My fingers race across deep valleys and ridges.
Rough bark is pleasing and slightly hot to touch,
the summer sun elicits a faint smell of vanilla
and sap.  I love the twisted and gnarled trees the best.

In incalculable breaths of time words pass, we have them no more.
With forced gesticulations in the empty air I try to say what I can never,
will never, be able to express.  I stand and let the wind in through my teeth.

Early Memories

I came into this world without a cry.  With searching eyes I looked around,  life still blurry in the distance, and I took comfort in the faces that smiled down at me.   I was cut from my umbilical cord, pulled from my mother’s body, and I immediately sought to reconnect–to hear again the particular rhythms of her heartbeat.  I took comfort often in the sweetness of her milk, and the dark warmth of sleep.  My first memories are pictures in my mind, somewhat out of focus but always poignant.

I sit in our Radio Flyer wagon, we are going to pick berries.  Kalin walks ahead of us, he is three.  There is a heavy fog on the field as it is early.  Kalin goes too far and I can’t see him through the mist: I am filled with fear, I am not certain that he will reappear, I am not certain that he exists anymore.  I call out, making sounds that are not yet the sounds of words, and he answers.  I feel, for perhaps the first time, relief and great happiness.  Kalin’s body becomes visible again through the mist.  All is well.

I wake up and my mother is not beside me.  It is dark and I feel lonely.  I see light glowing down the hallway, so I walk towards it.  Mom is sitting with some people talking, I run to her and she takes me in her arms and offers me her breast.

Kalin tells me he will pull me up into our fort with a five gallon bucket and a rope.  I do not doubt him, he is the knower of all things.  I stand under the fort and diligently look up, he drops the bucket and it lands on my nose.  Blood begins pouring down my face.

Kalin is on all fours and is mooing like a cow.  There is a large cow grazing in front of him, he is pretending to be its calf.  He gets closer and moos louder and I am afraid.  I yell out B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B (my word for danger and berries).  The cow comes towards him and butts him with her head–he is thrown back against the hood of the car.  Later he tells me he got cow poop on his head.

We find a caterpillar, it is green and has horns all over its back, and as we look at it it begins to get bigger.  Expanding from short and stout to long and thin.  I am stunned by appreciation and fear.

There is a body of a flying squirrel next to our steps, I kneel behind it and watch ants crawl out of its eye sockets.

Joie de vivre

December 3rd:  A bull alligator calls from the swamp making the sound of a motorcycle starting, I hear the cranes coming back to the prarie for the winter, A woman has a seizure in front of a bus I’m on she is in the street with a helmet on and the whole community circles her and shields her until she is alright.

December 4th:  A young man has a perfect handlebar mustache and he is working at Starbucks making lattes…somehow I fall in love with him in a second for having that ridiculous, atrocious ‘stache….

December 6th:  The white frost cloth over the field is covered in dew it looks ethereal in the morning light, I ponder the life of weeds as I watch them being pulled from beds of kale, the sunset is a glorious fifteen minutes of gods.

December 7th:  The house is filled with the smell of steaming organic collard greens, I think about dismantling my war against domestication, Ruben gets a bath and smells like calendulas, it is my brothers day of  birth.