In the Hills

We drove up the hill a bit faster in the older kid’s car as he passed around smoke that took us to the not-know as in do-not-know-what-to-expect – pressed tight with new friends piled arm on arm, hip on hip, front and back seat on a black ribbon pass that split into hills stacked up at the top of our town - banking left then right, making up jokes that matched the motion.

He pulled off the road and skidded in dust until we stopped and hopped out following him where he led us through this run-off tube that cut about 30 feet through the side of a hill, popping out on the shaded side into a river bed long before chopped off when they cut this highway between these old brown-black mountains.

We stood in the dry river sand and I could see how the dryness made things stretch here as they waited for water that might blast through once a year if even, and it was here that we stood in a circle letting it come on and looking back and forth across the distance at faces, young like ours, looking back, letting go enough to start a journey that this kind of freedom provides – we were blessed.

I never said thank you but I know a gift now and can remember the sequence like a brain carving: coming down from the hill with my hand out the window picking up the wind like a wing that came into my body and blew back the hair on my arm – the same arm that slipped under the short white sleeve of my t-shirt and flew with living light over and under the granite, sage, and blue that popped among the dwindling hills.

We wound down black paved road, traveling maybe 10 or 15 per, six or more of us in this small car, side by side and the word I heard was peace as in the peace that precedes an explosion or that comes just before fusion – a kind of edge, empty as in the present- paused as in vignette – we could have dissolved into a full crotched approach of bruises and kisses with mouths wide open.

I could see in my mind the lightening of naked-on-naked and hear bending waves that twisted our tongues as we spun out speaking in erratic non-sequitors of the surprise of the present, the discovery in eye-contact jumbled with some long-off kenning telling us we are not new, that we do not survive (no one does)– that all of these awakenings would roll into a sunrise that would, unflinching, come.

February 11, 2010

Hero

When I say hero, I know what I do not mean:
A horse rider, a loud noise, gallant bastard,
Public servant, honored and seen.
Not the man who leans to snatch
Small child from crocodile’s mouth,
And not the soldier stepping before
A small Iraqi woman to block
The off-throw of an improvised blast.

The hero I call up rises each morning,
To the talk in his head shouting him down,
Crosses wood planks of worn floor
To face a small mirror for the first encounter.
He is older by a day and full of his lists
Of must-does and the-thousand-tasks
Met by a chorus of silence,
He contends with the invisible:

Advance of the virus,
A slight loss of sight greater than yesterday,
A capacity to stand under bright light
Accompanied by no back-fill of strings,
Not one volunteer to listen
To the tedious litany
Except for the plentiful paid ears
In the ubiquitous 50 minute show and tell.

Persistence makes its case for bravery.
Action, absent acknowledgment, adds up
To a sequence of steps taken
Without the comfort of plot or the assurance
Of a receiving line to greet you with a "well done."
See the child then add the years and stand as witness
To a tenacity that sustains him all on his own.

February 4, 2010