Air is gone so suddenly and your lungs are shriveled and small.

You thought that it would change things, clinging to the railing and refusing to leave the unfeeling but homey steel frame.  You thought they would give up, go out themselves, leave you to be unchanged.  You do not matter to other people.  Your choices are not significant to them.  You wanted to unchoose, and they should let you.  

"Committment," they mumble (or shout).  They wear their white suits unnaturally; yours is stained with strawberry ice cream.  You hid in the freezer room, and they found the meat and ordered you out.  

"The moon really does have no air," you gasp.  The surface shines brighter than the atmosphere.  You tumble: stars burn below you, and the weightless rocks pile around your head.

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The forest is where you breathe.  Finding broken branches, crumpled needles, your clay crumbles in the natural dirt.  You decompose with the rings of the trees; water and air melt everything into calm agreement.  Standing, you see this: that the trees stand where they always will.  Friends have uprooted, but the trees will stay until their soil gives way and they tip.

The sky above you remembers and goes with you too.

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In the later afternoon, it moved: an elephant grinding its way through the unnecessary forest.  Its strong back rippled.  I followed it from tree to tree.  It kept a steady course west as the afternoon light paled.  

The sun finally shattered into stars when it halted on the edge of a cliff.  Clouds bowled below us in the lower peaks.  It settled on its haunches, moss ruffling in the evening breeze.  It did not move again.

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The mountains set, and what I mean is they went out, slowly.  They dimmed behind themselves, like a dancing crowd following a holy thought.  I watched with my pack next to me, across the lake perched halfway down the face.  The boulders around me turned over and went to sleep.  The sky that had seemed depthless in the blue day closed in hollowly.  I could hear the muffled sound of my movements.  I was in a closet and not the open air, and my body panicked.  

I snatched my pack from a sleeping rock and tore down the mountainside.  Rivers of stones scattered down ahead of me; the blood pounded in my ears.  In the blackness, my only sense was gravity.  The descent was miles long; I tumbled and felt the wetness of blood in my hair.

Water.  I huddled on the shore, trembling.

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We sloshed around the shallows of the lake, feet sticking, reeds slapping our mouths.  He got to the log before me, and I sat down.  He stood.  The water rippled, and the damp air clung with gnats.

A noise like a thousand bees dying collapsed behind us.  Our tree was felled.  Its fresh greenery would not brush our cheeks again.  The salamanders would find a separate place to drink, nearer to the ground, drying soon without fog seeping into their skin.  

"They could come here," he said without turning.

I shook my head.  "You live your whole life in a redwood, as a salamander.  How would you learn how to swim?"

"Organisms are surprisingly resilient, I've found."  He turned to me.  "We find our life where we need to."

He slung the climbing rope over his shoulder and we parted the reeds slowly.  

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In the sky, the balloon was an absence, a black hole.

His hands shook and the glasses tumbled on the card table.  They gave a trembling cry:  "Be brave and finish up."  "Stomp your feet and howl, but don't be heard."  "Calm your heart rate and settle into the rhythm: loss, found, empty, satisfied, raging, quiet--switching on and off.  Finding the vase then a face, a void then a wholeness."

He stood, turned a switch, dug his feet into the dirt.  Then, his body suddenly launched into the space where clouds crystalized and oxygen thinned.   "I wonder," he said, "if anyone'll see me..."

The couple saw from the balloon.  A man lit up and burned like a rocket on the horizon.  A snap and a small rustling and the lights went out.

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You mumble when the words are giant on your tongue.  You mean more than you say and say less than you mean.  You stand in the hollow of a burnt out whale and hunch your shoulders.  You understand the height of a tree, the need for it.  You find the fact of a hollow stump foreign; when the spark flared, smoldered, and went out, you were not there.  You are seeing the sky, smelling the spice of dry wood rot and needles.  You are wondering as your eyes adjust to the light, to the trunk of the decaying tree.  You do not know what you are wondering.  You sit down, cross-legged in the floor of the hollow, absently poking pine needles into your knees.

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Place has a pull for you.  Your feet feel firmer on some grounds.  Wandering down paths and sleeping under different groves each night, your senses are keen to it.  There is a scent to a home-place, not a comfort, but mist on the ground, a form in the distance.  

"Be where you are," the mothers at their clotheslines whisper to you.  But you hold a precious anger; it stomps out in your feet, dust spindles and dead spiders.  So you move again, squinting at shabby houses with aprons and porches. Rights and privileges ruined when your house fell down.  

In a field as evening settles, you cover one eye and look.  Cover the other eye and look.  Stalks of grain jump.  Trees roll back and forth.  You unroll your blanket.  The place folds down around you, and you hear an owl flap her wings.  

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"How do you be brave?"  Ancient eyes looked up at me, and I could not answer.

His small question sent me spiraling into this mission.  I went to the back porch, laced up my boots, and walked down the road.  

Our town lay in a red wasteland, purple when the sun was setting.  Films lit up the sides of buildings most nights. Black and white and crackly.  We gathered silently in clouds of smoke to watch the old movements play out over and over again.  The man in charge had found them in the shed of a dead woman's yard and brought them out when the nights grew warm.  A dim form of happiness, but that's what we had.

The ground curled up around me as I lay awake.  I was alone with the howling dogs and the dust.  My stomach clenched with fear and my eyes plastered open.  "How do you be brave?"  

I was not a man who spent time with courage.  I kept my head down when children disappeared and the man in charge called for volunteers to search the wilderness.  Rats kept at my heels and drove me home to my small cabin at the edge of town.  I remained there.  Alone when the last of my family settled into the ground.  

The howling abruptly silenced, and the greyness began to rise.  A boy with blue eyes lapped to the edge of my mind.  His sister had gone into the red sands earlier that year, chasing a vision as they sometimes do.  I had seen her go past my window, struck with speed and beyond-sight.  I rushed out, but she had vanished.  If I had called to her, said some word, she could have heard and turned back.  But silence was my curse.  I could not help her.  

Two days ago, her brother had rushed away.  It was something that affected them, some light or being they saw that no one else could.  It had a sound, a persuasion, and the swiftness that carried their feet away was unnatural. But the blue-eyed boy was not carried away.  He went into the wilderness to search for his sister.  

"How do you be brave?" I stood up, brushed off a salamander curled around my ankle, and silently went on my way.

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The ravine was full of light today.  The houses on either side sighed and settled.  A boy ran through here like a wind today, and the summer trailed like gloaming on his heels.  The gravel path felt the imprint of his shoed feet, racing monsters back home in the dead of day.

"Hey," the ravine shouted echoes into the sleepy town.  "I am HERE," the boy cried.  And he was.

Two shadows danced together in the draping of the terrible light.  One was his, grand and dusty.  One was mine, small and looking up.  

Across the town, in mirrored room etched "Soda Fountain," he looked at the calendar on the wall.  June 6, 2012.  He looked at his wrist watch and felt his heart beat slowly, saw the second hand of the watch moving moving with no speed at all, saw the calendar frozen there with its one day seeming forever, the sun nailed to the sky with no motion toward sunset whatever.


Shadows gliding in the water that grows in the middle of the ravine, the middle of the place where standing on the edge means racing smack in the middle of fear.  With golden summer kissing our foreheads.  A blessing.  A commendation.  A mint stick in our bones.

In Memory of Ray Bradbury.


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I woke up this morning in a best-selling first person narrative.  Yesterday I had gone through my routines at a normal reader's pace, fast and slow, picking up and setting down.  Nothing off-putting, but not exactly moving stuff. Nothing grand that even I can remember--definitely brushed my teeth, went to work, and, I probably had a coffee or two.  But today the rising action picked right up: Complications arose.  

My legs ran right off themselves, my mind swirled with speed-read words as my story was devoured.  Though my smile was plastered on, I couldn't help feeling that the readers were enjoying the whole thing much more than I was. I'm being vague, I realize.  Apparently I'm under a tight contract by the publisher--can't give anything away.  I do apologize.

I can say, that I felt like this tree that had been growing at a steady, unremarkable pace, alone on a field, but quite content.  Plenty of visitors, a good balance of sunshine and rain.  But then a tornado swept sideways right through my growing place.  Feeling a little windblown, a little out of breath and naked.  Ok, it's an adjustment, the tree thinks to itself. I can deal with this hair style change.  Just let me have it for a bit and I'll get used to it.

Everyone has an opinion on your life all of the sudden, when you're a character in a best seller.  I like hearing about the "foreshadowing" and predictions for what's coming next.  But it's honestly freaking me out.  Everyone else is more ready for this than I am for tomorrow.  And they're speeding right along.

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Darkness and then light.

I wasn't even looking, in the dead suburban night, and I found a falling star.  Tears wet my face--my spirit, raw and restless, my mouth agape.  I personalize everything: this meteorite belonged to me.  No one else could have seen it, I reasoned.  I felt the black sky tear open as if the star had broken the sound barrier--a heavy, sudden rumbling.  Only, the night was quiet, and only I had been torn open, lying ragged in a metal chair.

The next day, the golden light hit the tall, side-of-the-road weeds.  I drove by a fleet of nervous brown birds, feeding in the ditch, scattering low from weed to weed.  Then, one flew heedlessly into my back tire.  In my mirror, I saw it fall and lay still.  A small red rip in the fabric of the morning.

The fish that don't have eyes because they live in the darkest depths of the ocean.  That darkness and light and not mutually exclusive.  That the human eye can find form in shadows and light alternately, like the gaps between the trees, shining like glowing trunks.

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Trees silhouetted black against a white sky;

Her tower was sometimes light, sometimes dark, 

always either, never both.

For 700 years, she found no difference in the day,

apart from the trees noir, the grass blanc--swaying--

and black badgers sniffing along the ground.

On a golden afternoon that she did not see but did feel--

on her skin, the warmth of spring, the sweet breath 

of the blank west wind, swishing her black locks--

she lay on the pinnacle of her tower, thinking of 

truth: "Like the sky, bright and without blemish;"

evil: "The trees, the badger... my hair," 

she caught a wisp in her hands.

"Black, and very fearful."

At that moment, an itinerant fiddle player stumbled into her woods.  He fell flat on his knees on the harsh whiteness of the ground.  "What terrible magic is this, that steals all color from the world?" he gasped.  For in his last step, the hundred greens of the fields had vanished.  The greys, blues, and yellows of the sky were wiped clean.  Next to him, his friendly violin lay like a scorch mark on snow.

Bewildered, the young man rose and bravely tiptoed forth.  Shortly he came upon the lady's tower.  Looking up, he saw the her hair flying, looking much like a black flag in the wind.  He longed to know some sorcery, some incantation that would rip the contrast from the world, bringing texture and depth to this surely beautiful, strange place.  

A sad, angry song welled up in the fiddler's eyes, and his fingers, out of habit, began to pluck the worn violin. Suddenly, the ebony of the tower walls faded into a rough grey.  He lifted the bow and let forth a few solemn notes; the grass around his feet whispered itself greenish.  The man continued his song, and slowly around him the forest grew into life.  Gracefully, he lilted color over his path, passing out and over the boundary of the forest.

The sky parted into white and blue 

before the maiden's lifted eyes.  

She gasped, and her hair swept yellow over her pale face.

She leapt to her feet.

A black and white badger sniffed among the green grass far below.

She stared and a sunset drained her soul of words.

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When she closed her eyes that night, she saw fields of flowers.  She held that like a tiny treasure to her chest, and it blossomed inside like a yellow ranunculus.  Petals unfolded, stretching the limits of their crumpled joy.  Stems twisted all over each other, all glad and stepping on toes to get the same golden sun.  

Glad, glad, glad, her soul smiled to her.  

I always imagined standing on clouds, how solid and strange it would be, like Mary Poppins.  

"Clouds are made of condensed water vapor," my droning science teachers always said. 

My hand would shoot up.  "But has anyone ever tried to stand on one, just to see?"

Science teachers were consistently the best eye-rollers of all humankind.  "Darling, you would fall right through one.  You can't stand on steam.  We fly through them in planes every day."  The same answers, always: I crossed my arms and refused to believe.

So, I graduated from high school, got my hot air ballooner's license, and took to the skies.  To spite all my past advisors.  

I climbed into the basket, pulled the cords, and rose into a cloudless sky.  Then I waited, dangling in my bright red balloon, waiting for the sky to push the clouds to me.  I was soon rewarded with a mountain fast approaching from the east.  The wind blew brisk and thin upon my gleeful face.  My moment had finally come.

Swinging my leg over the side, I watched the highest peak cresting towards me.  And then I stepped out.  And fell 10,000 feet into the sea.

music.

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Today, I needed a tree.

So then, I was walking, hands not-so-free at my sides, around a lake.  The sky was rotating from orange to blue.  Around one bend, and the water breathed cool on me.  Around another bend, and the heat from the brush coughed warm.  My words were tumbling out, trying to find their order.  The dusky air was, too, trying to find its scent for the evening--jasmine, or sewage--as if one wasn't terrible.

And there weren't any trees around me, well there were, but no trees.  I needed a giant.  I needed an ancient.

I came back around.  The night was turning in, the birds trilling; and I looked at the mountain, a small one, but the highest in the city.  My feet rooted into the pavement and steadied.  A massive redwood suddenly sprouted on top of the bald mountain, pushing the sky out of its way.

I paused, for one, two, three to watch, then uprooted and went on my way.

You're walking, and your pack is falling apart, your tins and ropes tumbling down the rocks and wrapping around your ankles.  And you're gathering it up, but everything keeps falling, and you're walking because you have this goal, but you can't keep your shit together, and everything around you is so beautiful and you are simultaneously in awe and hunched over, grabbing all your crap that keeps rolling away.

For seven miles, you're carrying on like this, waking the mountains from the dead with all the racket your stuff is causing, slipping away and you re-gathering it with every fifth step.  And you have this insurmountable precipice at the forefront of your mind, and it's really all you want to get to, all you want to ascend, and you're eyes are totally fixed on it--whenever you look up again from grabbing after the flashlight or the frying pan that rolled away.  These things are necessary, they're in your backpackers handbook, so you got to keep them in your pack or you could die at night on the mountain.  This knowledge, and the joy of getting to the top of that peak in the distance are together in your mind.

So.

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The wind had whirled around the city all day, lifting pear blossoms off the flowering trees, tripping shopping bags into women's ankles as they quickly walked.  Minutes had been altogether lost by teachers as it blew through their classrooms in the early afternoon.  Gleeful boys ran home for snacks and video games, not noticing their tousled hair and homework papers running away.

The eucalyptus trees felt their leaves whispered by several doors swinging shut all at once.

A girl whom the wind had whipped all the day, walked slowly through the park in the orange glow.  Noticing her, the breeze softened.  Silently, it breathed out a moment it had stolen earlier from a postman.  The girl inhaled.  Her shoulders relaxed.  She closed her eyes and saw the patches of sunlight shadowing through the trees.  Whisking her gently along, the breeze grew her moment until the girl was gazing with wide eyes at the branches of the highest trees glowing in the invisible air.

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sustenence

full, which was long ago bread, which was long ago

flour, which was long ago fussed up wheat heads, which 

was long ago bobbing back and forth, rolling in those

amber waves of--

I have these thoughts, perched up on my outpost, glancing at the great full world with an obliging nod,

and a knowing smile.

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What do we do in these weighty moments, when the atmosphere sucks all vapor from the room?  Shriveled lips, we blink our eyes and crack our joints for relief.  However, the heaviness crawls into our stomachs and sits there, curling its slinky body against our diaphragms.  The caffeine buzzes through our veins.  Wondering, we gaze at thick paint, and maybe we will float after all.

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