a cowboy problem

eastern cottonwood

The eastern cottonwood is a member of the genus Populus which also includes the aspen and poplar species.  They are distinguished by their ovate leaves which dangle from long petioles and allow them to shimmer, even in the softest breezes.

"Cottonwood Blue"

If I could forget the plains behind this stand,

forget the train car and how I first saw

brown clouds tabled against a ceiling of heat, 

I could imagine this river valley

gave relief to land, that these tallest trees

diced sky into music above the oxbow

lake where bodies sink surely as pilings

set each spring for temporary docks,

where foundations lower houses like bait

for the leviathan rising of frost.

But it is summer.  Useless cottonwoods

do not crack in cold.  They've thrown a storm

of pith and down across lawn and screens

-Art Homer

rise

early morning sunlight color burst:

exist

I looked for a poem about green, rain, and windows.  Maybe about having nowhere else to be on a morning where the clouds are thick and low and blur into the soft haze that rises from the bay.  About cool bedsheets and grey light mixed incongruously with the sound of Oaxaca and the flavor of Tuscany.  I looked but it doesn't seem to exist anywhere else.

sailing shoes

strawberry moon

hazy rise
the fusion of grass with summer sun -- enchanting
more so the closer I get to the ground
the thin wool blanket
missing the satin trim at one end
where I sit waiting
looking the other way
wondering if somehow the plan has changed
so it comes to me like a surprise
catches me off guard
because that's the best way to be caught 

solstice

What to do with all this daylight?

mile ... mile & a half

free

the author with his mother

becoming

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

-Anais Nin

shimmer

In Robert Boswell's book  The Half-Known World:  On Writing Fiction, he writes about "magical moments in fiction" where the familiar is made strange.  The successful writer creates an alternative world or different dimension for the reader to enter into because "there are times when it seems there must be some other way of living, moments when the utterly ordinary takes on a measure of strangeness."  He goes on to say that in order to enter into these alternative worlds there must be a physical or tangible "embodiment ... a shimmer (or bridge) [that] exceeds it's physical definition."

I can pretty easily make the leap from fiction to all experiences of literature, art, music -- and then to clouds, wind, fog, the curl inside of a wave, the arc of a tree limb, grass swaying in the wind, all types of rocks, the ruffles of flower petals and undersides of leaves, weathered bones, lilac perfume, birdsong at dawn...  As sleep is to dreaming -- a portal to dreamworlds -- so is the potential in everyday experiences.  If we recognize them as points of shimmer we might find ourselves liberated from the common, transported by them into the waiting other worlds.  

So this is my passion.  Finding the threshold.  The shimmer.  The next world.  Jonathan Franzen said that "one half of passion is obsession, the other half is love."  My passion for wandering is divided into my obsession with finding the shimmer and the promise of falling in love with what lies just beyond the surface of the moment.  The movement inward, the leap upward, the whisper of air between touch -- and then the slip into that perfect unknown.