I suppose for the folks here in SLC, it’s not strange that an avalanche should close a canyon road, but for me it’s a first. I’m more accustomed to the violent crash of waves breaking over a dike and freezing over a shoreline road. It’s all relative to this shift I’m going through, from one landscape to another and two time zones over.
Seems apt today, after blogging about this feeling of shutting down. The way I think even the spirit (if you will) or the mind sometimes needs to avalanche roadways to force a rest. I have so many stories to tell and haven’t said a word. Silence is new terrain for me. Why I’ve been waiting I cannot say. Sometimes there’s just too much to purge, and the whole screen goes blank.
In the posts to come I’m going to share some of the things that have happened in the previous months—from the few prior to our move from MQT to SLC to now. This will bring me, I hope, into 2011 with a clean slate (may it not bore you to tears).
Before I begin this (dramatic though it may seem) arduous journey, I want to thank my friend, poet Traci Brimhall, for knowing when to dial my number. And for writing such a killer first book. I tell you what…if Rookery doesn’t floor your ass, I’ll pay for the cost of the book and the shipping. Really. Here’s a sample…the final poem in her debut collection (which is really just the first series of sad and poignant and ass-kicking songs we can expect from her. *Note, the tercets here are not as they appear in the book, but I cannot make the second and third lines indent because I’m technologically impaired. Sorry, Traci.):
Prayer to Delay the Apocalypse
Angels, give us this day. Set down your plagues,
and forgive us this night. I've lifted a candle to see
who I've been making love to and examined his body
for the first signs of terror. Whoever you are, wake up.
Tell me heaven will be like Venice--dirty, beautiful
and sinking. Tell me the walls of every paradise fall,
that there are riots in the city of peace. Promise me
I will die of love. Promise me we take our suffering
with us, the scratches we crewel down each other's
backs as we rush into joy. Take the ghosts first,
they've gone mad grieving for the world. Let the apostles pull
up their nets. Keelhaul the archangels, make seraphs kiss
the sharks, but do not call me unto you. Do not spare me
gunshots outside my window. Do not spare me the man
who touched my neck on the train to St. Petersburg
when he thought I was asleep. The devil has been up all night
and is sleeping it off in the basement. Let him rest awhile.
Let us continue wandering in these perishable machines
made of dirt and music. The saguaros swell with rain.
Hallelujah. The mysteceti's heart is big enough to crawl
through and it sings for no reason, hallelujah. Praise
for young seahorses growing in their father's bodies.
Praise for the avocados clinging to the trees. I will hold onto
the night like a girl with wet hair. I will put my fingers
into bullet holes in the opera house. Do not destroy this.
Gone would be Goya, Paris and the Marinsky ballet.
Gone the glaciers and Great Barrier Reef. Gone the cave
paintings where humans first learned we must love
what we kill. My dear God, my darling Torquemada,
the first and the last and the everlasting, you already know
how this will end, how as a child I heard Talitha cum
and woke standing over my father, saw the fire
burning next to him. I nestled into his body's curve
and pretended to sleep so he would take me back to bed,
bear me like a bowl brimming with water, like an angel
carry me to the end of the world and lay me down.
*****
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