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."

Every night it's the same

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

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

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.