Adaptations

Montana, August 2015

I.

 

Jet lagged haze and nothing’s stable

time abandons order,

drifting, as

 

motion markers swirl:

(love in bombed out buildings; nature

walks where cloud invaded structure),

are wringed out of memory by riding planes

counter-clockwise (earth wise)

across meridians and also by

the ends of things that were good,

 

because old homes will be gutted and dolls we

once hugged will be sold for $1 off the stoop.

Friends marry by the dozens, and preferences settle.

We settle, and it is fine. We stitch the

holey kid jeans we didn’t throw away

with slightly nicer fabric.

 

Aging haze and nothing’s stable. Still,

 

time is the only commodity. It cannot be

repackaged or resold,

obsolescence, inevitable,

and never planned.

 

It pioneers love growing

out of blackened earth; it shadows the endless textures

of sediments that collect

when rivers change direction,

like those that take their

orders from the Rocky Mountain

Front, the mightiest of waters

helpless against the glory of the great divide.

 

 

II.

 

I once believed these rivers to be my veins

pulsating with insatiable intrigue,

bulging when I at last, exhausted

and plastered with muck and tears,

climbed up out of whatever oblivion

of youthful dogma to which I had

banished myself, looking for true

blue, no haze, to feed

into some perfect circularity.

 

Then one day I screamed to the nearest mountain:

Why aren’t you enough?

Why are truths never true enough?

 

 

III.

 

Near a trail at five AM, rocks

consider the complications of clouds,

watching a sunrise staining burnt sienna, the color

of countries far and

undiscovered, where the deserts

sing the same desolation

claimed by the Rockies and their

unforgiving ridges rising from

the agitations of a molten

inner sea.

 

Orange and circular in the

grade school textbooks, but can we assign

shape and color to such

fundamental flames?

 

Matter is never lost, proclaimed modern science

singularly, with spiritual authority;

it only mutates from molten to solid

like a mirage.

 

So how dare they sketch the soul

in such unforgiving light? Let the nude

model turn in the shadows the way she wants, generously

shade her hair. Turn the graphite left

and right for texture.

 

At 80 degrees north, a grey low hanging cloud, like an

alien device, pierces the valley’s abdomen

to monitor developments of forest fires

cleansing the river banks and the inhabitants

of the wild trails tattooed on hills and canyons below.

 

This sentient device swoops up a lone

hiker, the only one awake, and drops her

on her scarred up knees, commanding ablutions

of rain; that she humble herself before the scale of sky in motion

overset on the genesis of burning stone.

 

 

IV.

 

When she was young she witnessed the old

St Patrick’s hospital implode upon itself,

a spectacle for the helmeted dads on bikes

and wild eyed children gathered behind

the city council red tape, imagining that war was

happening right here in small town skies

rather than in those red and heatstruck

a million miles away.

 

 

V.

And then: the beloved mountains burned up one summer, the flames

hopping consecutive creek bottoms and crackling

even the most imposing ponderosas.

 

The arnica and bitterroot wilted in

milliseconds, surrendered to

the restless mind of the divine, causing trouble miles

from anything industrial.

 

And the humans cried:

Evacuate the cabins! Collect the valuables! Our cities

will protect us.

Oh the ferocity of what is coming for us!

Lock the family photos in a room where they may

safely smile in the dark!

 

They ran until the trees stood still

and branchless, like sterilized sewing needles,

when death was only apparent in other woods.

 

Only then did they crawl out of their cars,

like scorpions crawling out from under

their rocks.

 

 

 

VI.

 

Adaptations are jars of spare change

passed through many pockets. Some coins rusted, worn,

heavy with handprints rubbing against the newly minted.

 

On the shelves are collections of what

came to pass. Wildflower

fields on sunny spring days, holding hands in

the holy rain that broke the heat wave, all lined up like the

balls in Harry Potter’s hall of prophecies.

 

Only this time he’s alone, and human,

and shouting: Why isn’t love enough?

 

Why do we forget the salinity of

former dreams? The smoothness of

moonstones we fingered

blindly in the dark, awaiting

sleep to come.

 

Adaptations are medicine cabinets ordered by

shaded squares of schedules.

Lined up tinctures of lessons

in their proper places.

 

Small loves and big sunrises are daily dosages.

Be quick with your dropper, for they go fast

and forgetting is so long.

 

With only a capsule captured, people

pine and ponder:

Why isn’t time enough?

Why isn’t earth enough?

Why isn’t love enough?

We want more from the systems we know!

We want to hold the hands of the great beings who

benevolently keep the score!

 

 

VII.

 

The tree half dead from windsweep

yet standing, a stately ponderosa whose branches

curve like ribcage over earth owned by

enterprisers and trekked by trespassers.

 

A worthy counterpart to the circling hawks, all these years

safeguarding both the sky and

the indifferent cattle that graze

the valley at her feet.

 

She surrounds her trunk with

dead dry bark and needles,

remnants of self which allow no one

to sit too close. All who dare approach must climb with grace, as

the ancient red branches crack with any misstep,

and all the valley wails and echoes

an elegy of the sacred.

 

The most recent human to cry beneath her arms

had come to build up stones to mark

her as a signpost.

He rose up over the ridge like a searching spirit

only to find it had already been done.

 

 

VIII.

 

How fortunate, he thought, to be of the

sprawling pine and cerulean skies;

to dream at night and the dream be earth.

To dream of you, tree, and wonder if you dream of me.

 

How strange to know one’s toes or

roots, he shouted, to feel the sun and wind and sand!

Sensation and memory to feed upon in absence of

abstraction.

 

But the sorrow of goodbyes,

Pressing through the rows of corn

as children who can’t see over, skipping along

with baskets of bounties only to fall facefirst into

the seeds of sprouting sorrows.

 

Turning down the mountain he wonders when

the mound will fall and the tree will topple,

when the fires will come and when the city will

crave more space. When he will need new shoes.

 

And what a curse to care so deeply,

expecting to be trusted and the pain of trust.

Empathy is an ocean ebbing;

Ah, to know its depths and its rhythms –

he yearns to be sturdy and windswept, as god and tree above.

 

 

IX.

 

Yet after all this, some still ask: where is your god? He replies:

I think god comes when I sit alone with

my words at night and cry

about the perfections

I, one human, have witnessed,

considering those of the billions with whom I share the earth.

So young and I’ve seen so much, that I’m almost afraid

of discovering more.

 

A million where’s and who’s

From: A shared glance between a stranger

in front of the box store while we both smoke away

a little loneliness in the unforgiving neon light;

 

To: the way the sky sections itself off into

texture fields and color bursts in the

wake of rain at sunset.

 

To: Skipping stones with an old friend on an otherwise

glassy lake, for the twentieth summer.

 

The way her life has fallen into place, love and

passions triangulating her like a

misshapen hula hoop.

 

The way she tells you, so have yours,

my friend, and I love you. Now let us

hoop together, as we have always done.

 

 

X.

 

Americana dreams and nothing’s stable.

Do they fall on this side or that side?

Are they buried in the scripts of the ancient peoples,

forced away to some museumed parchment?

Are they footsoldiers in the box store revolution?

Do these dreams and mountain springs we love belong –

to us?

 

Or perhaps they’re in the next place. Once

Cairo dreaming of Baghdad, and now

America dreaming of a greater America,

of the wisdom waiting in the authentic

jungles and beaches of wiser, browner places.

Searching with the chaste and noble belief that the way

will be obvious once stumbled upon.

 

We look for the cairns along

the way, forgetting they are

windswept markers of the sacred.

They are humble and beautiful in

that defenselessness, crumbling

with any touch of careless wind or human,

itself no more than cairn, scheduled

to crumble.

 

What are these wisdoms that gather as the trail

is trodden, again and again, by who knows how many

other lovers, family, friends?

It’s the trail that leads wherever it is that you learn

to care more about what you care about already.

 

 

Cairns collect these tiny wisdoms formed by

travellers who’ve come this way before. Rejoice when they

come around the corner here and there, like the spreading view from

an airplane emerging from the belly of a long dull cloud to

glimpse the fields of altocumulus beyond!