Creek Running North

Blue light, then red, then blue again.
The street looks wet,
fair slicked in darkness,
but my bare feet kick up dry stones.
Pebbles skitter over curbs,
implant themselves in callus,
and I flick them clumsily away
with forefinger.

They have splinted his left leg.
Clotted traffic pools uphill and down.

Just yesterday I ran a mile, then two,
and then another,
the longest run in months,
and mourned a bit
at the run’s end.
Best not to push one’s self.
This sense of splintered shin a sign,
these aching femurs,
impact upon jolt,
Earth rising up to strike.
It is the final blow that does the harm.
A love fractures;
the shards hit the street.

How many such blows can a heart take?
They push their hands, heels down,
into his chest.
A formality.
There is no urgency, and
the ambulance rolls slow away and silent.
Tomorrow I will run in daylight,
will run as Egret hunts the creek,
as White-Tailed Kite
hunts motionless above the marsh,
but tonight the owl
hunts souls above the street.
Her silent breast
reflects blue light, then red,
then blue again.

The chorus frogs no longer quiet as I pass. Perhaps it is the angle of the moon, my failure to cast a shadow on the pool of reeded water where they sing, or my ill-advised black nighttime running garb, hard to spot for frogs and drunken drivers both. Perhaps my step is lighter.

My path illuminated by the moon, anorthositic light, an airless light. It was brighter once, these tides more terrible. It was an unimaginable catastrophe, a planet-destroying blow, and yet a partnership then slowly coalesced from the debris. A gigantic moon hung low and bright above the earth, passing overhead each 19 hours, wresting tide tremors in the Earth’s hot heart. Their pas des deux spun them apart. The moon is six feet farther from me than it was when it first lit up my eyes a half century ago.

The white soil shines in her reflected light. The path it opens up in her reflected light. Her reflected light limns the grass awns, the webs of hunting spiders.

I have too easily found my way by her reflected light. My eyes grown keen and sensitive to the smallest cloud across her face. She heads toward the horizon where I cannot see her. To the east the land is bright, lit by the daylight glory I have shunned. I would cast my own shadows there.

Jeffrey St Clair has published an excerpt from the introduction of my book Walking With Zeke at Counterpunch.  Go check it out.

On the subject of the book, thanks to Nanette, PZ, Bora, and our dear Theriomorph for the plugs and kind words.

Turns out this piece, written in April 2005, won’t be making it into the book. So I’m putting it here.

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The sky is rent. The sun comes through it, seething. Dry wind scours me from the insides out. A tempest, a dust-devil of a life, and my eyes are closed against the stinging of it. I raise my hand partway without intending to. I raise my hand partway against the wind.

It takes my clothes, my hair, my skin. All these excrescenses I was, these trappings, a flexible and sensitive armor against a sullen world, now stripped away. Calcium is left behind, and potassium, and eyes still strangely and illogically moist.

Where cities suppurate across the Mojave desert ravens clump in massive and delinquent flocks, but away from our debris and waste they fly in pairs. Find one in flight, and wait: another will be close. Sometimes they are close enough to ride each other’s bow waves. Sometimes one is a minute behind, and calling to its mate: a raucous rasp.

Rarely a raven flies alone, and then always singing loneliness in its rock tumbler voice, a song to rend the skies, a call left generally unanswered. One came to me last night in sleep, massive and melancholy, and lit on a smooth and pocked Joshua branch.

Liveoak leaves under my bare feet today, humus so deep beneath them that I sank into the earth. Two ravens tumbled in flight above me and brought the dream full back. Raven lit alone on the Joshua tree and preened, I thought, grasped tailfeathers in talons, brought them to his beak. He wore an odd intensity, an odd intent, and pulled out the feather with a pained crow howl.

Raven feather floated prettily to the desert’s floor.

Another feather grasped, hand to mouth, and plucked. Another cry of pain; another blue-black blade made lazy downward arcs.

He stared holes in me, gauging my reaction.

The next one had blood on the quill. It dropped like a stone. He panted hard, eyes wide.

One could make light and pretty trivialities from feathers such as these, fake platitudes to hang on terra cotta walls. Another loss, another step toward flightlessness by hellish increment, and they shine such a stunning blue there on the bright hard soil next to the blackbrush. Black leathery crow’s feet and searing, iterative pain and loss, and I gasped remembering it, loud enough that birds took flight.