There are places farther than I can see. They hide in between the lines on maps and stand sentinel next to highways and sometimes interstates. I can see me there; the days would be counted in cast shadows across the yard. I could live in Ritzville in a faded painted bungalow that tumbles over dry grass and waits like a cat. There are places where sounds don't travel so much as they explode and scatter like dust particles near a window. I can see me there; I would teach my self to write letters again and send packages with things I make or bake or sing. The bursts of wind would pass by the windows and I would always think it was you coming up the long unpaved road. Could this part be in Pendleton? Or Baker City? The wind whips it's self in a frenzy there. These places have quiet yards. You come home to these yards when you get to the place when nights no longer promise you anything. What to do with silence? Bounce it off surfaces. Fold linen. Make soup. We've entered the age of ache and retraction. Of sweat and good will. Here comes the bar room memories and the scent of what we planted if we remember to plant anything.

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 wagon passes, I don't care, I don't know him. An alarms sounds 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 for someone 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.