A seat by a window is all I ask
where I can see beyond the walls
of captivity
and watch clouds
like whispered truths,
hiding in plain sight
roll and collide
and contradict
and disappate.

A seat by a window
so I can see beyond what I know
so I can grasp hope
so I can chance to witness something
beautiful.

But all I see is a group of kids
with their hands on their *****
playing dice
and shouting at mothers
pushing babies in strollers
and spitting.

Contrails, like brushstrokes
made with measured and elegant
exactitude
wash over the halo of white light
worn by mother moon-
the persimmons of night cut through
the vaporous blanket of winter,
swaddling the earth below in mellow
reflected light,
saying "carry on, my sons
and my daughters,
the night shall pass,
but until then I give what comfort
I can."

The sun
is in
your eyes.

If you live your life with your teeth gritted,
with your jaw clenched,
with your upper lip pinned back
to reveal your pearly white fangs,
don't be surprised
when your they start to loosen,
bleed,
and fall out of your head-

leaving you with an unconvincing smile
and an even less convincing
sneer.

You look tired, girl.

The lines on your face
from annual frost wedging
sprout tiny trees and assemblies of
lichens
that blot the pages of your book
like carelessly spilt ink,

but it's not worth crying over.

I spent my time trying to read those
pages,
those hieroglyphs
penned in a foreign
and dead tongue.

I tried to read the landscape of you.

Where split rocks harbor still-breathing mammals
at the base of your collar bone.
Where the aspens quake
and make homes for hawks
on the crest of your bony hip.
Where the trickles of water babble
softly,
but not unheard
and the trout jump like living jokes
in the cracks on your tongue.

Really, I tried.
And the closer I looked the more I realized
that you are not my native land.
I was an invasive species there
and I could feel the god in you
crying out
to abolish the man in me.

So I tore down the shack I had built
at the border between you and I
and I watched as the trees regrew
where I used to harvest my firewood
and I saw the deer
bed down
as the sun set
behind the
cold and silent mountain range
that fringes your hairline-

those mighty castle walls
that I could never truly breach.

Millions of years ago a glacier
-like the pinpoint tip of a paintbrush
in some celestial architect's hand-
carved off the ridges
and peaks
and rough edges
off this valley,
like a frigid finish sander;
leaving sparse patches of
smoothed-out, tiger-striped gneiss
that permeate a background of
grass and scattered boulders.
Picturing the area's native peoples
-humans, deer, rabbits and porcupines-
meander across it is too easy-
but what is even easier is moving across it.
The word "running" doesn't really
fit-
it's more of a fast-motion jig
crossing feet one over the other
and tiptoeing
from rock to rock to rock
five feet at a time
until, at a pause for fresh air,
you realize you've crossed a whole valley
under sun's watchful gaze.

We spent the day here,
just across the border between the man-made
and that which made man,
whooping like madmen
under sun's embrace.
Emerging,
some indeterminate moment later,
burnt,
but enlightened
in the truest sense
of that word.

Inspire.

Expire.