have forgotten wishing for anything and have begun to simply carry on with moving and whistling dixie - about this time I suddenly notice a "light" or a presence of change, like when you know someone's staring at you behind your shoulder and get that tingling intuition-sense, I felt a similar (!) from out of nowhere.  At which point I turned around and saw the most miraculous view I ever saw, which I attribute much to the power of surprise, for it's one thing to lay eyes on your long lost childhood friend when you've been planning for months to meet, but it's another thing completely to lay eyes on the same friend after turning the corner of aisle 9 of the local grocery store and running suddenly into each other.  So I turn around and it's as if Zeus had reached down with big muscly arms and drew the clouds apart like curtains, giving me a perfect window view of all the remaining ranges marching down and eventually into the southern california desert, and at sunset nonetheless!  Or, as the peaks were rising high to swallow the smiling sun in all his pride and keep him there out of sight, but in his final struggles managing to cast brilliant fading illuminations over all the world's features and reminding us he'll be back around.  I was immediately reminded of a painting at a pizza shop in North Carolina where there's a perfect meadow and a spectacular waterfall and a rainbow over everything and majestic friendly brown bear fishing for salmon in the lake below and all the trees blooming wild fall colors - how I'd always look at this picture and laugh for all of it's outrageous extravagances and over-doings - though I suppose no matter how beautiful a woman attempts to paint or write or tell or act, there's always a true beauty to the original experiencing of the source in the moment that'll outshine any recreation with easy and simple brilliance.  So I turn my head around owl-like and get blasted by this sudden view, inadvertently stopping in my tracks and pausing to gape, because I surely didn't believe it.  Because here I was hiking along in a gloomy world of dusk and never supposed that anything to the contrary could've ever happened, and certainly not so (!) quickly in any case.  So I stand there paining my eyes to please open wider till it hurts, and trying to trace every ridge valley shrub tree rock bird and city light below and every color, blur, sweep and sway of scenery, and a part of me sad because I know soon it'll blow over and I'll never see it again (and even now can hardly see it in memory's eye).

But I don't need the moment back or any moment for that matter.  Because holy blessed replacement moments are always arriving on the scene all the time and forever, of course until they don't anymore, at which point we won't mind anyway...  So, as I say, and to prove the point: Cowboy Coffee, Can-a-Beans and Candide by the fire, leaning against a hollow log and watching blue-orange outlines of shadowy pine-figures turn to black (how many moods and characters has a tall pine? whether outlined with fog or dusk or noonday sun or what else!) And in fact the stars are out, and looking down on me and my silly little camp, as I'm only able to write these words whenever the flicker flames allow - so really I suppose the fire wrote it all and I'm therefore not to blame.  Can you beat it?!

So I wake up in the morning and read these words: "For example, when we sail a boat into the ocean beyond sight of land and our eyes scan the four directions, it simply looks like a circle.  No other shape appears.  The great ocean, however, is neither round nor square.  It has inexhaustible characteristics.  To a fish it looks like a palace, to a heavenly being a jeweled necklace.  To us as far as our eyes can see, it looks like a circle.  All the myriad things are like this.  Within the dusty world and beyond, there are innumerable aspects and characteristics; we only see or grasp as far as the power of our eye of study and practice can see.  When we listen to the reality of myriad things, we must know that there are inexhaustible characteristics in both ocean and mountains, and there are many other worlds in the four directions."

Lemon Grove Avenue

Life is good.  Work is well.  Sun it shines.  Home is clean.  Clothes laundered.  Paid are bills.  In short, order's got her muscle-grip viced down on all my mornings, afternoons and sundowns.  So because everything is so well, and because I realized this week just how well it was, and because I started to feel just a little claustrophobic in this one-truck town - I've decided to take to the woods this weekend.  Because what I really need is 60 straight hours in which I have no clue and no way of knowing what'll happen next.  Because what I really need is to be challenged by a steep and sliding trail, to be lost in all that's familiar, and to sit in the presence of a few who are much older and knowing than I'll ever be.  And because, which is always the best and most imperative reason of them all, is because I simply can.  But anyway the real reason is that I've heard the mountain has poems hidden up there and I won't be coming down before stealing a couple or at least sneaking a peek...  Happy Weekending everyone!

A Revisiting

Sandy beach 

an overripe peach

and a true view

of the inside passage.

The seldom seen

scene of blue skies,

a jet-cloud stream tails

a plane of passerbys.

Feeling rooted

youthly suited

and quite mile-high myself

for a monday afternoon.  Besides

Who'd dare dispair?

If they too had seaweed

for hair, sand for hands

and a peach to spare.

Bids my mind run free -

like a child ankle-deep

in waves, piles shells

for mom to see.

The Swiftest Traveller

Morning trek begins downhill, through still-asleep neighborhoods.  Bagel for breakfast but no coffee in sight.  Clomping West along Angeles Crest Highway - "why not just drive there?"  Like Elliott and me, when three summers ago we hopped a lone tour bus, tired and beat, down an old dirt road on the southernmost end of the rainy island.  And now, three years and a few trails later, on a sunny saturday on the southernmost corner of Turtle Island... I know that if I were to see it in a crystal ball, he'd be doing the same this very minute.  Couldn't be happier to be on the move.

Hour or two later, following up a gully in deep-settled powder (how deep?), slow going, very slow going.  The blue ridge trail is here, hidden somewhere under here and out of sight.  Salvage two dead limbs for walking sticks, one short for the uphill traverse and one long for the sloping descent, you boys aren't done for just yet!  The pastel sky, the shapeless carpet of pure white, and the evergreens in between, socks, boots, gaiters, water knife sandwich and poems ("Cold Mountain is a house / without beams or walls").  Now if you get out into the open fields well you start to sink in slush every blasted step; better to stay beneath the trees and close to trunks, where sun shines less and snow stays crisp.  Better you learn to discern a squirrel track from a rabbit, because you read about it?  Because I saw him just now, in his characteristic stop-and-go fashion, go a scampering from trunk to trunk.

Come upon a high ridge, treeless expanse, views of desert in the distance, views of ski-lifts down the opposing valley.  Squinted eye-level with the highest ridge around.  Finally to rest upon the high dry slope: no signs here, no panorama view or guest-book... but the place gives me a good feeling, a kind a hospitable quiet.  And the sun here breaks through clouds warm as august.  Leaning bare skinned on a 200 year old Ponderosa, with direct view of his brother: much more to look at, though not as tall, gnarled and twisted back again, with lots of crooks and crannies up there, as if he couldn't decide which way to the sun (must be the younger of the two...).  All around are simply needles, dry and weightless, 8-inch clusters.  And also a fallen patchwork of bark flakes, amazing curvatures of smooth golden brown.  An encircled summer oasis from the snow with golden heat beaming down.  Ingredients aside, brand names regardless - the harder you work for a sandwich, the better it tastes.

Time now to pick up the sticks, head over the valley, across the contour and down-slope to the road again.  Off toward a regular Saturday morning.  Stopping at the ranger station on the way back to town (open 9am): "Say, any good trails around this area?"

coffee black and egg white

First snow flurries in Wrightwood on a sunday morning

Where first came the Natives, the Missionaries, the Spaniards

the Tractors and the Tour Bus

Where Hollywood comes to film "wild"

Where very dark at night and stars still the primary

Could fit the whole town into the post office, and do

Could ski lift up from the mojave desert, and might

And now the waking town bright, the Costa Rica Dark

Porch Sitting, a sudden and much needed slowing down

Last night laughter resonates, chili songs and accomodates

From somewhere down the street singing "let it be"

Because Darlene I am your lost grandson is why

Because everyone says 12 inches on the way

Pass is closed.  One thing we know is snow

One thing we never forget is roads

How tall can you build them?  How high can you lean the ladder?

Never know what's changing till we leave

Never know what's coming when we're young, and just when we had it mapped and named - mystery white flurries from the blue sky came

cure for the homeless

Midmorning sun in the southwest corner of the continent

plates collide to push up from the desert -

young mountains strong and stubborn

steep rock, cliffs of scree

scrub oak and desert brush

Serrado country.

 

With skin cooled by thin breeze

I lay peaceful here,

watch a milky blue sky go yawning

from horizon to horizon

while grandfather sun, hung and glowing there

shines all the     way     down

finally to rest on bare skin shoulders.

 

In a borrowed bed of fallen needles - one

meticulously assembled carpet over time -

I lay unassuming,

gaze skyward at Grandfather pines

Citizens proper.  Contained

in that elderly wisdom where nothing surprises

and all goes without saying.

Swaying easy in the wind

while unseen and underground

ensues the complex intertwine

the gnarled thrust and search of arms

rooted to the center of the earth.

 

Hear him now jackhammering

the Nuttail Woodpecker

eighty feet high and unceasing

like he doesn’t know its Saturday.

Breaks loose a pinecone

through the air to free-fall

the soft impact and tumble downhill

finally to rest, marks the place

for new growth.

A hawk circling overhead pays no attention

rides a warm current

over ridge

and out of sight.

walks around town

The Year of the Turtle

Monday morning in the Weaverville Bakery, one of my last here for the time being.  And I got to watch 'em stand and pole the American flags all up and down both sides of Main Street (it's Martin Luther King Jr. Day).  And speaking of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we should all pay respects by listening to the song "Dr. King" by Mason Jennings.  You can easily hear it by way of google, great song by a true artist.

I am flying to Wrightwood, CA on Friday morning, as a permanent deal, to live and work and everything inbetween.  I have already compiled a list of all notable authors that have anything to do with the region and have planned a succession of adventures to surrounding areas (the tallest mountain in the contiguous US, the lowest desert, Joshua Tree Park and Yosemite, etc...).  I will be busy as soon as I arrive, searching for a place to live, meeting the people, getting acquainted with the work site and learning the flowers.

Today I am working on closing the chapter, on moving furniture out of the house and into a storage space where it will stay until Brad and Joel come and pick it up in a couple months, to begin again, if they want to.   Garrison is back in Oregon, beginning his own new story with brand new knee at a new university.  Brad and Joel are working in Montana for the moment, and will hopefully come work in California next to me for a while before returning to Asheville, and hopefully maybe even stay in California, one or both of them.  But none of us really know for sure yet, still coasting on the open-ended roadtrip we began last spring.  The house is starting to look like it did a year ago - the day we moved in - when we sat on the living room floor without a dollar to our name or a chair in the house, ate Arby's, then wondered what to do for the next 7 days before work started.  None of us actually lived out the entire calendar year under one roof, but hey, baby steps.

So far in 2011 I have been climbing a little more often, eating a little smarter, reading a lot of Gary Snyder and listening to a lot of J Tillman.  I have also been watching more movies than I would usually admit, probably since I'm living alone and don't have Joel to quote them for me anymore:  I was really excited to see the "Book of Eli" because of Religion in Pop Culture and end-of-the-world and well of course Denzel, but unfortunately the movie was completely weightless and made me swear that I would give up on Hollywood forever.  But a few days later I saw the original "True Grit" which was a damn good feel-good of a western, and can't wait to see the Coen Brothers' take on it.

Hopefully no one, besides Backpacker Magazine who claims I owe them 20 dollars, will send any more mail to 44 S. College Street in Weaverville.  I'll let everyone know of my new address as soon as I do.  Mostly, I wanted to get on here and send Love to my family in Newberg Troutdale Sellwood Livermore Little Rock and OKC, most of whom I was blessed to see over the holiday break, and the rest of who I'm excited to see for kicks in '11.

puddle-talk

To 630 in the morning and E who slips on his black Neal jacket for the thousand and one-th time.

To how easy everything is when all you have to do is wake up with Jazz.

To the white elephant who makes his home twixt Park and Yamhill, and to the rain.

To tweed ricket chairs sitting round hourglass morning tables.  And window-gazing too.

To the old Italina-capped maestro dragging on outdoor and narrow alley stairs.

To the Buddha who sleeps soundly 'mong the firescapes while the building burns slowly down.

And to Mrs Peacock under a polka-dot umbrella, grimly bearing the slave-weight of purse, shopping pouch and poncho.

To the myriad pairs of long, slender, solid-colored and suggestive synthetic rain boots.

To continuing this one among all the many memories still remembering just one.

To pretty little city.

To pretty little city and when all the time her guardian mother-cloud hangs perpetually overhead, cries her eyes on all the children.

And to a cloudy glass of water by the bedside.