18 November 2024
I have no time in some respects, or so I believe. Too much also, that does not matter either. I was out in the arroyos and climbing the ridges and I did a prayer and I always say aloud the date but yesterday I came home and went online and saw I had it wrong, on the seventeenth of November I was thanking the worlds for their proximities, I was not reaching to touch I was only thanking, but I was saying, “Oh this beautiful day, eighteenth of November, twenty twenty-four,” that is, talking about today, right fucking now when I am in my house with a fire in the Englander woodstove and I want yesterday that I named today so today might be tomorrow or yesterday.
*
Fast, fast, I went up the canyon, my feet in the little drag of the soft fine sand, rains and snow came through last week, the sand had accumulated piles and throws and arrays of pebbles and pieces of roots and branches, I slowed and even stopped sometimes, I was not reaching to touch but I saw this brown corroded stone with mica glitter on it and a spear-point shape and I wanted it and I took it and I lodged it in my jacket pocket, the stone touching me.
*
This was the year Trump was re-elected. I was opposed and I checked my blood pressure regularly at home and since Wednesday, November sixth, the day after the election, I was ten, twenty points higher. I was well, the b.p. was still a mostly okay number, but I wondered if it would take a long time to get back to where I had been, one-hundred nine, ten, my favorite was one-hundred eleven.
Also, I wanted to hang out with Jeana, and Jeana loved RFK Junior, and we could not talk about any of that, we headed immediately into yelling and rage, and I saw on her Facebook a long post about how people now might need to go through a serious painful healing, Trump was terrible, but she saw RFK as hope, Jeana prayed we would all come through to a better place.
And some people liked that, thanked Jeana for her positive hopeful take, and I was caught by it, too.
Yes, yes, Jeana. Step back: now is hellish, really nearly unreal, I wanted to say to her but would not dare. Okay, Jeana. Yes, later maybe we will heal into the good, reach the better. Our health, our world, it will start to change.
*
22 November 2024
My right foot keeps hurting some and slowing me down.
I am happy anyway with this sunny near-60 weather after driving ten miles and a thousand feet lower in elevation.
The canyon with sandbank breakage, hunks and crumbles. Canyon is misleading, the ground is wide and flat, a long bottom, an intermittent watercourse, the maps name it canada, which makes me hear the word canal, the word drain.
First half mile in, an SUV parked near the middle of the loose, boulder-lined de-facto road. The back is open, a person is there with a dog. A young woman in black jeans. I stop a minute and say, “Beautiful day,” she answers similarly back, and I drive onward, and the big Shepherd comes running toward my truck and veers off going back to her.
The running dog is a beautiful creature, and I behold the exact point of the change where the dog radars from my moving truck over to the young woman. It is like a diagram in a lesson about drawing animations. A minute shift in the lines of the image. The dog, and another dog. And there you go, a fresh move. CGI techniques and AI probably make such instruction near obsolete. But I feel the woman and I are for an instant interchangeable. The untrusty trusty Shepherd is more real than both of us.
I am in the arroyo below the Apodaca Trail. It is a narrow arroyo that gathers more and larger boulders as it rises. The bed of the arroyos has a fresh thickness of sand and pebbles from the week’s rain and snow runoff. In some places, the sand mixes with a black strand.
The sun is surprisingly hot and clings to my legs in tight jeans. Up the west side of the arroyo, I get into a group of lava-pocked boulders and take off some of my clothes.
The warmth on the skin out in the air feels free and true. What does that mean? It does not really feel that way maybe.
This spot on the ridge is higher than I realized. Above, the arroyo continues into more large boulders. I can see the top of the ridge some of them probably broke off from. The rock up there has jagged cuts, long spikes sticking up against the blue sky. On my side of the arroyo, the terrain higher up seems more level. As though I have climbed much farther than I thought. The rains and snows since last time I was here, a couple of months ago, have changed the land. Maybe fewer blocks to my hiking up the boulder-strewn arroyo, more of the easy shortcut stretches, some faint animal trails without a lot of shifting cobbles and pebbles to navigate. It seems I might even be near the last stretch before the top. Where the walking gets smooth before I have to decide which of several steep ways to follow to the rim and the mesa above.
I will be around the boulders here for about two hours. The sunlight has a honey about it. I sort of cannot believe I am in this human flesh. My bare legs so animate looking, the shine, the expanses of skin. I get sun on my chest, too, I pull up my shirt a ways.
I sit here and I eat something and then I stand and speak to what I feel as planes, as dimensions, as jumpy, earthly folds.
Down below, the black strand that follows the arroyo bottom is like errant hair, or a long-stretched piece of root, or a mineral signature.
Something like that. I just read a book of Roberto Harrison’s poetry and they are still in my head. Certain numbers, fours, also sevens, and there are zooms way distant, zooms micro close. Ancestors in the future, dream alliances, names crisscrossing times. Tecs, Abayla — they will be waiting for us, already are, have been.
I sit here and play a long while on an Angel recorder. I want to learn. The instrument is small and seems simple but I have read about its baroque complications. I experiment with half-closed holes, slurs, throaty buzzes.
And sometimes in contrast a long melody that spans two registers and at some points sounds tender. I can hear the echo, close to me on the air. Beyond that, I am not sure where the echo goes. I feel it near and the echo seems to be solid, to have a body. Maybe the echo travels a while low-level, skates along the ground being caught and held around the boulders, the branches of the juniper cedars and the pinyons. Or travels farther, higher into the arroyo above me, more boulders and trees and also the level stretches where I believe easy deer paths climb upward.
I might almost pet the sound, stroke it, it is right here, it is up a distance and leading where I can find it.
But though I can hear myself making sounds, I cannot really hear, the sound is always getting away. I listen to that getting away.
The sound is elusive, that’s the idea. John Cage said he wanted to hear sound. Not music, really, which is always like somebody talking about something.
In the video interview Cage with bangs on his forehead, the face with deep wrinkles. A countenance like a rock with grasses growing across the top. He says he wants to hear intensities rising and falling, he wants to hear sonic motions.
Does not talk about anything. A sound of motion itself.
But I am not sure about this. Motion maybe talks, too.
*
I expected Jeana to share the image printed on a sheet of paper. Folded several times and carried in her bag. Or in her jeans pocket, jammed down some.
Instead, the medical exam photo of Jeana’s cervix is on her phone. I expected grainy exposure, grayscale like old moon photos. But it is a vivid color image. I guess done with edits, filters. Or this is the way it is raw.
We have not been lovers, the HPV diagnosis is not about me.
“I want to see exactly what is going on,” she told me beforehand.
She means the dysplasia from the HPV that is showing minuscule blurs across the field of cervical cells.
She keeps the phone in front of us for about a minute. She is staring at the photo of her cervix, am I seeing her brown-gold eyes wet like with dew, at the same time her eyes glistening and shedding everything, Jeana indifferent, impatient, sick of worlds?
What are we looking at, looking for?
I am like praying on every fucking cell. The prayers also are blurs.
“That’s enough,” Jeana says. She whips away the phone and holds it to the side where only she can see.
Some way though I am still seeing the image that was painfully sharp and fuzzy at once. Moving on itself.
Dysplasia. Jeana tells me the laser treatment can sort of take the rising cancer away.
Keep it down a while. Even a long time. Checking in every six months, once a year.
“Or never,” Jeana says. She says the word with finality, humility, rage.
Times like this she reaches and grabs my hand and squeezes really tight. Jeana taught me a long time ago to grip her hand back just as hard.
I wonder for a second about my blood pressure. World going every wrong way. Drains and canals. Canals and drains. Does Jeana’s RFK talk about this? What saves us each minute.
I am still seeing the image and it resembles a zoomed satellite map of the mountains around here. The zoom point where the map can go to street view but there are no streets or walks and the image zooms one last time and blurs over trees and boulders and it is too close to remember where you were up in the zoom before.
Just the shapes of juniper and pinyon trees, the pale ground around them, a piece of texture, of fabric alone, there is no direction for a fit.
Jeana does not let go of my hand. Her fingers feel wet. This life sweat of hers against me is precious and it hurts.
That which is tender, I thought, must have a yielding, porous timbre. Like some droopy reed flute in an Anime impossible-world. A world with all green leaves and planes and levels inward incessantly blossoming.
The children are bright dawn stars.
But with Jeana, that idea was way lax, soft. She was the fierce tenderness stuff. Greatest love, breaking apart its own max vector.
That full moon hike we had taken, I told Jeana, “Look at all these cracked and busted boulders, they’re still beautiful, maybe more even.”
Jeana had said happy and knowing, “It’s all the world.”
“Like a heart,” I said.
“Whose,” she said.
Jeana’s tender motion — something stuck a little on her lips, the sound I barely heard, she was moving off from me, working the trekking poles, getting ahead.
A minute weep, that sound of hers, tag of some vast irruption, and then Jeana’s long blue sticks were hitting the stones hard, like the very blocks of the earth must give way to her. Or she them.
*
A small bird shows wings in a sunlight flash, the bird is hanging out near some giant boulders in the main arroyo, about fifty feet down from where I am lodged, half nude and stretched out over a couple of level rocks.
And now I kind of feel the bird coming. This happens sometimes when I get out in the arroyos and make sound, brave noise.
The middle-school recorder, the black Angel I found at an estate sale, just keeps going as I catch at the borders of sight the bird’s movements around a massive five-boulder pile on the other side of the arroyo.
There is the one phrase on the recorder I close my eyes and repeat. Seven times, is it? Or nine?
The Roberto Harrison is a City Lights book. Harrison has Panamanian roots and the poems say they are laying down numbers and sounds for dream alliances with a future people and place that are right here and also past.
The small bird crosses jumping and flitting through boulders
these boulders with many small planes on their surfaces they are gray and brown and they are subjects or subjected all the marks dents cuts pocks small holes short and long lines where the boulder split is splitting will split
The small bird crosses jumping and flitting through boulders
this next boulder a mega mountain vehicle aeonic dumptruck and the boulder in dignity folds and angles and dents frowns and grinning grimacious rocky underwoods
the small bird searching delving diving
this next boulder a mushroomy receptacle blue and green lichens patching warts
the small bird the small bird
Angel is it seven is it nine
you are not this form stopping are you this matter carrying you on
the small bird the small bird
this splotch Jeana saw one day on the boulder she said it was Buddha in a white lichen surround a paint around a pale dirt diamond-shape
Jeana stumbled words: “I mean I feel the world I know not is anyway irresponsibly responsive is it?”
the boulder the leopard spots the alerted mouse is a gray rocky bear foaming crooked stone mouth don’t bother me
the small bird
the small bird from the five-boulder wall
crossing the arroyo small arroyo it is only ten feet
one day I stand with phone video and count the boulders it was seven or twelve the boulders cut and split
I some way slanted the phone and the video did not show what my talk was about
“here the small bird crossed to the first boulder great gray anvil eagle”
“here the small bird was moving not making a sound the new boulder turned down at one corner like hiding an ear”
“here the small bird was at high velocity a flown motioned stick”
“here the small bird searching splashed lichen dyes slo-mo explosions and gravity gravy light shows”
“here the small bird traced mycelial filaments times filaments not relevant every here where talking is all the sound the sound is saying”
the small bird is very close
the Angel is still going maybe I am a happy creature I am not minding the small bird
I do not move the tiniest inch though the Angel is on my fingers I feel it singing the one phrase several or all times
then the small bird comes right here and shows a wren’s long thin curved beak
the small bird’s tail end is like the beak
a comma or colophon device something graphic and glyph
for a second way way dark like spading a fresh dimension
I harken to the small bird
canyon wren
and the color is a fresh bright brown-orange
I will never again see this bird’s passing color this one the bird is hunting little preys along the boulders I am on
the canyon wren has a rising lovely song I have heard late afternoons today the bird is quiet this is nothing the canyon wren heard noises and traveled over to them
and now is gone and the Angel is still going
someone tells me yesterday yes the canyon wren has a way of motion, what was the word, flitting, vibrating, backwards revolving…
and the canyon wren’s metabolism, I read later, is a high-temp heat envelope so the little bird of high desert canyons swims in a thermal haze, the world touching far away from wren insides, or the hot world actually is very near is right inside the canyon wren
*
I go back to Facebook where Jeana is standing somewhere well lighted and corridor-like and RFK Jr. has an arm around her, a hand on her shoulder.
In the posted image, RFK Jr. is mostly a giant human head. The workouts, the long hikes with dogs, the existence of the late-starlet partner who loves him so, she says in interviews — all of that glowing, animate, manly stir culminates in RFK Jr.’s suntanned cephalic hood, vizor, bonnet, or whatever, RFK Jr.’s phallic top-package shameless and gloriously embarrassing and successful.
Excessively dome, noggin, all that. Along with this dodgy motion that RFK Jr. is doing or that does him.
The words coughed up, dredged up. A form of speech that is mostly the sound of clearing one’s throat to start saying something.
Or what Jeana might hear: a voice husky with feeling, passion, care. A voice before or after tears. A voice that cannot help fate, cannot help itself, can only croak out words. A worm in the brain, yes, years of heroin, yes. Likes to torment animals because he also believes he is a thing, a thing who does things, has things, saying: I am helpless I will help the helpless helplessly that is helplessly my thing.
Jeanna drove to Albuquerque for the RFK Jr. event, in her cherry red Rave SUV with three simpatico friends.
I imagine them on the highway from Santa Fe, coming to the long descent near Cochiti. Nearby the red-rock shrines, little caves lined with offerings and gifts.
One time I saw people walking there. They moved slow, their parked car had flashers on. I could not see what they were doing. If they were tending or placing offerings. They might have just been taking a break from driving, or waiting there for mechanical help.
The road to Burque, I-25 at 75 miles per hour speed limit. Jeana driving at 85, mostly, there is no choice, otherwise the right lane backs up behind for miles.
The horizons seem very far away. The Galisteo basin is wide dry rivulets. Cholla cactus, thousands of them tall as trees.
Faster, faster. It’s like between Santa and Burque nothing needs to exist. The four women in the Rave do not talk very much. Earbuds, videos, music, audiobooks.
On Jeana’s phone, RFK Jr. already speaking. The face is innocent, almost startled, how can the world be this way, so helpless, I mean, I mean, harumph.
I-25 is speeding past the exits for the Rio Grande Pueblos, rez after rez, sovereign nation after sovereign nation. Santo Domingo, San Felipe, Jemez a farther distance.
I-25 is speeding past a Mormon war memorial and I-25 is speeding past a deserted faux-adobe shopping mall called Traditions, an exclamation point at each end of the sign logo. It was among the places where the radical museum collective Meow Wolf made a start years ago. They had DJs in the abandoned structures, wild dances. I went once and I thought I got it. We were fucking high, we came from Santa and Burque and we were out here between exclamations feeling around and everywhere, here and there, this and that, we felt good that the touch was so huge we did not have to do anything about it, not even get near, we were so blown out between our up and down exclamations, time fiends, time friends, we trotted dimensions black and supple right at our feet and far deep.
*
15 January 2025
I get this mood that Jeana and I lose all the time with our love. I get this mood. This mood gets me.
“Oh right,” we said one day. “We’re all about motion, aren’t we? Not emotion.”
We both said the E in emotion like shrieking and yuck.
E, E, E.
And then we danced with pure helpless motion. Jeana is not a good dancer, I am not either. She throws herself around, she hotly languishes or something.
I raise myself up and move my arms a lot in the air, Jeana said it was hopeful girl-dancing.
“I’m refusing hylozoism,” I said, “haha.”
“There’s a disease I’ve never heard of.”
“How about the one we’ve got?”
“Yes?” Jeana had a hip out like a shoulder, a boulder.
Then the music went on without us. Less than a week to the inauguration, the whole world was going on.
My foot was starting to kill me but I was alright.
And we held in our tightest killer hug thing, the dance floor under us like everywhere tilting wet, substance forgetting form. We were around hot birds. Last lights flickering. Morning dews.
“I want to see exactly,” Jeana said.
