if you have been domesticated, go outside to cleanse the claustrophobia. breathe in a history of your wild life alone. befriending an animal is not about approach. remember when you bowed to the wary respect of deer who didn’t bound away. recollect that they remained as you now do: observable and unadorned, quiet and patient. speak only when necessary, then in a whisper to rival wind through tall grass, your words a rustle. recall the peace of your outdoor home, of walking softly across the carpets of earth, the sticky pine and shaggy greens, rocks smooth, and jagged. the caterpillars that fall from trees to whom you offered fruit, their tiny orifices greedy at the sharing of sugar. spiders taking to your bed in cold comfort, their silk stopping mosquitoes. indoors your perspective changes yet the rules remain. remember the hard-won lessons of your earthly freedom: bow. but do not show your belly. when your yearning is heavy, the innocence of earth cradles you. here is your lesson again. look up in greeting toward the canopy that comforts, keep her all in mind: leaves, needles, clouds, stars, squint-inducing blues, heavy greys, raging lightning. there is no ceiling, like there is no spoon: classic, rebellious, true. the “real” world in which you’ve taken to domestication is a poor substitute for the deep honesty of which you’ve been taught, time and again. claustrophobia will come, and you will go outside to breathe in recollection. you will know again, as the earth insists: you’ve never really been alone at all.

they call to tell you she has died and well, you and she had hardly spoken over the decade you’d known each other, but admired each other with a fondness born of the circle in which you both had swirled, mingling as lost young things before growing into the strong adults you had become, though now she is no more and all you can say to your beloved friend who has called to make sure you didn’t find out elsewise, is “we were lucky to have her while we did” because this was a thing she had tried and tried again, in a manner of speaking, and now had perfected, with the end of her existence, this intellectual anxious beautiful being who came into our lives so long ago immediately causing jealousy until one spoke with her and realized that maybe among us all she was the most genuine in those days, from whom we then learned and grew together and grew and birthed new plans amongst ourselves, new lives and bodies and willful, with scars on display not proudly but with honesty we grew and Bex was a catalyst, will always be. will always be missed.

I’m walking around this art museum dedicated to nuestra gente wondering what it means. To claim a culture as one’s own. To belong. These are not the same thing, are they? No se, pero I do know that when the museum employees talk to me I hear the coquí sing, and it’s all I can do not to beg them por favor continúa. Tiene la sangre, me dicen, y lo creo. Their Spanish lilt of bacalao and salt. They might as well be singing, “sana sana, nena” porque all I can smell is mi abuelita: garlic and distinctly latina perfume. All I can do is wiggle my hips a la bomba. All I can do is leando: de las bregas, los revolucionarios… y que fuerte son nuestra gente. I looked in the gift shop for baby clothes. Or anything que dice “Wepa” porque yo necesito más wepa these days. Necesito más de la raza. De mi gente. I sit in the gallery surrounded, soaking it in, and wonder. About belonging. Un empleado cantando in another gallery to light my heart. His bouyant lilt wafting through the rooms to remind me of el amor de vida that is solamente de la isla verde. Y como mi corazón lo necesita.

sweet plums spilling out a forgotten tree. they’re happy to pass even if it’s a D. as I age I’m realizing there’s no finish line. as I age I wonder about time. apples go thwump in the quiet of night. from society’s corners they’re itchin’ to fight. no matter where it’s planted you’ll reap what you sow. no matter where you find yourself you can grow.

We were hiking back to camp when it happened. I only wanted to keep going but he bade me sit down to talk it out. I had wanted to be afraid and then I wanted to cope aloud and he made me stop walking to do that. This wasn’t about our sport, this was personal to me. This was a yet different fear beyond what I’d already faced alongside him. Because we had though, I reluctantly sat down. I couldn’t look at him at first, or think, so great was the mess in my head. He waited. By and by, I talked. Around all of it. I said everything I felt like saying. I looked at the valleys close and distant, the further mountains, the wide blue sky. As I reacquainted myself with the desert calm, a shadow startled me not ten feet to my right. The raven who’d cast it swooped down in front of us, lilting on the breeze. I nearly cried then. “That’s for you,” he said, and the raven played on. With rarely a wingbeat, a wide black bird casually careening on draughts of dry, warm wind just beyond our reach from the canyon rim. The raven stayed close quite a while. Let this die now, she said to me. I left it soaring over those many valleys off toward the far mountains under our wide blue sky.

you’re up against a wall of rock on four toes and several fingertips, further from the ground than you’d care to notice, relieved to take a breath as you steady for the next reach. looking for holds is like looking for seashells: most that look good are incomplete, not quite enough. natural formations. you squander energy, myriad muscles tensed, exploring one hand at a time. later your buddies will say you think too much. now, right now, you have to breathe again. sometimes a little spring is necessary. a hop from three points so that your fourth can make a distance. up a natural wall. this isn’t the fear you had expected. there was a climber who told you that her first several descents had her vomiting as she reached the ground again. that isn’t what you’re going for, but it might not matter. breathe. your most ancient knowledge is telling your body of danger. that is not this moment, no matter the distance between you and an idea of safety. the problem is in right front of you. you’re breathing. you’ve got this. now. you’re here of only your own strength. it’s not too far. reach.

No more deep gulping yawns: autumn air has a bite. That moon’s called a Harvest cuz it works through the night. Going slow is the fastest way to lose balance. You’ve gotta move quick, quit wasting your talents. They notice and wonder and participate. They slump in all high, they’re showing up late. He used the n-word again and didn’t like what came next. We’re not gonna win but we’re giving our best. It’s one old flame that soothes and another that burns. You’re choosing to lose cuz you just want a turn. At sunrise each morning you’ll try, try again. If you’re running it’s into the arms of a friend.

All I need is the whole thing, all of the time I can make. Not forever but for now—I swear, my soul to take. They’ll whisper the secret and I’ll never tell. How did you do that all by yourself. I’m going to use it all none to waste. It’s not lost but feels gone, nothing taking that place. He reached into the tree and several plums fell. They aren’t getting better but they’re getting well.

I saw a jet fly past the moon like Santa Claus in the movies. My sensitivity to persecution means I never enjoyed E.T. Dead flowers are so perfect but they definitely make weird gifts. We love a mundane problem for once let’s all fix this. I’ve been receiving letters lately, myriad legible thoughts. The memories one stoked were buckets in a drought. There was one that irked me weirdly, yet another, simply sweet. You’ll never make it up that boulder if you can’t trust your feet. The plums are tumbling out the tree. The garden’s overgrown. There’s nothing for their suffering but to offer up a kind of home. Collective energy is everything, so is being held. There’s nothing like community, there’s nothing like oneself.

This one is for you, current presumptuous mess that you are. For well you know that a garden untended suffers any myriad of fates. Too much sun, or rain, wild animals and tiny parasites, illness. I think of The Secret Garden, all the greenery in all directions, on all surfaces, hemmed in by stone walls. A garden will grow however it pleases without you. If you return years later, there could be thorns, brambles, leaves that cause you itch. You cannot lie comfortably where you once did, nor might you will the vines to make you a bed. You could hack your way through the overgrown paths, or recall that you are a tender of life and must be patient. This isn’t anything new to you, but you’re distracted of late, idealizing what is most dull. The truth is this garden always looks so appealing from afar, then shows not a care for your return. Rarely there is fruit, and without discernible pattern. Tremendous is the might of growth-driven things. In the entanglement now is a good place to grieve. What once was and couldn’t be, all the flowers you may not ever see, and the gardens you’ve left to thrive.

He’s easily discouraged cuz that’s all he’s ever been. You’re often quite unsure about the state your heart is in. He used his skateboard as a weapon. He can’t ride here anymore. The rodeo kid flashed bruises then claimed he wasn’t sore. If there’s anger in our earnestness it comes with the territory. We all have our own role in this. Ultimately it’s not my story.

The raccoons came back tonight. Two crept up on me while I was writing something else. We startled each other. I had to stand up and be big real fast in the middle of my spliff. Raccoon chitters are scary, and the arched creep of them is kind of ghastly. As I eyed those weirdos in the shadowy dark their defensive, awkward pugnaciousness brought to mind some students. Everyone feels cornered sometimes, teenagers most of all. Long after my heartbeat slowed, I thought of you. I write ridiculous shit, but I don’t believe most of it. I believe you love me when you can. I believe that shoveling the raccoon shit from the driveway was a smart move. I don’t mind taking direction from you. I wish there was more of it.

I met a random older fisherman at a bar in West Yellowstone. During his first triple shot of Bacardi on ice, I learned some and laughed a bit. Somewhere in round two, he suddenly asked me if I knew I’d broken hearts. He was sure I had, serious. I couldn’t laugh. I’d meant to become a legend. I didn’t intend to cause pain. A dream somehow realized that has been heartbreak for me as well. I never wanted to be known, only to be wanted. Now I am committed to work that involves being known and it’s terrifying and normal and boring and altogether the biggest adventure of my life. The first time I was considered brave for traveling I was baffled. “I was running away,” I tell people, “I didn’t feel brave.” Bravery is another person’s assumption that I had been known, somewhere at some time, and left it for unknowing. Most of everything I’ve ever known is unknowing: it took me a very long time to get acquainted with my self. To be alone in a strange place with few resources; to make my way on kindness, willingness, and open mindedness. To be “Good, Giving, and Game” in my experience of the world. That I am already in love with the unknown is a gift, I am sure. An expensive one.

listening to the raccoons chittering out in the barely dark. are you trying to have purpose or are you trying to make art. let’s try a different word. let’s seize another day. their neighbors have been bickerin on the cost of hay. he’s here just on probation. each must participate to pass. that one is my favorite: i’m saving it for last.

You used to be more intimidating. She used to be more free. There’s no weapon we aren’t confiscating. Let’s take a sec to breathe. How overwhelming are the first days. Wanted colleagues? You got friends. I wish I was doin it for the pay, cuz I’m invested in how this ends.

It’s contagious, his big grin with all of those teeth. We’ve all been busy what-if-ing missed opportunities. There’s a prince in the north, a cowboy down south. In common they’ve got only my starving mouth. The mama bear startled, on her hind legs, deciding. If guns come through the door he says he’ll go down fighting. She shuffled with one hand through jangling keys. The two cubs were darling, each clung to a tree. Now the battery’s dead or the starter is broke. Her folks called it love but it felt like a yoke.

The curtain of nighttime lowers and I feel your body against mine, sweaty and wet. The stars fall all around and I remember our howling. There were yellow blossoms everywhere in that dark garden in the bright city. Unseen pleasures taken lightly, dewy moist everywhere. Three separate times my entire weight against yours on the rocky ocean shore. Our bodies a landmass. Push, and gravitational pull. Nearly as many years gone by when you came around. In the dark alone now, the safe cloister of night, these dreams.

You’re aiming for some betterment. She’s fixin for a fight. Take a nap, the Perseids aren’t ‘til the middle of the night. There’s no growth that doesn’t hurt, and plenty pain that won’t see gains. You’ve got dressing on your shirt. He remembered all their names. Whose turn is it to answer? Who’s trying to get paid? I thought I could be teaching but we just gotta keep them safe.

We know the roads in Nawlins are a hate crime. She shared photos from five years ago, but a lifetime. I went and played in the rain because you would’ve wanted to. When it’s not a drill I know now what I’ll do. They gave me all the vegetables complete with garden dirt. It was beautiful between us, that don’t mean it didn’t hurt.

tiny lizards spring from the sills. air thin. heat thick. electric zooms flit wildly. in search of sweets, the hummingbirds. so aggressive. surfaces of thirst and cracked layers. muted browns, sunburnt reds. wobbly convection heating little shrubbery. how deep the aridity. atop the mesa dry air. gusts whipping. twirling dusts. what is god but terrible beauty.

they call it drop. falling after floating. we’re better animals when free, just so. this one left not a whiff for me to smell in his wake. ghosts are all around these days. no trace but ache. somehow not better: a hand-written letter of fresh future promises in brilliant prose. oh, how I fall for them both. couplings superb in both romance and brevity. each its own beautiful terror. just so, these roman candle loves, “and everybody goes, ‘Awww!’”

The moon is super and so are you. Cats come just to say hello. If you’re trying to be teaching please own up when you don’t know. We talked of quitting and commitment. What is future in uncertainty. The baby standing in calm shallows. Her face pure joy just perfectly. A loving helper holds your hand. A startled heron beats a wind. I wouldn’t have believed it if it hadn’t come from him. Been skint on love of late, I’m grateful for the least. I’m gonna grow whatever I get; we’ll share ourselves a feast.

Remember the night the moon carried you home. In your relief and recovery you ate two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and crashed so hard. The cows startled you in the early light amid the ponderosa pines. You’d needed carrying because there had been gunshots, and you chose a rough drive up a canyon in fading evening light. No one knew where you were and you had no cell service. Adrenaline fed you’d handled the rocky climb in your agile little car and crested the canyon rim to find the moon waiting, shining white and wide, cut by the horizon. You’d never seen a moon like this one; you finally took a breath. A greeting and an assist, the moon sat directly atop your destination, though in the moment you hadn’t known. How and where to feel safe enough to sleep now. The moon offered and you followed. In the familiar forest where you finally rested, coyotes celebrated not far off, omens of refuge. Cows slept. In the morning you felt better, and probably ate another sandwich, you don’t remember. From that morning you remember only the soft light through slim reddish tree trunks with epic stature, the here and there fussing of cows, birds chattering and singing. Anymore in the memory of that frightful night there exists only the coyotes’ lullaby, and the moon, who carried you home.

There was rain and no small winds that late evening. The growing gibbous shone bright around my chattering wet neighborhood of trees and brush, driveways and houses. I was under the carport enjoying the cool moist gusts when I heard a skittering on gravel, or pavement… both? It wasn’t startling, it just perked my ears up in time for a low moan which was startling. I wasn’t alone. Several tittering noises in two pitches rang out collectively—raccoons. For folks from some parts of rural North America, this is an unmistakable sound.

Around my second grade year, my parents were selling the house. I told one guy who visited that there were raccoons under the barn because I truly thought that was a selling point. I was wrong, as I would grow to realize, raccoons are not good neighbors. They are the monkeys of this continent. (Monkeys are terrible, is the premise here. I welcome your debate. You will lose. Monkeys suck.) They are crafty and sneaky and will steal whatever food they can get their actual hands on. Hands! Unlike monkeys, raccoons are very good at washing their food before consuming, which is actually pretty cool.

When I taught in Taipei, our school would sometimes go to the zoo where, as North American mammals, raccoons have a cush home. The kids absolutely loved all the masks and hands of them. They couldn’t understand why I wasn’t equally smitten. My students also didn’t care, while I inevitably questioned my own motives. The only time in life I’ve seen raccoons eating not garbage, neither bothering anyone. Happy raccoons? Or bored and lying in wait.

By this time in my current night underway, I’d realized I needed to remove myself. The whole scuffle were all right up within feet of me, noisy and busy in the dark. In their unknown number they continued their yelping and threatening, respectively, as I sneaked inside and shut the door. The group stayed in motion within sight of my view, deeply tucked into shadows; I still couldn’t make them out. Somebody continued groaning and then there was a scuffle. The yelps took on a higher pitch. All this proceeded as I realized I have on an outside light near enough. I turned it on, expecting to scatter the ruckus. Raccoons indeed! I saw that two were little, though certainly big enough to do some damage. Whoever had been angry—another raccoon? a cat? any theories please reach out—-had bailed from the pool of light in which now the babies and their mother seemed to collect themselves. Each pounced on the others in a frantic way, the biggest one shoving the babies along with her body. They crept in a waddle as a messy, aimless group, over to where birdseed was scattered in their reach. Where I’d tossed it. Never doing that again. Hello raccoon neighbors, please don’t stay.

In the morning: a baseball-sized pile of perfectly tubular and pointy black scat in the middle of my driveway. Raccoons.

Lightning always leads the way. Like when you know which club you’re going to and you spy the distant strobes going wild. You stumble down the street arm in arm with your equally sure-footed friends, aflutter with anticipation. Around a corner the beat lands, first in your body, then your ears. Thunder saunters in like this, sneakily powerful. Now you’re arrived. When the rain comes down it is a dance floor full of strangers sweating, grinning. The air grows torrential, and you are lost to the rhythm around you. Your friends are nearby but you can’t hear them unless they yell in your ear. The pattering grows pelting. The sky drops the beat.

The sun rises over the Tetons, softening their youthful roughness in layers of pale light. This is raptor country, a fact which causes me some confusion as I spy massive dark shadows flying swiftly over farmland through the morning haze.

A plane over Idaho crops.

These fields which, now graced by sunlight, glow with a green so yellow it’s as if this corner of country has been highlighted. I want to annotate everything, weeks later still beset by the confusion of broken trust, even as attempts to mend are made. Raptor calls are common—this early hour has them furtive in the hunt. I make out a shape atop a hay bale only just in time to watch it leap, feet first, into high grass. It’s a flurry of fluffy white pantaloons and reaching talons, broad wings catching the last inch of air before the ground, robust body somehow never touching. As it takes off, smoothly enough though neither quickly nor gracefully, I wonder at the hour and the breadth of the bird: could it have been an owl?

Looking around the fields I learn that not only Kestrels and Kingfishers hover—I spy a small dark falcon at work, suspended in the air with seemingly little effort. There is a reservoir nearby, so that every other electricity pole is graced by such a gathering of tree parts as to make a retrieving dog blush. The nests of osprey are easy to spot: all sticks, no twigs, protruding in every direction from what seems haphazard but is obviously a very stable home to raise a brood. In the early light the families are spending time together, parents visibly feeding their young in one nest. In another, two adult birds seem to be chatting.

I take myself to the water. A great blue heron hunts, slowly stalking in the shallow, reedy, mucky shores. A stilt stands in the solid mud on shore, exactly as you’d expect of it. Enter an osprey, wings wide, dipping her talons into the water as she flies. It’s hard to tell if she is swooping to hunt something or simply enjoying the cool wet on her toes. I have barely formed the question when a larger bird cruises in, directing its energy toward the osprey. A chase begins, and now I wonder if the first bird does have something in her claws that the larger bird is chasing. Ominously, a third bird swoops down into the drama. Now it’s two eagles, a couple, staking what must be territorial claims against my peaceful osprey. I wonder absently if there’s a teaching here as I watch the giant partners in pursuit of the lither bird. Something about the arbitrary nature of territory and competition. It’s clear that either eagle might catch the osprey if it was inclined, but the pair comes shy of attacking. The osprey, dogged after a while, flies off into the grand sky over the wide water. The bigger birds circle once before alighting again, separately in their respective tops of trees, on either side of their bay. Unperturbed, the heron and stilt remain on the shoreline.

I keep accidentally dipping my books in hot springs. She didn’t write down recipes she just never forgot things. There’s goodness in gossip there’s safety in telling. They gaslight you baby so you’ll buy what they’re selling. It’s a matter of time til someone starts preaching. It’s life you’ve been loving but now your heart’s reachin’.

A ways down: construction. There are just a few vehicles ahead of me; I put the car in park for the long wait. In traveling as the lone driver and passenger of my car-casa, this is a rare opportunity: I am progressing toward my goals and yet am not required to maintain vigilance to the road. In transit I am the type to pull over often, if only to not drive for a moment; Yellowstone suits me for so many reasons. At this red light I manage to apply all the necessary sunblock, make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, then eat the pb&j before resuming the wheel.

The next time I find myself in this type of summer park standstill, it is behind a white Suburban hulking with darkened windows over my petite Prius. At intervals, I catch the SUV leaning this way and that, rocking side to side even in its parked position. What kerfuffle, what commotion must be occurring behind those tinted windows? The vehicle bounces on its chassis in response as we continue waiting.

I dreamed, now that the motherhood you used to plan against has come, I dreamed it all but softening your nature, so that my phone rang and you asked how I was doing. The morning came brightly pine scented, limned with peeking sunshine and birdsong, twinkling. No thoughts of prior or potential lives could distract me, then, the moment an adventure. Just so, an older bison bull crossed the road ahead of my car, bellowing. As he reached the opposite greenery, the whole width and weight of him flopped into a patch of dust there. Wallowing is too melancholy a word for the rambunctious task the buffalo set himself to. As a dog tosses itself in grass or snow or shit, this ungainly animal ten times the size wriggled, limbs up spine down, to gather dirt into its thick blanket of dark fur. Its legs seemed incongruously thin as they waggled from one side to the other across the giant creature’s tall chest. Nearby the dozens, probably hundreds, of other herd among the hillocks and recesses of field. All the beasts resting and grazing, the broad family completed by the here and there appearances of playful calves marked by the russet coppers of their first ninety days. Among those varyingly large masses of fuzzy browns, the lithe and lightly shaded figures of a family of pronghorn weave. As the breeze rolls over the high grasses, the serenity strikes oceanic; here a buoyant group of smaller ungulates drift amid a leisurely school of bison. I float along. Just down the road, several cars stopped on dirt shoulders, many more stopped directly on the pavement. I wait patiently with my foot on the brake. From his truck in the oncoming lane, out the open window a man is telling the cars ahead of me where to look, and for what. I am clearly uninterested in a full conversation but this driver bellows down toward my car, “It’s a bear.” Deadpan, and drives on. I am still chuckling as I pull up toward another bison bull, lounging boulder large in the near, high grass. I slow down and wink from my window. The buffalo winks back.

Yellowstone (#2/?)

There are several miles of Yellowstone Park, definitely more, where the air is graced by mineral presences that describe a tale of week-used porta-potty. Open your windows to be smacked by blurry memories of festival lines ending in uncomfortable small spaces, not to mention what awaited you inside. Here, it’s in vast landscape of hills and mountains, greens and florals, wildlife and weather. In this glorious view and extra fresh air: a smell not unlike several hundred human reliefs simmering in a hot plastic box for days. Earth farts.