We built this house
On a dirt road at the edge of the forest
And between two coyotes dens
So it’s hard to know if the howling at night
Is sibling rivalry or civil war
Serenade or sacrifice

The colonial maps and oral histories
Note nothing of the hawk shadows
That circle gopher families
Hiding in the shade and roots of pine trees
That have outlived pestilence and fire
And the technicolor cowboy movies
Of the early rings of their forgotten youth

Mule deer wander, agnostic
Across the yard and out my gate
To the mountain meadows above
Without a second glance
At the raccoons canvassing garbage cans
Like a liberation militia
Living off nothing but the knowledge
That our intrusion is at most
Transient or tourist
Easily exploited; inevitably outlasted

These people don’t care about
My earnest endeavours
My myths and unreliable narration
Of some special place for me and mine
In this place of feral patterns and
Cyclical time, and so I don’t exist
To them at all,
I’m just an alien, an anomaly
Lost in space
An insider looking out at outsiders
Looking through, and
Seeing only refractions of shadows
Where I imagine I stand

I don’t lock my doors
Against the post modern vigilantes
Out here at night, when humanity ends
But I probably should
If only to remind myself
Of all the strange things that I am, and
All of the stranger things
That I am not

My winter girl
Forever filled with light on darker days
And my mind sees your hand in mine
Before we cross a parking lot
In the mud and the snow
With a constant sense of purpose
To always do the thing
That needs to be done
Before we lose the day
And that look that always knows me
In all the ways the world doesn’t know
Just breaks away the cold
Like your mother's fever
On the day that you were born
Still lives inside your bones
And warms the world
My winter girl

In the late fall
After apple picking and around thanksgiving
When the leaves started
To fade from green to red
We’d hook up the PTO from the old Deere
To a massive circular saw
Like something out of a cult horror movie
Coated in flaking layers of leaded rust paint
And under a cloud of diesel exhaust
And the slow blue smoke
From a constant Rothmans cigarette
We’d feed that beast the cast off limbs
Of the silent surrounding giants
And toss the amputated pieces
Onto a bottomless pile of drying wood

The dull shark teeth of that villain
And the way it would yank you in
Every time it hit an unwilling knot
While the old man on the tractor
Above nodded, smiled and coughed
And told you to count your fingers
Was a modern rite
A violent reminder
To stay sharp even when your tired bones
Were wandering towards the warmth
Of hearth and home, and
To remember that your hard won harvest
Didn’t harbour the carelessness
Of too many apple bins and turkey

The tired anxiety worn by necessity
In those darkening days
And all those pilgrim traditions of
Pending dismemberment
Marking every fleeting moment
Until thankfully, we were sent home under
A ragged red sun
Wide eyed and sore
And finally ready for winter
And for some kind of sleep

My children tell me of a mystic
Living by the lake
In a green and purple house
Surrounded by gardens of giant flowers
Who takes small dreamers
On uncharted adventures where
They choose their directions and she
Finds their way

My children tell me
How she floats on the summer waves
While they play on and around her
And how she buys them ice cream
While their parents lose track of the days
That fall past them in their rush
To do everything but the thing that’s fun

My children tell me of a mystic
And they are notorious liars
Like all libertarian dependents
But I remember sometimes
Being caught in the curves of the world
That they describe
While a voice coded to my DNA
Drifted down from something like
The heavens above, to will me to sleep
In the shade of her loving form

My children tell me
I’ve forgotten the magic
That I must have once known
Having lived in the presence for so long
Of one so filled with the primary energy
Of the green filled universe

But I tell my children
Lives are only understood in their entirety
And you never really understand
Where the mystical resides
Until you live long enough
To see her
With someone else’s eyes

A monster of cookies and a man of spiders
Lie in a stilted plastic embrace
On the floor of my shower
Waiting for my sleepy naked foot
Like a soapy cartoon landmine
In the semi darkness
Where I don’t expect to face my mortality
By way of a crushed skull
From a forgotten toy
Regardless of how well it would fit
With the rest of the story
These aren’t the assassins
That I once thought that I would face
Although I do revile the blue one’s
Wanton destruction of innocent pastries
I had conceived of my enemies
In grander terms
Back when my super powers
Were just in front of me
And I was the small naked hero
Narrating the struggle for the world
In the shampoo rain while my father
Far above and far away
Presumably kept score and kept mumbling
Something about something
And the bruises
On his feet

We wander in the smoke
Of the fires we never should have fought
But we thought we knew
A thing or two, about calamity
Having burned the world around us
So many times for such small reasons
That when the rains came
Like a transcendent ritual
To clean out the sky
Of the cinders of our sins
You’d think that would have been enough
Of a miracle to rehydrate
Our choking spirits
But maybe we were meant to burn
In the unexpected beauty
Of these Armageddon sunsets
Full of imbalance and entropy
Where the dead wood of you and me
Needs the lightning
And the imagined ending of everything
To find a place
To let the green things grow