Daily Rounds and Dreams Unfurled

Clearing Before Spring

Snow is the wonder of rain caught in the headlights of the last ride home before the land opens to the coyote and the mountain lion stalks its shadow through the wounded woods. Sweep away the abandoned tires and rusting hulks, the wrecks of the misbegotten. Let the cactus fascinate the mountain and the wizard rise from the abyss with the force of a waterfall. Sweep away the junkyard of bad ideas and give tongue to solitude: in the fields a new lexicon.

Calligraphy for a Full Moon in August

The brushstroke should be everything: everything that moon is and I am: curve of orange emerging from behind the hill, spike of shimmering light on the lake. What stroke for the first flash— orange breaking over dark pines burning the water?

Impact of orange: struck and, yes, undone in the grateful culmination of undoing.

The brush should be a sword to deliver the faithful stroke.

Dreaming Awake

What was childhood but the strangeness of a deep impulse caught between the islands of sleep and waking—dream unfurled from sleep. Of the sights that moved into the crosshairs of consciousness: purple martins I tried to catch, swallows arching over the evening, sparrows forming notes of bird music along the telephone wires. Trees that through their upward branches made real the sky, clouds floating into a whole mythology of bird and beast. Armchairs that sat around the living room like dyspeptic uncles; the undersides of tables like caves where I could take refuge with the cat. Something remained hidden behind the sound of voices, the colors and visions, the cries and shouts that came with running, jumping, splashing, falling; the almost suffocating smells of grownups, of dogs and cats, with their closer sympathies, of things ripening and rotting; and, over all, time tunneling toward an unknown vastness.

II

I followed strangeness into the woods— along an unfamiliar track through forest deep and lovely with the sun sifting through the leaves onto the soft floor underneath. A chill leveled the air with the blue note of fall, and a diffused light glowed from a hidden source. Then I saw what I had never seen: a creature green with gold, a golden green—bird or insect as it perched in the branches? No one else to see it, but only the stillness of the woods and its shining difference, as if

to present a glimpse of something not to be explained nor yet put aside, but only kept as one keeps a special stone, a fragment of glass, a piece of something not merely to be imagined but to be sought—back in the dream from which one first awakened.

Return to Silver City

Everything becomes dear here, vivid to the senses, a challenge to the mind—what was, what is, all to be rediscovered in the darkness of old questions and surmises. Had I lived here in the intervening years would the daily round have ground things in the mortar of sameness, subtle changes passed unnoticed? Now keen reminders fill the space of what was and is:

Mountains defining the sky, vast as ever with clouds like battleships, each realm charged with force and motive; the Ditch, a park, where once the muddy water swirled down through the arroyos after hard rain; the main street where I left my childhood—different retail efforts marking the signs and windows; the flagpole the kids raced their cars around, gone now from the center.

I could not wait to flee the mud and dust, the ugliness, as my father sat blind in the living room cursing his fate and my mother bore her resentment in a dark halo. All gone now. I could be a ghost coming back to haunt my past as it haunted me—a part of all that I have met.