Yesterday
Yesterday the desert on the Burnham Road put away its natural light in a black heaving Irish ocean.
Outside
Dwelling on the impulse to move. Leah takes the impulse and makes patterns of movement. I can dwell on the impulse to move for a whole book and never move.
Framing
The desert isn’t a creature. It doesn’t have eyes nor ears, nor hands and feet, nor does it have a language. Always, strangers define it. (Anyone who doesn’t speak will be defined by strangers.)
Picking up small rocks and large stones, my mind calling them “rocks” and “stones” but also wondering there you are, who are you, how would you like to be held, would you like to be held, thrown over there, left alone, stepped on, flipped over, taken from here and collected and put on some table in front of a television with maybe some music playing?
Bounded to the west by the San Francisco Peaks, to the north by Mt. Hesperus, to the south by Mt. Taylor and to the east by Mt. Blanca, you are __________.
The well-meaning stranger’s tongue was cut off in A Distant Episode because he believed his brain was enough to tell the desert what it is.
The cold of the desert evening reaches my hands first. My fingers curl like a petal of one of those flowers that sleep and wake in the course of a day, that I’ve never been able to name.
I accept the significant things told to me by the Irish nuns and Jesuit brothers and think it right that there are people who can, on my behalf, complete my sentences and even my thoughts.
Strangers carry the desert from one side of a highway and dump it on the other side; but in a sudden snowstorm, at twenty degrees below seasonal normals and in freezing high winds, the desert flurries in an icy mix of snow and sand, remaking its own partitions.
Mid-day Fantasy
It seems the same emotions that go into grieving go into raising children. You look down to the street without expecting signs of life and so life is all you see. A man comes inside. A child tells him not to shut the door. That’s my child, you think. That’s my door. But that man who doesn’t know you, it’s his door also, and he’s grieving too.
