SR-518
is the saddest road we take
when we give you back.

I rode the bus from Boise to Missoula.
It stopped in Pendleton, of course,
for the two-in-the-morning
turn around of drivers and new faces
and new air coming in and out of
the door. Twenty two hours of the most
out of the way navigation that breaks
my heart in half to think about waking up
to large stretched out distances of eastern
Oregon and Washington. I know my places, so I knew
I was getting close as the western larches
gathered together along I-90 just outside of Spokane.
The Selkirks appear, and dark blue on green appears
and the interstate binds and hugs the sub ranges.



I rode the bus from Boise to Missoula
only to take a plane to Billings.
You were taking an osteoporosis study
and asked me to come, so I did. We took
the highway from the Greyhound station to MSO.
We flew in a twin-turboprop commuter plane.
I sat near the window, near the propeller and
it sliced my sight-line as I stared out and
thought I felt the Gulf of Mexico.
I held your hand as the descent proved terrifying
and the sun pressed tight on my temple.
When we found our hotel,
I wanted to hold the Rimrocks.
We were on the other side of the Great Divide,
and I knew from the sigh I set free, from the shadows
and the way the rain smelled that summer night as we came
back from dinner. Really, it wasn't those things that told
me this at all, but I know it, now, like language, like Chinook winds
and the way that larches tell me I'm almost there.

I'm pulled between the places
where the rain soaks
in to the ground and stays,
and the places where the ground
will plead for water
and get lightning instead.

I know when winter approaches.
Leaves turn in to crackling dervishes
in gutters and light gets brighter
and colder and leaves sooner
and to try to drink it in, well,
it might as well be the moon.

It is. It's true.

In the Morning

I put the sky away
after falling in to
the same pattern
of waiting for a different result
with out changing my approach.
I studied fields,
but those left to.

Sometimes, in the morning,
I'll wait just a few seconds more
as the light slowly changes
and it brightens each nerve
of the houses on the slow descent
down the hill.

It's the only thing you can do,
being morning and all.

Out here, with us.

The parking lot was overrun with weeds
when we walked from the motel in St. Louis.
There were cars that looked cracked under the
persistent morning sun, and I imagined each rock I saw
and each stump I passed, that pierced through the
forgiving asphalt, had a face and a name better than mine.

I'd never been to the Midwest, and there were a thousand stories
I'd made up for years. I wanted to drink in the urban prairies. I wanted to see vast lawns and flower beds so orderly and sparse, it would make me
homesick for a house I'd never smelled. I wanted to see hand written diner-signs
advertising chicken dinners with sides. The streets would be faint
and they would forget you too early. I did see some of the tall empty buildings, and how they leaned from the pressure of time,and more than once I saw structures with broken out windows, affording views through another window, and so it would go until I
was stuck with a framed horizon that wasn't mine.

We don't have decaying large cities in the west.
We've got forgotten towns and fields whose ghosts peer out
at you from the trees and grass covered tombstones.
Long boarded-up roadside cafes on the way to places
like Fairfield and Riggins and Horseshoe Bend tell you
to keep moving towards the cities and the water, and to leave them alone to their still-life playing it's self out quietly in the shift of clouds over foothills and prairies.

They don't need you, and they'll forget you long before you forget them.

December '08

I can feel the winter in my once-broke clavicle while
roof tops pray for snow and grass follows it's lead.
It feels different now.
There's soup to be made, books to arrange and rearrange,
cracked melodies to grasp for before they become
part of the upper atmosphere.

I rememember the morning we woke to snow
in our city cabin in the woods,
staring at the attic style ceiling.
The sound of snow on snow
was suddenly punctuated by a thunderstorm.
It was early and there was no light
except the street lights pushing
yellow lines across the white quiet street.

I wish I could paint this for you, but I can't.

Where I ended up was here.
This is the place where the trees
bend themselves to ignite electric terror
as they run their hands across windows
as if to say, "I know a place where we can go."