The past few months have seen me go from one coast to the other, desert to mountaintop, inner to outer city limits, while the world in between and underneath all of this remained choking from car and plane exhaust. I've landed amidst a story of ghost birds waking to their deaths in an acid bath at the bottom of an abandoned mine pit, glanced at the pages of land underneath to notice that the lakes are drying up, and finally, now, in the midst of this whirlwind-ride through air, on a brief layover from a reading with Michael Dumanis at the University of Nebraska, Kearney, I am listening to the traffic of people in the Denver airport. I am beginning to question what poetry has done for me during these few years of sky living. I feel the wordless more than ever, a quiteness has taken place of all the language that once jumped from my mouth like lightning. All those 'truths' I once had, now batter on the rim of an empty cup. I wonder if the antelope know this and if so, are they willing to drink from my poems again?

I was home last week, and as always, I was faced with the desire to remain a rock greeting the morning sun, when in reality, the land would break underneath my red dusted shoes and I'd find myself slipping toward Tucson again. In my attempt to cling to every branch I could grasp on my way toward the gravity of the Sonoran desert, I'd realized that realizations were all I had left in my attempt to name this place, this hour in which I live. I realized that each epiphany about life is personal, and that we are all just children with dangerous toys. I want poetry to acknowledge that again.

Allison Hedge Coke, Michael and I walked through the Fort Kearney State Park this afternoon. The Fort was an important site for all the transconinental chaos and massacres that have come and gone, but now in the quite of the aftermath, a hundred and something years later, there is no blood to be found in the walls of the reconstructed fort. No gold either in 'them thar hills". Allison picked up a cottonwood branch, broke, and mentioned that one could search for water with the twig. In my teasing, I pointed the twig to her head and said,"look I've found water!" We all laughed and moved on through the fall breeze, all three languages of us, sifting through the remnants of a blank page.

Labels: The Sky Door