Undulatus asperatus

I drove down Magnolia for the last time in the late afternoon of September’s end, and I took a walk down all the paths that once lead me to you. It had been one day since we’d talked, four days since we’d actually spoken, and twice that since we had really heard each other. The truth turns as easy as the rounds of sun I followed through Caribou open space with a hit of L and banana chips, and mid-afternoon in an Aspen tree I thought about the time you told me that those leaves looked like they were winking. Clouds came then; do you know they recently classified a new formation? They realized there was no word for the ominous draft clouds that always dissipates, and so undulatus asperatus was born: “ agitated waves “  these are the storms we think we prophesize, though they never come. I’m painting golden leaves in the grass when I realize you probably haven’t heard of this, and that I hope I get to tell you. Now the sky undulates, it is early evening, and you and I are twenty-two holding hands on the path to the Caribou Ranch barn, my hair is the longest it’s been all summer and a photo is taken, later it is painted into a watercolor. Later then the painting is lost. My hand aches because it’s empty and likes being held and I remember how well the painting depicted the way you walk. I cringe from crows, you all well know this, and just then at sunset I heard one laughing at me. She said time sweet sister you scared little thing, your angst is vicious your soul subdued you wait for him and time is your master, time is your lover, time is the injured man who wants to be yours as you are for him.

For now at least I let time travel in my front seat as I take the backroads to the west side of Magnolia.  It’s dark and I plan to drive the length of it and absorb the turns and thoughts and glimpses that used to be the woven fabric of my most textured twenties. This is the time we were we. I do not pass Ponderosa Way,  I turn into it, and follow the breath as she folds herself into my lap and I find myself on our old porch. Midnight wraps around the room we once shared and I glimpse the past shadows of us curled up in an abalone shell. The black crow winks, glints. You are standing four years ahead and forty miles away and clouded in what feels obtuse to me, I do not know this man, but here is his soul and the turn of his neck and his gray pajama pants in a pocket in my lungs, I am breathing him in (now and always). I am shaking at the steering wheel without your hand on my thigh, our old road, but then morning breaks and I find myself sunning on a black smooth stone, I am topless, I am softened, you are gone and I am glad.

the winter I was warm enough (to leave you)

When the last curl turned loose across her forehead she felt her inner wrists open up and offered everything she had to the wolf moon. It was January. She knew everything would change once the sun, hung in opposition, would pounce across her pillow.

It had been four years since she woke up feeling alone. She welcomed the emptiness in her chest, the gnawing from behind her ribs. Scrape of her clavicles and she lifts herself, starts a fire, sneaks outside.

She feels lighter already.

Ode To A Naked Beauty

Pablo Neruda says the things we wish we could.


"With a chaste heart 
With pure eyes I celebrate your beauty
Holding the leash of blood
So that it might leap out and trace your outline 
Where you lie down in my Ode 
As in a land of forests or in surf
In aromatic loam, or in sea music


Beautiful nude
Equally beautiful your feet
Arched by primeval tap of wind or sound
Your ears, small shells
Of the splendid American sea
Your breasts of level plentitude
Fulfilled by living light
Your flying eyelids of wheat
Revealing or enclosing
The two deep countries of your eyes


The line your shoulders have divided into pale regions
Loses itself and blends into the compact halves of an apple 
Continues separating your beauty down into two columns of
Burnished gold
Fine alabaster
To sink into the two grapes of your feet
Where your twin symmetrical tree burns again and rises
Flowering fire
Open chandelier
A swelling fruit 
Over the pact of sea and earth 


From what materials
Agate?
Quartz?
Wheat?
Did your body come together?
Swelling like baking bread to signal silvered hills 
The cleavage of one petal 
Sweet fruits of a deep velvet 
Until alone remained
Astonished 
The fine and firm feminine form 


It is not only light that falls over the world spreading inside your body
Yet suffocate itself
So much is clarity 
Taking its leave of you
As if you were on fire within 


The moon lives in the lining of your skin"

~pablo neruda~ 

Alone A Learn

New behavior emerged in her solitude

She started dancing naked in front of her living room windows

Made friends with the curtains and the candles, soulmates with the cat

After a shower she'd rub her feet on the raw wood

Use coconut oil in all and unmentionable places

Light incense in the stairwell to honor where the moon hung 

Eat chocolate in bed

Sing old soul songs in the morning

She Initiated a nightly ceremony of brushing her teeth outside,Spitting off her balcony while arching her heart to the sky, praying vigorously to the starline, grounding down through the rugs as she lay on her bare back  

Daring not visitors, but solitude to enter in and join her

She named her dogs wax and wane (for the moon) and called her cats ida and pingala for the shushumna channel of consciousness. As such, she existed neither here nor there but in a realm of her own choosing where the phases of the stars not only chose our paths and pulled the tides but went for walks with her after work, would lay at her feet belly up; where fields of energy would not only regulate the flow of consciousness between dimensions but would sit and soak up the sun in her stairwell, purr as she pet them in passing.

on grapes and your great ghost

I dropped a bag of grapes in the market because I thought I saw you in the next aisle
Sped up on my bike ride for a split second, swore you were just ahead
Every jeep that cruises by I see you in 
and I 
Remember you following me up dream canyon with that grin
You're hiding in the smile of that boy that keeps looking at me
And you're slung back in the posture of the fellow dancing in the front row
You were camping with me last weekend, I felt you and gasped 
Thank you for visiting
I see you everywhere Ben, in everything