The Unwatched Guards

2011-12-26T05:54:00.000-08:00

I dream of cars and how they mean so many different things.Here I am on a corner waiting. When the red with yellow trimmed station wagonpasses, I don't care, I don't know him. An alarmssounds deep as the van I've been waiting for my whole entire life,and also for ten minutes, appears. The car, it gives and it takes. Waiting forsomeone to arrive can pull the colors out and over the sky. That red streak, and how the evening sky goes through a bruise cycle's worth of colors, shines brighter. Expectation produces dust particles.

2011-07-28T09:52:00.000-07:00

There is alchemy, to be sure,
in small hours of morning.
No one sees it but a few,
with the thick dark humming
electrically as people
sleep despite the strange stars
that are out and the few people that
are out and the cold and wet
air that waits for the sun
to crest hills.

I don't see that much anymore, though.
The morning I see is crowded
to capacity with blurred eyes,
awake, but not really, and it's
just alright then. It's alright
becuase it has to be.
It's alright for now.
I feel the afternoon.

2011-07-13T12:46:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it sounds like bones
hitting other bones. A fast gait,
a first-look at the morning
through half-lids and light
not pouring in so much as escaping
through the open bedroom window.

Sometimes it sounds like sand
pouring on sand. An expected thud,
water running in a garden outside
our window. Our room is too warm
and the heat doesn't escape through
the open bedroom window.

But here we are: Sometimes,when the darkness
shakes me out like a rug and I awake to
the sound of you living in sleep, I breathe
a sigh that stretches out over all the houses
like a moon.

The Calendar

2011-04-01T08:16:00.000-07:00

It should move faster these days.
The tug of panic
and uncertainty wanes,
and, with my older me,
the lights shine softer
than they did when youth
had me by the throat.

But these days, time stops and starts
wildly. Jerking back and forth from
full acceleration to feet
caught in honey. The night time
shines and the daytime is rubbed
like charcoal sketches in to the edges of the farthest view.

There are places in my town where houses
sit on large lots.
The view out the back is I-5.
The view out the back is Boeing field.

Softly, I think, someone watches through a kitchen window amd
waits for the approaching lights to spread across
the wall, telling them that their person arrived,
telling them their inside will settle down
until the night folds in on its self
and sings them to sleep.

Dear 1989

2011-03-30T08:26:00.000-07:00

I thought about you
this morning, in the dark,
how when everything was bright
and the summer had you in its claws,
you jumped off that train trestle
in to the Clark Fork river that spit you back
as a kid who couldn't walk.

You can't get off the train in Missoula.
You can get off in Libby, Whitefish
or Spokane if you're inclined to backtrack, if you're coming from the east.
It feels like closing an envelope when you
get back.

The Growing Things

2011-03-29T09:44:00.000-07:00

There's, where spring lies and waits for summer,
a place where things should grow.
I don't know the land well,
though I want to, though I know
this will help me with me.
Where goes this seed?
Will the sun shine here forever?
The lettuce I grew stared back at me
waiting to die.
I'm sorry.
I want to make it better.
I can, when I try,
make some things work.

There's frozen air and

2011-01-27T12:16:00.000-08:00

The porches out here are dark.
One by one we scan the street lamp lit
street as we sit on the steps, drinking for warmth .
It's nine at night, and a hush
would seem loud here. As one frozen leaf
gets blown off course, in to the street,
the world could come off it's axis
and the only sound left here
would be, "goodnight."

2010-11-04T12:19:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-28T08:23:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-10-21T08:44:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-10-15T12:33:00.001-07:00

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.

2010-09-24T13:10:00.000-07:00

In the Morning

2010-09-23T07:24:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-09-15T12:12:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-08T11:19:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-02-19T13:01:00.000-08:00

2010-01-21T10:18:00.000-08:00

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."

Every night it's the same

2009-05-20T08:33:00.000-07:00

The warehouses
pour out their own
at five o'clock.
They cross train tracks
with smoke plumes coming
out of cracked windows.
Radios syncronize
for a short while
as the weight of daytime
lifts and shoulders lift
and the eyes get focus
on everything but the herons
perched on the riverbed waiting
for the quiet to start.

The Prize

2009-05-19T09:21:00.001-07:00

What will we do tonight
on the edge of the cracked shrub-steppe?
We can go around green mounds,
in between them are canyons,
we'll lay bare our options to the unfolding
storm clouds.

The river was invited across baslt layers,
each one pushing until it couldn't.
Land waits.
No one I know cares to push their feet in to
the mix of sagebrush and grasses like I do.

You know it's not ending
in the stilted shadows across
great plains, and you know it
won't end in the desert-cold nights.
The farm lands have all faded in to
the deepest of memories and I'm
left with a lantern to fade with
the dusk.

Milton-Freewater

2009-05-06T08:05:00.000-07:00

Every tiny moment
increased until it was
a real day.
The foreign sounds,
the backwards trails,
the pack of trees standing guard
on the edge of untouched forest life.

Black ink trails
lay through the state
vein-like and I can't
find a map to save my goddamn life.

Everyday we'll get off this
Greyhound racing dog
only to find ourselves in places
like Arco and Hermiston.
I could have stayed on and
slept through the leg-stretch
opportunity, but I never do.
I'm interested in how the air
here is like breath on glass.

2009-05-05T09:09:00.000-07:00

Could it be
that I only see
a burning moon and stars,
illuminating cars
for the people who never sleep?

2009-03-06T09:51:00.001-08:00

The right wing have discovered recycling! Fear recycling.

Good Work

2009-03-05T08:03:00.000-08:00

There's loose papers scattered around our feet and
It's our harbinger to ignore,
'cause we don't need no dailies
to tell us what we already know.
We're lucky to have good work to do.

There is mud on our shoes,
cramped fingers to extend,
the hum of a thousand light switches all turned on at once.
Twilight fabric extends over the Cascades,
a slow wake up for us to travel on twisted black ribbons
because there's good work to do and we do it.

The Things You Learn

2009-03-03T08:40:00.000-08:00

There's a lonely fact
you learn fast and hard
when you live in an empty state.
To dream of dropping off the coast
the way a rock might if it were thrown hard.
It's a dance you do when you turn from side to side,
looking east and west.
East is a comforter.
You cover up with trees
and hills and imagine forever in a horizon being pulled from
your finger tips. You think you want to smell fish and
salt and anything that's not dust settling on a fence.

It's a lonely fact
that you learn real slow
when you move west. There's always
dust on your back, the sound wind makes
through rocks and passes and the roads that brought
you here. Can you ever sing what it's like to smell rain in the desert?
Could you paint a night canopy over the lighted night sky?

Let me do this movement with you. Our east to west dance between
dust and mud, and a changing night sky.

Cold on my neck

2009-02-20T11:11:00.000-08:00

The spring set.
Grass ways.
A lemon spring cucumber
sprung from the side yard,

I could hear crying in the bus tunnels this morning.

One-ninety-four straight south.
She was holding on to his arm,
the same one gripping a suitcase.

A part of you swept through the bus tunnel this morning.

The grip of Union,
Pioneer and King Street couldn't hold it.

Have patience.

2009-01-19T16:27:00.000-08:00

With much banter, it is quite beautiful.

So long, Ron.

2009-01-06T13:27:00.000-08:00

2008-11-18T08:52:00.000-08:00

The rain makes the roads swell lately.
I can't compare the sky and the ground
to anything else.

I've always lived here and here.
I know the Northwest.
Sometimes, when the moon would rise over
an Idaho ridge, I would imagine that forever
is only the state you live in

all the bricks are layed for someday.

2008-10-21T12:51:00.000-07:00

on high strung lines
i've strung lights that burn out
and get replaced with seasons that change
with barely a whisper of

more rain
more wind
and a bounty of what we see as good days.

The Perch

2008-09-04T07:15:00.000-07:00

Sitting on a porch,
a perch for a better view
of the instant tense,
much better than the present,
Of course, it's not the words I say
but the ones I don't that sting
a little. They aren't meant for you,
you see. They are meant for the
the vent pushing out a draft of stale air.
Staying for awhile, suspended,
until it's pushed out
above the atmosphere,
waiting for wind.

Inside Eleven Two

2008-09-02T07:13:00.000-07:00

Could you ever,
never,
turn your voice in to a song?
I hear falsities,
a persistant kick drum,
a recording played backwards
until the words are a drill.
Proclamations broken in hours,
and excellence in bullshit.
It could be ten years ago,
the way stories are told, retold, told louder.
I don't care.

The story you write for your self will
have one ending, same for all your friends.
I'ts not a whiteout I see coming, but the sound of the
phone that eventually stops ringing.

Outside

2008-08-19T09:57:00.000-07:00

It's the siren song
in the view of a harbor
and clapping concrete
make shift shoes
battling hills
in the view of the
everyday.

I live here.
I do.
This town, connecting through
phone lines and food lines,
bell ringing, service coming and
banshee screams of the
ghosts on high streets.

I'll Follow Him

2008-08-12T06:16:00.001-07:00

Jerry Lee Lewis and The Rust College Quintet from the 1971 Jerry Lee Lewis Show. Never shown on TV.

Cedar/Western

2008-08-07T09:23:00.000-07:00

Was it spelled out
for you that day?
Was there a crescent moon,
crows on the fence
a lamp light extinguished?

It seemed so rare
a curve to take
with two lives rattling
behind him.

They say it was a pedicab,
which was coming down a hill,
and simply could not stop.
I'm inclined to believe that
you knew it would end
and I can't help but think
the pounding of feet as people
ran to you and yours helped you
shrug off the coils
and the fear
and sent you off
knowing something about
pure love.

found

2008-08-06T08:04:00.001-07:00

See
Palm trees at shooting station
Fresh water lake
Whalebones
NARL / DEW line relics
Satcom Array
Point Barrow

2008-08-05T15:50:00.000-07:00

The road out of here
veers in the sway,
that's the way it
looks as a road hugs water,
holds on to a cliff,
makes the promise
that the ending
will not repeat its self.

We are we

2008-08-05T15:43:00.001-07:00

We are we.
You and me and the animal
make three. There's not
much more for anyone else.

I give my voice away
everyday, and at night.
I praise that folly
to every listening ear,
to every bad pretender
and to the mechanical
terror in the back room

Don't call out too loud.
I can't wish your birthday away
in a time when all the ghosts are
hitchhiking and all the dust
settles on more dust.

The Blue Angel's Death Song

2008-07-31T12:42:00.001-07:00

The Interstate

2008-07-26T12:13:00.000-07:00

No one is listening
to that sound we made
that played on the brief
and tender under-belly of the
FM band. It goes with a thud
and waves goodbye, making it's
exit in a beaten up van of
the most middle quality.

I'm not going to say goodbye to
the interstate veins that lead me
to you and you and you.
I want to see the inky darkness
of Donner Pass and the open
dawn spill out at the bottom.

It's good thing, here,
with all our friends.
The yard is the same
with them crowding in.

It's the sound of wheels
approaching, air settling
around the structure,
gravity making its point.

Sunday

2008-07-20T07:28:00.000-07:00

In this sleepy place,
news travels at a violent pace.

Every night is a carnival, an ongoing funeral.

Street corners make an empty landscape
light changes colors to an empty curb
Sunday morning settles down
on a high mountain desert town.

A heavy head and a chest of regret,
The last thing you remember
was making a bet that you could follow the
meteor until it hit, but it was just
truck lights reflecting on the side of a house.

The New Old Way

2008-06-28T09:38:00.000-07:00

This is the way,
this is how we go.
It's not different
and it makes sense of the cold.

I'll hold your hand
as the moon makes us tired.
I won't let go as the sun
starts us over.

.

Of Course

2008-06-26T08:26:00.000-07:00

I have a friend,
a good friend,
who told me recently that the
show doesn't have to go on.
But he knows, the way language is known,
that that's not true.
The way R. Davies words said what we couldn't say,
to a father and a girl
from the friend that will do anything for all
if his excitement doesn't best him.

I got the message today
and I say, "Of course, of course, I'll do this show, how could I not?"

I do it Because my heart goes out to you and your wife.
Because I could never stop screaming if my baby let go of this world.

I'm sorry,
I'm sorry.

Whenever you're ready.

2008-06-19T07:57:00.000-07:00

Heat has a smell.
The turning over from dawn to day
like workers changing shifts.

How was the night shift?
Dark.

Have you ever smelled manure
from a freeway in the parched southern
portion of Idaho? At 6:30 in the morning?
With weak filling station coffee?
In the middle of August?
While rewinding (until it eventually breaks) over and over,
Need Retrograde Orbit.

Have you ever eaten at Cowboy Oil?

Even in a high mountain desert
the eerie calm before a
heavy heat tells
you that this day belongs
to the air
and the brown hills
and the irrigation ditches
and sideways looks from
heat stricken Overland
overlords.

Here you Go

2008-06-13T15:44:00.000-07:00

I want to leave this week with a piece I love by Anne Sexton-

The Starry Night

That does not keep me from having a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.
Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother

The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.

It moves. They are all alive.
Even the moon bulges in its orange irons
to push children, like a god, from its eye.
The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die:

into that rushing beast of the night,
sucked up by that great dragon, to split
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.

The Over Under

2008-06-13T09:07:00.000-07:00

You glass eyed
backyard bandit,
patrolling the fence line with
awkward ease.

I can't go where you go and
the history I have with the
tree is an uneasy one.

You are a restless watcher and
a live ghost at best.

Should I see you close to me
or mine, remember this:

I see the ancient moving film rolls
in your eyes (replaying treaty battles, reflecting the half lights of a cold summer day) and I can study
the pace you keep, but I will never
forget that you hold the deed to my back yard.

The 45th Parallel

2008-06-12T08:35:00.000-07:00

We used to make our way
in the great December
across the Blues,
through Powder,
sleeping in Pendleton,
and aiming ourselves at
a sideways horizon.

The rumbling truck lulled us
both in to thinking you were here
forever.

You were the victor of the north slope,
an Alaskan bar room magician
and the envy of all western men.

To say you choked
in your sleep in Montana
defies what I know about night
and sunrises.

But here it is
and what's left
is this:

Falling asleep
in the truck in La Grande
and needing Idaho after so many
snowstorms, I realized the whole
of what I could learn by staring in to
your hazel iris.

1994 Idaho Library Doors

2008-06-11T20:39:00.000-07:00

There are days
when light makes chaos
around rooms and buildings
and the sky, flickering
like christmas lights
outlining the incoming storm.

It was 1994.
What a brave year to have your
light burn out on us.
(I smashed my head on the
punk rock. I thought i wanted
to join team dresch. )

When the call came in and your
brother told me you were gone, i fell down.
See, I worked at the library.
Mostly I would hide in the
stacks rereading passages.

When one light burns out
the other ones get brighter.
Wind felt hard that day in October.
Shadows went the wrong way.
I wanted to call you and tell you exactly how
I missed you.

See, you were wrong! I do miss you!
OK, now come home. It's alright and we can
get this shit straight.

But you were gone
to a place with no
t-cell counts
or AZT or soma dreams
in an apartment with no windows cracked.

While i waited for my uncle to pick
me up from the university steps, i began
realizing that it wasn't your dark
hair disappearing around corners
darting behind cars
escaping the Indian summer
in to a dark lecture hall
in the plain liberal arts building.

i didn't dream of you that night
because i know you sat on my bed.
you were pretty and you loved me and you were elated with
the lack of pain.

i came to on the bathroom floor and
screamed your name at the towels.

Fourteen years later i wish i could
tell you to hold out your hands for my
friends mom. I want you to gather the
dead troops of my family to welcome
the new friend who turned out the lights
in their brave year of summer/winter
and Indian summers.

Oh. My. God.

2008-02-13T10:31:00.000-08:00

After spilling my guts in my last post, I ran across this in The Onion today.

Enjoy!

Hungover Couple Unaware They Broke Up Last Night

We'll welcome the stars with wine and guitars

2008-02-13T07:52:00.000-08:00

Last night I re-watched "Be Here To Love Me," the documentary about Townes Van Zandt. What a truly devastating set of circumstances he encountered in his abbreviated life. I feel like a late comer to his music. However, when I first saw this film two years ago, I was immediately taken in by the sturdy yet transient nature of his songs. He reminded me of the delapidated houses I would see in the middle of fields in Idaho and Montana. Though they were no longer inhabitable, the basic strucure and the stark beauty remained with them long after everyone had moved on. I got the sense that he could either roar or fall over. When I heard lines like, At my window/ watching the sun go/ hoping the stars know/ it's time to shine, I understood that I found the songwriter that put in to words what I'd been striving to articulate and never could.

His relationship with alcohol and his partners resonated with me pretty deeply at the time. I first saw this film while housesitting for a freind who was away at sea for three weeks. At the time, Nick, who is now my husband, and I were seperated. This is pretty untrue, really, as we were still living together, playing in a band together, and generally tooling around together ALL the time. There had been some deep, unresolved anger that had caused the "seperation." When I drank, which was often by myself at the time, and it was often red wine, I would be hurled out of my head in to a foggy void of wine and id-driven expectations. My limitations were erased. I could too easily imagine tossing myself, as Townes did, off of a deck four stories up just to feel what it's like. Every night there was a possibility that I would feel like the line from his song, "Rake."

"My body was sharp,
the dark air clean,
and outrage my joyful companion"

The other line that rang true was just as possible:

"The sun she would come and beat me back down
but every cruel day had its nightfall"

The mornings are what I remember as a cautionary tale. To extinguish despair with wine makes explosions that are at once cataclysmic and boring. Noone else can feel (nor should they have to) the fucked-up drama of a well earned hang-over for you. Feeling like you have been bruised from trying to crawl out of your own skin? What was I, fifteen? I said "no thank you" to that.

The warnings everyone gets when their young about time going by so fast are absolutely true. As Issac Brock from Modest Mouse sings in "Heart Cooks Brain," The years go fast and the days go so slow.

It seems like a million years and a lot of kicked cans from who we were then. Watching the film last night helped me understand that the beauty I find in these songs or in the telling of his life don't have to be a reflection of how I'm living. I don't think his songs are sad. As Steve Turner of Mudhoney said in the DVD extras, "he's not sad, he's well rounded." Despite having beers now and again, I know I can keep shit between the lines. And, more than ever, I can relate to these lines:

?If I needed you would you come to me,
Would you come to me, and ease my pain?
If you needed me
I would come to you
I'd swim the seas for to ease your pain"

Thanks, Townes.

Checking In

2008-02-11T16:15:00.000-08:00

Oof, it's been awhile.

The wedding was amazing. I no longer play with Junkmail.

Thanks to my housemate, I've also had "Junior's Farm," from Wings in my head ALL DAY.

Take a listen:

Yard Work

2007-07-23T11:56:00.000-07:00

I had to add this. After bringing in some chairs from our back yard, this poem became lodged in my head.

the red wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

-william carlos williams

This Morning

2007-07-21T08:31:00.000-07:00

I woke up at 5 am , after an uneasy night of sleep, to a certain kind of magical morning. It smelled like Idaho. Rain soaked in to dry ground, the feeling that the heat will rise steadily until it's a hot afternoon.
I'm glad I stayed home last night.