when snow was here, this tree captured it to use as a dressing gown while it waited for spring. the sky was so blue

a 2nd

b/c everyone needs poetry
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cold work

tell me, of time, resounding
in your partial and gentle sphere,
do you not hear perhaps the muffled moan?

do you not feel in slow fashion,
in tremulous and avid work,
the insistend night returning?

to dry salts and airy bloods,
to headlong rush of rivers,
the trembling witness testifies.

dark increase of walls,
brusque growth of doors,
delirious population of stimuli,
impacable circulations.

roundabout, infinitely,
in interminable propaganda,
with armed and defined snout,
space seethes and peoples itself.

do you not hear the constant victory,
in the human footrace,
of time, slow as fire,
sure and thick and Herculean,
accumulating its volume
and adding its sad fiber?

like a perpetual plant, its thin
and pallid thread increases,
soaked by drops that fall,
soundless, in solitude.

--- pablo neruda, "residence on earth"

change

late january in montana... should it be warm and sunny?
i heard that somewhere in eastern montana this past week it was sixty-five. things are changing everywhere. is it el nino? naturally occurring global warming? or something a little bigger and more sinister than that?
it's hard, as the small, insignificant beings we are, to truly appreciate natural systems and cycles for what they are. "this summer was a hot one!" we say, and think nothing of it, really. "there seems to have been less and less snow these past few winters," we note, but what does that mean? hurricanes, blizzards - humankind has been dealing with these occurrances since it first blinked it's beady little mind millenia ago, and before that, when consciousness was a mystery to us.

no answers to be had. but is acceptance the right response to change? no, and yes.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

further, school has started again. my first (and only) class meets today. i feel excited, and ready to begin learning again. i feel like i need to continue gaining knowledge and experience, as much as i can while i still have time and inclination. guitar lessons begin thursday, and i just bought myself a membership to the campus gym (which is really rather rocking, remarkably (oh yeah, alliteration)).
soon, i hope to be on my way to being the person i've always dreamed i would become. more alive.

a view of the dry hills from mt jumbo

inaugural

so.
in honor of new online journal. a poem from namesake
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'walking around'

i happen to be tired of being a man.
i happen to enter tailorshops and moviehouses
withered, impenetrable, like a felt swan
navigating in a water of sources and ashes.

the smell of barbershops makes me wail.
i want only a respite of stones or wool,
i want only not to see establishments or gardens,
or merchandise, or eyeglasses, or elevators.

i happen to be tired of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
i happen to be tired of being a man.

nevertheless it would be delightful
to startle a notary with a cut lily
or kill a nun with a blow to the ear.
it would be lovely
to go through the streets with a sexy knife
and shouting until i froze to death.

i don't want to go on being a root in the dark,
vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
downward, in the soaked guts of the earth,
absorbing and thinking, eating each day.

i do not want for myself so many misfortunes.
i do not want to continue as root and tomb,
just underground, a vault with corpses
stiff and cold, dying of distress.

that is why monday day burns like petroleum
when it sees me coming with my jailbird face,
and as it passes it howls like a wounded wheel,
and it takes hot-blooded steps toward the night.

and it pushes me into certain corners, into certain moist houses,
into hospitals where the bones stick out the windows,
into certain shoestores with a smell of vinegar,
into streets as frightening as chasms.

there are brimstone-colored birds and horrible intestines
hanging from the doors of the houses that i hate,
there are dentures left forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and fright,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and poisons, and navels.

i walk around with calm, with eyes, with shoes,
with fury, with forgetfulness,
i pass, i cross by offices and orthopedic shoestores,
and courtyards where clothes are hanging from a wire:
underdrawers, towels and shirts that weep
slow, dirty tears.

--- pablo neruda, "residence on earth"