The Walk

 A poem.

    _______________

Rail against the window

The clear December rain

And trickle down the sash and brick

The dirt along the lane

It swirls and whirls in whorls it rolls

It swishes trash across the molds

The grit and soot

Around the foot

Of sodden man there as he strolls

With pipe in hand

And rubber band

Around his wrist near pipe smoke strand

A briar bowl

With match he stole

Enflames this leaf, his favorite brand

His blue eyes close

He scrapes his nose

In wet wool socks he thinks some prose

The smoke and rain

Decembers gain

The poultice for late Augusts throes

The Northward Way

The following piece was an experiment in world building. I have an enormous story that I have been slowly and rather irresponsibly been working on. In that world there is a desert expanse north of a massive mountain range and, at the time I had no idea what that desert was like. So I decided to come up with a rough character, whom I imagined to be a twelve or thirteen year old boy with dark skin, and make him find out for me what was to be found in the desert wastes.

This piece was fairly free form and written in only a few sittings. Enjoy.

                                                ~)o(~




I stood on the Mudmah plateau, not far from base camp at the end of the main road that wound down from the Sainjeem Mountain pass, which led high into the watchman hills and eventually branched out to the various villages and cities southward along the cliffs and cosps that were the homes of my people. Around me sparse reeds in tight twisting bundles bristled up from the stony graveled earth.

The wind was strong today. The banner on my javeline stood sideways as I took in the view around me in this last moment of civilisation for what could turn into a month or more. The long support ropes that held down the main village tent in the center of camp flew banners of the king and emblems of rock and water and crystals and wind, emblazoned with brilliant colors, though fraying at the ends in the gale.

Up high in the atmosphere, higher than the highest clouds, a winding and thin band of soft orange snaked its way through the cobalt of the noonday sky, and every once and again, tiny streaks of piercing gold streamed through it and dissapeared into the blue surroundings.


Four women had just arrived from the West, I had seen their quivering sillouettes peak above the horizon just north of the Bandehm Mountain Root early this morning. They had heaped a mound of skins on top of a large beast and strapped ladders to its sides, and now they were tying it's snout to the ground with tethers pierced in it's ears preparing to unpack their load. The women were dark and wrinkled like spring mud, and they pointed and shouted vigorously at the young sherpa boy that had come out to meet them. I could catch bits of their screams on the wind, but at my place just out of camp boundaries, and about to head northeast to the Mudmah cliffs, the fiery tradeswomen wouldn't bother me today. Or any day soon, for that matter.


I had a small beaten leather vest onto which a skin sack had been sewn, and which I could remove with two ropes that dangled at my right side. I wore light leather boots that covered my knees and overlapped in layers down to my feet and a pair of shorts "to keep me modest," mother had said. My weapons were my javeline and a square sharp bit of flat hammered iron with a stone handle lashed to it with leather thongs, and a summer axe, also iron, that I wore bound above my bottom. I had rope wound around the skin sack on my back, of which was filled with various supplies and a bit of water, and a length of reed paper rolled and sealed with the Kings emblem and fastened with metal caps on either end, not to be read by me or anyone else till I got there."


Messenger Day Three: Concerning a Desert Storm, The Last Cliffs, and the Eastern Road

I swallowed, and the last of my water dripped down my chin. I dragged my finger under it and licked as I stared out East and North seeing nothing but windblown wild sand, Gehban trees and shafts of bedrock jutting toward the sky.

I had been following an old riverbed for miles hoping for a pool or spring, the slow slope of the terrain suggested that the water table should be very shallow here, but nothing upon nothing is all that I’d found.

My thirst wouldn't wait for me, I had to find water, my strength wasn't going to hold out for even another two hours. And without a place to rest in shade, I'd bake for certain without water.

Still I followed the riverbed down hill and the banks grew steeper. The water course weaved to and fro, the steep banks hiding the view down river. Though not a half hour’s worth of trudging on brought me out to an open place, like a wide dry pool, seep banked with rivulets and tributaries cutting down into it that I could use to climb up on top of the banks and see where I was. The riverbed stretched not more than a quarter mile down a sort of slot in the rock before it ended in a U shaped gouge in a cliff-side. Standing in the gouge, just this side of the edge and leaning against the wall, I could see straight down to the valley floor stretching off to the horizon. The Lom Plain, finally. And sure as I’d thought, there was a thin dim strand of shimmering silver just beneath the horizon, the Eastern Road stretching northwest.

Tossing my spear in the air I whooped twice and, turning to run back to the wide dry pool, I caught my spear by the thongs and twirled it as my feet slipped in the loose desert sand.
Hoping for a better look around, I clambered my way up the nearest rivulet, placing my pack beneath an outcrop just beneath the top, and I mounted the ledge where I took in the scene.

“I had been following what seemed to be a drainage basin, and from upon the top of it, it looked like a small canyon as most of the rest of the terrain was flat and waste, save far off ribbons of shadow, presumably other slot canyons of the same drainage type. All emptied, one like another, out over a cliff that extended as far as I could see southeast and north west, winding like a broken spine. And there was the road. Winding to the north and clear like a silver ribbon sparkling in the glaring sun, and I could see a brume and a smattering of green growing around it. I was so close, there I could see the desert giving way to grassland, and somewhere in that direction, just over the horizon, I could see it in my mind from the old stories, the fabled Living Temples and sunken water mazes of the King of Hohnm, the High plains Lord.

I smiled and wrung my fist tight against the javelin, My skin making a squeaking sound, and I turned to look upland, directly south. I could see distant mountains - even still - so far off. West I could see rolling hills as well, and between the two, a long flat expanse of desert, broken with fingers of rock and Gebahn trees, sponge lichen spattered the ground in odd shapes here and there, some with little dunes forming against them on the windward sides. The sand was mixed with coarse black rocks like paint splotches across the tan dust, and my eye was drawn up and far off to the south west, where I was met with a puzzling sight..

The horizon that way was a fuzzy dark streak, hard to make out. The sky was clean and blue till it met the earth, and then wavered into a thin haze. “Wait, what is that... could it be?

I had heard stories. But I had never seen it myself. It was said that sometimes the South Ocean wind, punching hard and fast against the mountains, pushed air high up over the peaks, and the wind would grow cold and sink down the northern slopes. Mostly the air would settle in the valleys of the mountains, but there was a glacier field far off, just south, that sometimes would collect air and send it barreling down west into the desert. Air sinking from the northern hills would sometimes chute the system of sinking air northeast causing fantastic and violent storms that would scour the desert. I had heard of people caught in these storms that had died or disappeared in the torrent, and stranger things than that. I had heard, once, of living things that awaken in the desert when it rains, and wander about looking for people or animals that had lost their way, to devour them.

Strangely enough, one of the deadliest perils of this desert, though certainly it’s least frequent, was not thirst, or madness, but water.

"Rain,” I whispered. I needed a drink, and any water that was to be found surely would have been found by now, so close to the cliffs, and not a puddle or spring presented itself, even in the low places. The only way down to the valley floor from the desert plateau was a dangerous slow climb down from the chute that I had first looked out of. Just beneath the riverbed stood what looked like a dump for stones, a large fall of washed rubble built up from flash floods carving out the dry stream-bed above. If that was a storm, and if it was coming my way, it would be upon me before the day was out(before noon, before mid afternoon?), and the decent down the rock falls was a slow one. If it rained up here, all that water would end up pouring down on top of me, and I would be washed down the rocks.

This fall of talus would, of course, be my way down to the plains floor and North eventually, just not yet. Not till I knew what the weather would do.

So I sat under the outcrop of rock, I leaned my javelin against the wall inside the small space and smeared a fresh layer of fat mixed with powdered gypsum on the top and sides of my pack, working it into the leather for waterproofing.

After finishing, I peaked out from my hiding place in the shade of the outcrop and, sure enough, it took only an hour to see the weather system grow exponentially. The clouds were massive. They grew, towering like the surrounding hills, broad with a deep shadow, and reflecting brilliant white, billowing peaks, as though they were covered in snow. Here and there they bespeckled themselves with reams of lightening.

But would it rain? There had been many clouds in the mountains, even through drought, without rain, and even thunder wasn't a sure sign of water. But as these clouds rose higher and nearer, I could see something riding the feet of the storm front like fog.

"Oh, crap. Here it comes.” My throat formed a lump.

There, obscuring the ground, shot through with muted flashes of light and distant peals of thunder, and moving like billows of smoke, fell a great and mighty wall. It was like I had never seen rain before, it came as though a mountain cliff were on the move. It blocked the light, it hid the desert sands and the horizon beyond, the blue brilliance of the sky was blotted out completely as it edged forward. I could see it from here, moving faster than the swiftest “horse,” barreling down at me. It would be on top of me within an hour. Such fantastic speed. For a moment, I was truly terrified with what I was seeing. I could see how someone could easily die in such an onslaught.

And sure enough, not much longer than an hour and the whole storm front had continually risen and swelled to almost upon me. Half the sky was gone, and still the storm threatened, shaping and reshaping itself as the clouds bashed against the rising hot air from the desert earth. I could see the cold air of the storm raking against the heat of the day, scraping the clouds into odd twisted spectacles of themselves.

I could hardly contain myself, though I feared for my life. The temperature had dropped thirty degrees, at least, over the last half hour, and still the rain poured and poured, blotting out the world. The ground trembled with the sound of the approaching rain, and I could now see it moving along the desert sands, not a mile away from me.

It took only minutes for the water to overtake that mile between us. I stood my ground to see what it would be like, and a great wind pushed sand into the air before it. The water, like a curtain closing, hit me hard and cold, the shock knocking me from my feet. Without a moment to think, I was soaked through, my breath stolen from me, and mud rose from the ground around my body in an instant.
My drenched hair stuck to the folds of my eyelids, the rain ran pouring down my shoulders tickled my arm hair.

The old eroded and dried riverbed that I had been following for the last few days now carried fresh muddied water along its swollen banks and belched a new waterfall, sending thick brine cascading through the clefts marred down the cliff wall, and erupting into the air above the floor of the Lohm Plain below.

My pack was still sitting beneath the outcrop of stone, and a large bulb of fingered lichen that had been dried by the sun now swelled twice in size and shuddered as it drank water from the sand. Just above the outcrop, near the rivulet, a swirling pool had formed in a wide hollow that I had not noticed, and now drained slowly into a small, slivered mouth where the dry dirt had been clogging a skinny shaft in the rock. The pool spun and roiled as I ducked back under the rock eve to grab my water bag.

I climbed back on top in the torrent and bent down, lying in the soaked sand under the liken bulb. Squeezing at the base of one of its arms, I drained a mouthful of water, thick with an herby tang, and then filled my water vessel with all the rest that I could strain. The pool had grown double in size already, and was deep enough to swim in, though it seemed to be draining swiftly. I dropped the bag back down under the rock and jumped into the swirling pool.

The water was hot, my breath shot out and I swallowed water. I didn’t touch bottom, the water was murky, and I swam back upward as fast as I could, coughing and gasping as my face burst into a cold breeze. My eyes were filled with stinging water, though my voice laughed and my mouth smiled between wet coughs. I swam to the banks of the pool and fell on my back, face to the rain where I lay till my lungs were cleared of water, and my laughing was spent.

Ihmahm flowers began sprouting around my head as I lay watching the clouds boil and sag above me, white and pale with pallid peals of light and thrashing thunder. The cold wind that the storm had brought blew freely across the landscape, pricking my skin to look like a plucked birds’. The stagnant heat that had hung all about me for days now had been pushed to the north and I rejoiced in the unexpected water that fell from the sky, and I wondered about how strange a thing the rain really is, though I wondered with my eyes closed and my hands and heels buried in the soft, grainy mud that the water washed all around me.

But almost as fast as it came, the rain lessened to a smattering over the next hour, till it stopped completely. The clouds, that had first felt crushingly close to the ground, pitched higher into the air, and formed fingers and whisps in the upper atmosphere. The sun cast rays of broken light across the wet sand, and shadows moved freely here and there across the world.

Yet I just lay there. Figuring I should wait for the water to run off, I let my head sink into the mud. I could hear the river coarsing in it’s banks, and glancing down the rivulet, I could see the wide pool still filling with water and soil.

...

I packed the water in the bottom of my pack and then stacked the rest of things on top, careful with the paper scroll, and then lashed the top closed, throwing the whole thing back on over my shoulders.


And, with his freshly waterproofed leather pack beading and shedding water like a bird, he trekked with new heart off north eastward into the thinning rain, disappearing into the rivulet as the thunder pounded hard, shaking the swollen desert earth.(?)

A Kind of Mountain

Before we begin this post, forgive the jumping around and rather cryptic nature of this particular piece.  Some of it I do not recall the meaning of, and other parts I cannot forget.  I did a little editing for flow and repetition, but the majority is left intact, in regards to how it was penned maybe a year and a half ago.  

To me, this describes well the feelings that I get, both while hiking or backpacking in the mountains, and when thinking about it afterwards.  

Thanks for reading, and we begin:

…And in dreams I hold on tightly to a band of ribbon that I had only barely caught onto, and it draws with a stinging bite against my hand as my body sands.               Drags yet floats.

       ________________________

The mountain ground is mixed with the crushed gravel of boulders
and the dirt and the grass that grows, 
and in higher altitudes the moulds and lichens 
where the west wind blows.  

How the pines stand and creak and whisper 
against the crazy clouds that tear at the fettered wind 
and race up the face of the sharpening ridgeline.  
The tumbled rocks and breaking shale slide against the roots
the mud soaks the trickle from the rock, the pool glimmers 
with a kind of sky locked up upon it.  
The walking path is stamped into the dirt and it has grass covered walls 
that I lean against after coming so high that the sky seems close, 
so close it can steal the air from my chest 
and I faint to the tune of the smell of the pines.  
To the black of the dirt.  
To the salt of my sweat.
  
And when I light a match and the stove flares to light 
whispering like a torch on fire 
I recall all the times.  

All of the times when I was high in the hills
when there were only the rocks under me
when the bones of living things sat still and bleached on the forest ground
when the only way forward was across fields of boulders 
without a living thing growing,
when the entire forest had burnt down and we walked in only tortured trunks 
and barely green undergrowth 
and still silence for hours.  

As I stir with my spoon I recall.  
Kneeling at the mountaintop, 
the cairn as tall as me stacked at the highest place, 
and how I prayed as I placed a stone.  

I prayed as I looked 
and through the trees I could see sky in nearly every direction, 
even as I looked downward there was the blue.  

And there was me, and there were You. 
With me as I sat alone 
on the constant soaking mountain.

Synesthesia

I sat smoking my pipe in the armchair that my grandfather had sat in, smoking his pipe himself, all those many years ago.  The hearth was crackling and sending popping coals against the metal curtain that hung across its glowing aperture.

The conversation from the ride home had kept me thinking all evening.  The man that had sat down next to me, the stranger in the trailing coat, the brown eyed man with the subtle implants surgically buried beneath the skin of his temples, had never heard of it before. 

There was a strange tone in his voice as he tried to convince me how much of a liar I was, how nothing of the kind could be, not without sedation at least.

And I had been thinking all evening.  The smoke curled in strange fingers from the warm briar bowl that sat in my hand, and as I smelled the old tobacco blend of Cavendish and vanilla oil, my vision danced alive and then fell still again with the pulse of my breath.  

This particular blend of spice and smoke had always, even as a small child smelling that aroma on the collar of my grandfather, made me see streaks of green, ambient and transparent, a whispered breath of a thing, that ran across my field of vision like aurorae.  The emerald belts would slowly drop in cascading spires and then whisp to nothing.

A man can grow accustomed to so many fantastic things.  It's strange what it takes sometimes to remember the beauty in the world.  

The conversation with the brown eyed and technologically savvy man, it got me thinking once again.

And so I lit my pipe, turned down the ancient oil lamps that guests would complain were so antiquated, and lit a real fire in the fire place, one of the few left in the city, and sat in the dim, smoking.  

And seeing.  

And remembering.

Sparkled in the Streetlight

As my forehead lags in my hand

And my mouth parts with a breath

My eyes close

To the sound of the piano.

And my pen falls to the floor.

The way it was presented to me

At least the way it seemed that day

The stuff of dreams

Was on the air like pipe smoke

In the carpet like coffee stains.

She suggested we get away

So we walked out into the rain

There are things I can’t shake

I told her

Kicking down leaf piles

In the gutter.

The rain fell like mist

Coating her face till it sparkled in the streetlight.

Things I just can’t shake.

I can’t help laughing when the clouds are fantastic

Like mountains

In a fever dream.

In the house

In my head

In the dark

I war with the 29 year old that lives and the five year old

That has refused to die.

Because I keep feeding him fantastic things

And he has grown strong

Yet stayed young.

What does it mean to be a man

With a child caught up inside?

I suppose it means that I have a great task

Of nurturing

To do.

But in the covers alone

Listening to the pummel of rain

And of piano keys

I wonder:

“Could I be made to nurture more than only me?

I remember our walk in the rain

And our talk for half an hour

And handing her a towel to dry her shining face

And I wonder.

About relativity

And singularities

And gravity wells

And event horizons

And the proportions of an hour imposed upon an eternity

How it can make that hour swell

And press at the nearly bursting seams

Of time

And of the lonely space between our houses.”

A Requisite For Lu Lu

The following I wrote, oh, back in 2009 if I remember right.  I wrote it for my friend Lu Lu on her birthday.  Some of the pacing and descriptions I've changed only slightly just now.

Partly inspired by her actual physical appearance and partly by unrelated events from my life, the short is an attempt to describe a kind of feeling that comes with separating two lives through the breaking of relationship - specifically when, after one party tries to forget the other, what it can feel like when one small unconsidered thing can make all defenses break down completely, and memories, unwelcomed, come flooding back in.

The woman in this short is also named Lu Lu.  It is a work of fiction.



____________________________________




It’s like being reminded of thunder.

It’s like being reminded of trains at midnight out the bedroom window.

She can’t help but look around startled when she hears it.

It reminds her that much of certain things she remembers

That it makes her start, electric muscles flinch in sparks
And her voice timbre crack in mid sentence

When she hears the looming sound.

It was, after all, his favorite song.

He’d only listen to it now and again, with hopes that it would never wear out

So many other songs just wear out sometimes.

Like barestrand socks.

He didn’t want to try his luck, so he’d only listen to it sometimes.

When they would be together at a coffeeshop and it would come on the radio

He would stop talking, with his hot mug in his hands

And close his eyes.  
The ivory rim of the cup this close to his mouth.

The steam fingerprint fogging his glasses.

It was something that just happened sometimes.

And when the song was over

Conversation would begin again, and he’d say sorry, 
You were saying something special
I remember!  Don’t look at me like that, I was totally listening to you!

Or something close that.

It’d usually make her laugh. Under normal circumstances.

The sound of heartache, when it comes, wells in great deep sighs

Shaky wondering sighs

That make her eyes close.

So she does what she can, avoid the places they used to go together

Get rid of the things that remind her of him

Change her phone number

Change her address

Change her hair color, her vocabulary.

The usual.

She hates that this happens so often to her, and that she believed
It wasn’t going to happen,
Again,

This time.

She’d done all that she could to remove the possibility of remembering him

But she couldn't control the playlists of coffeeshop courtyards
And rail station patios.

And it jars her friends when she covers her mouth

And clenches her eyes

And turns her face

And runs like swift lightning from the room, her skirt a billowing cloud.

The empty chair her leaping point.

She runs to somewhere less crowded with electrons 
Like a brilliant and bright beautiful blur.

And like lightning, people murmur with head winding shock through their surprise

At something so beautiful and cast leaden strong falling back to earth

The way she does in those times.

Like lightning.

Like thunder.

Like lilting piano.

Like chalk bright sky blue eyes.

Like the rumbling momentum of his train leaving town.

Like tear stains and coffee grounds
On a blouse that she forgot she was wearing
On a rainy day

Bliss Is.

“Nate, you should be in constant bliss.” …is what he said to me. We were both in a crowd, we were both where the concert played, and our voices soughed. In this coffeeshop we were looking into one another and talking about what we found there. And as many of my conversations will do, things deftly turned to G-d.

 We talked and chatted and I listened as he spoke. He made that comment about bliss in reference to what life lived with G-d should feel like. Constant bliss was the precise words he used.

 He said the words, and in an instant, standing there with my coffee mug cooling against my fingerprints, I saw it happen; I saw the eye of his mind careen backwards into his life and fasten onto all the copious deficits of happiness and joy that, to him, are bound solely to eschew straight out of separation from G-d. There were craters in his experience, blown wide with ash and smoke, ribbons of pains and white hot hurts like canyons that followed him all his life. The requisite of myopic dispensation, selective intimacy. Addiction.

 And above the slake of periodic honesty with himself I saw a kind of cloud, like a death vapor with it's soul hunger quenched like red iron in cold oil, rising above the strangling fray of disappointment, and instead of striking with its ice fingers like it had with all of his grandfathers, it lifted the gaze from the derelict to, oh just barely above.

 All it took was just that much altitude, and in the vision I was having into the marked open envelope of my friends mind, I could sense a change in the air, a freshening intake, a tingle on the tongue. Just above where the wisp cloud strode, like a spread sheer sheet pulled out and turned straight into a layer of fog, I could tell from where I stood that my friend could see all the way to the horizon. Floating there with his sight cleared of the dark mist of his past, he could see how the world should be. He could glimpse what life in G-d should be and to him it was a fathomless bliss. A dizzy Joy. A constant tarry.

 Who knows how many teachers of the bible had told him that his life should be full of bliss. Maybe only two, I don't know. Maybe it was a friend that he lived with that had talked with him late into the night from their bunks, over old coffee. Maybe it was a homeless man with a grasp of wonder who whispered it in his ear over a cold and wrinkled dollar.

 Whomever his influence had been, I could see with clarity the flowing ease with which he believed these things, how close he stood to the words that he chose. His eyes were tracking on mine with a smile.

 And I’m glad he believed that then.

 I remember thinking about his words year in and year out since then, and saying to myself, “Yea. Bliss constantly. That’s what I deserve. Why am I not in constant bliss?”

 But I don’t believe it now. I don’t deserve Constant Bliss. And I don't mean that I think I'm not good enough to have bliss in in ever ebbs, either, like I believe that I'm not worth it.

 You see, it’s just that the power of bliss isn’t that we have it in comparison to not having it. But that this bliss, when we have it, well... it anchors us in a moment. It's so good because the feeling lingers, and time sits down a moment.





 I think bliss should be here sometimes, and heartache in other times. I think there is meaning in the fact that the palette of colors that is human emotion needs to be used in full, not squeezed till all the ochre is gone, all the phthalo blue dried up, and the rods and cones we use to see them shriveled all out to dust and wind and longing.

 Give me bliss, yes, but only at the mountaintop maybe. When I kiss the metal rope anchors at the top of the dry and raspy climbing rout. When the bread is piping hot, or when there is ice cream on my lips. Let bliss be there, but let it surprise me with it's being.

 And give me sorrow at all the wasted years without her, you know? Give me fear when it’s all uncertain, give me rage when all I've worked for is stolen.

 Give me vertigo when I step near the edges, hunger when I can't afford the least of these, give me that treasured and wonderful gravity pull kind of longing when I see the stars.

 Let them come and go like people do, let the feelings come and go. We are fashioned in a high degree of complexity for more reasons than we can ever know. We know good and sour terrible emotions because we are made to know what the world means with our feelings. To touch the world with as many sensations as a body will allow.

 I'll take bliss. But also give to me its sister, just as strong as, with roots that run both in parrallel and as deep as, the opposite and strangely similar, the weeping woman of the spirit; Heartache.