I leave my front door open every night.

And mornings,
with showy dismay,
sweep dead leaves
& crawling things
from carpet’s clutch & cling –
stowaways on midnight winds –
scold myself & double-lock the door.

Meanwhile muddy footprints
– giant cigar stubs,
half-scabbed sores –
pock the living room floor.

I settle on the couch,
turn on t.v.,
and carefully keep my eyes
from flirting down –

a tightrope walker
denying all that ground.

   He looked up and saw a cloud and seized a tuft of it and as it slowly drifted away and pulled his arm after it he made up his mind and hauled himself up, climbed inside and sat.
   He poked out a hole to see from and watched other clouds mist by.
   In some clouds he saw other eye-holes. Some were vacant — he wondered about those. Some held watchful eyes. Most revealed others hungry to get his attention — hands sticking out and waving, widened and smiling eyes, greetings called out in voices mostly eroded to murmurs by the high whisking wind. He did nothing in return, only sat and turned his head as the occupied clouds sailed on.
   He slept for half a day.
   When he awoke he forgot where he was and screamed until he remembered, then he looked around, ignored the eyehole, and went back to sleep.
   When he next awoke it was dark. He looked out the eyehole and saw a valley lit up with electric lights. He tried to piss out the hole but most of it splashed back against him and he sat in the soft bed of his cloud-vessel, reeking and tired.

   He dreamed he was in a submarine going deeper and deeper into some black, eerily-lit trench with the pressure threatening to pop his brain like a grape, and he wept like a baby as he felt his body crushed and kept saying over and over: “I didn’t think we were going this far, I didn’t think we were going this far” with his face pressed to a porthole and the cool glass slippery with his sweat.

   He awoke with a start. The cloud was stuck. A tree branch skewered the far end of it like a fork tine. He looked out the eyehole. Other clouds, with other passengers, were similarly stuck on the dead tree’s branches like dried leaves on a porcupine, snakeskin on cactus. The tree looked newly canopied with its great heavy tufts, season-defying and mystical, like some part of a landscape on an ancient chinese tapestry.
   Every season the man had the strong urge to climb down, as all fruit must drop and he imagined it must be no different with him and the other clusters of white tufted cloud. But he never did, he stayed there all his life, eating from the nuts that grew on the boughs and learning to tell the seasons and even the fine gradations within seasons by the bark of the branches that skewered his moored vessel.
   The eyehole closed up after a week and he never again had a desire to look outside. He grew old and his beard tangled everywhere with the curds and peaks of cloud, merging in white whorls. He died cocooned, warm and shriveled like a seed in its shell, and happily so for he knew there was no soil for him, never had been, only always this, the promise of cotton palm cradling him frozen in sky and now serving as his coffin until lightning breaks his bones loose with a bolt.

For our Branches are buried in mud, and instinctively thirst for rain and sun even while sunk in the muck.

But they’re smothered to choking in that damp and locked from the light in that dirt.

We were born with a sharp garlic taste for lust, madness, and with an inarticulate goat-cry lodged in the throat. But every noble, kicking, fearsome, joyous impulse in us can’t live while our lungs and hands and brains and souls are trapped by the rank Sludge of the Burying World.

Because the Burying World hates anything secret, strange, and wild. It wants us tame, drooling, limp, soft and clawing around in the underground or not at all. It wants us like Wax to better receive the bombardment of impressions from television & advertisements, billboards and the Buy-This Datafeed. The Burying World is the world of sensory overflow. The Burying World is the world of the Close-Up & Zoom-In; it’s the world of graphic representation run amok. The Burying World wants your Eye, wants to bore a hole in it to fuck. And then it will ask for your money.

The Burying World knows what you want, because it has seized your senses and pumped you full of well-marketed desires like formaldehyde. The Burying World coddles your narcissism and makes you think you deserve everything. That you should improve yourself endlessly. That nothing else matters but you [and only the ‘you’ that is able to purchase and desire]. Not other people, not a tree or a creek, not a cow or a lark, not Art or the Spirit. And so the Burying World keeps you slavering after its products and messages — yoked to its Pus-Drip-Feed — through planned obsolescence and psy-ops marketing. The Burying World fastens thick cables around your neck.

The Burying World is the world of convenience and expedited-everything. The world of Minimalism, Economizing and quick, marketable Feng-Shui-Simplicity at the expense of the bounding heartful healthy Sprawl that we are born craving. The Burying World wants to strangle your thoughts and words into easy-to-digest Soundbytes and Energy Bars. The Burying World will chain you. The Burying World will take your Gazelles from their well-gamboled Steppes to trammel to Troughs for fattening up.

The Burying World numbs your sex and makes pallid your grins with isolating devices, gadgets and technologies. The Burying World automates and automates until there is no need for us to intervene in the endless layers of Processes regulating Processes; Machines regulating Machines. Removed from the world, we rot. The Burying World will feed on our compost.

The Burying World hates the past, hates history, and lives in the eternal, marketable Now. The Burying World is afraid of absolutes, whether in Art or in morality or in church or in state, and would rather you accept everything in what seems to be an enlightened & progressive relativism, but which is actually a spoon-fed blubbering Apathy.
 (Read More . . .)

Five black raisins ink her palm’s milk skin.

Small bowl of cupped hand lifting them to lips.

Quick soft wet of mouth. Palm-heel brushes chin.

Outside the gravel crunches: a lover’s car pulls in.

“He squatted over the wolf and touched her fur. He touched the cold and perfect teeth. The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun’s coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her. Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from. Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel. He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it.”

-Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

A dead wolf is held by the boy who loved it.

This is worth our love. All that is fierce and snapping and hungry and wild in the world, which even wind shies from. Nothing that can be tamed, disneyfied and slapped on hallmark cards, nothing that can be atrophied and enervated by a desire to see nature harmless, easy and meek. Cannot be held, never be held.

McCarthy suggests the wolfspirit lives on in the world even as the creatures themselves are killed. That the world not only must not but cannot be bereft of wolf, that there is something in the skeleton, in the pattern of the world that has wolf burned into it, in the DNA of it, programmed and scripted. So that wolf would come out as air, stream, wind, fire, in the eyes of future beings and creatures to come.

I don’t know about that. I think the world could indeed lose the wolf, and will. But it must not, that I agree with. All the wild mad-flower sprinting rich-blooded marrow-loving among us must not be lost. All creatures which live with a snarled starving yelp in their throats must not be lost or the world is a flat and quiet and forsaken place fit only for sleeping.

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

          James Wright

The last line like a shovel slamming against your chest.

Or maybe not, maybe just two firm hands seizing your shoulders, shaking you, then turning your body and setting your feet upon a different path, & a voice saying: “Go, make up for lost time.”