The sky fell
In a wet spring
And the creek roared
With clear rainwater
Sluicing down the many ways
Dancing over the rocks
And the rain came on
Into May, when the heat first rose
On into June
And the creek still ran
Down in the canyon
Below the thundering cars
Clear rainwater
Filling the cracks and fissures
Priming the springs
People in kayaks and tubes
People just swimming and floating in the stream
Braving the rocky run
Tumbling over the waterfalls
Small but violent with strong waters
I saw one group of young men in tubes
Laughing and wild
Towing an ice chest
Surely full of beer
They tumbled over cherry falls
The last man, the one with the chest in tow
Capsized in a foaming explosion
At the base of the falls
But he came up laughing still
Righted his craft, secured the cargo
And floated on to join his fellows
July came, Texas heat searing the land
And the creek still flowed
Buoyed by rainy days, here and there
Finally, in the dead heat of August
The rain stopped, and the creek died
We walked by dwindling pools
The last water holes
And in every one
(Five we counted in a row)
A snake swam
After the fish and water creatures
Trapped in the drying pools
The long reptiles hunted
Carefully we skirted the edges of pools
Watching the snakes swim
Marveling at all of it
At last, the creek dried to nothing
White rocks like bones showing
Dead for a time
Yet full of the promise of life
In the mud and under the stones
Sleeping, surviving in the heat
Ready to live again
When the first cold fronts of fall
Bring rain to the canyon once more

To sleep
Descending softly
In floating footfalls
Drifting down
A green hill in spring
To a far valley
Visible as the quiet sum of wonder and desire
The outer world recedes
Clamoring war of urgent banality
Of imagined lack and ferocious scheduling
All fading, for a time
At first still audible
And real around the edges
But increasingly irrelevant
Against the siren pull
The seductive wondrous slide
As the body lets go
As the mind enfolds
Into the vale of sleep
Where a light breeze ruffles the sycamore leaves
With a sussurating static of soothing white noise
Where we never leave the womb
And the universe exhales
Transpiring the warm, wet stuff of dreams
Outer world now far behind
Darkness falling like a gray blanket
Over everything
Warm, soft, a shield and a comfort
And at last, in the quiet dark
Night now fallen across the vale
All withdrawn and seeming dead
The dark is punctuated by sudden sparks
Hardly remembered, the mind's trick
Each a galaxy in a sand grain
Dreams
What transpires in the vale at night?
Only a sudden waking can sometimes tell
And cobwebs of drenched emotion tear asunder
As we emerge
Radiant thorns piercing through to the waking world
Half-remembered, so quickly receding
Back to the vale
A mirror life
Of chaos beneath the soft blanket
Gone now, fading, ephemeral
Even those who quickly scribble a few lines
Can never recall the full power and scope
Of the infinite majesty, joy, danger, and fear
That we all carry on our daily rounds

Our lives are defined by apparitions
Of shared assumption
My name
Fortress to contain my self
Built of thin gossamer
Yet imbued with power
Without names (could we even imagine it?)
Would we run free in new pastures
Like infants, or wild beasts
Knowing the entire world, always
The gestalt of now, created each moment
No individuals, only the herd, and the world
The sky and grass and singing wind
Eternal, ommipresent, exultant
And what of minutes and hours
Days, weeks, months
Demarcations of time
Parceling each piece of life
Fabrications all, mental constructs
Tyrant ghosts with solidity and purpose
That we have given them
To these we abdicate our lives
Soon with no concious consideration
Running like background programs set long ago
Forgotten, yet underlying all
They command the days
Sun rising is marked and measured
Today is only a place to see tomorrow
Could we ever truly forsake these now
To live fully in each moment
Alert to what is happening now
Right now
We walk like ghosts
Past towering constructs
Shadows of our thoughts
They hulk on every horizon
Naming the universe

I took a razor blade
To cut away the strangling root
I thought was snaking up around my family tree
It was hard
I don’t like cutting
But I steeled myself
I was afraid: afraid to act, afraid not to act
It was not done thoughtlessly
But it was desperate
I cut the root
And the bleeding started
The blood flowed out
Pain and anguish and sullen grief
There was so much
I could not see, until later
It was not a root
It was an artery
I had cut the tie that binds

The house of my spirit has many rooms
I can move through all of them
Some neat and spare
Some cluttered with delicate art
In some the psychic detritus of latent dreams
Courage is needed
To venture into the labyrinthine dark
Of nether spaces
Haunted by echoes of lament
Of fear
Of failure remembered, over and over
Of self-doubt, and self-hate, and self-persecution
Descending in slime and dark to places where hope dies
Yet other ways call to me
With brilliant power
The lofty rooms
Citadels of love
To walk like giants
To be as gods
To grasp and hold
No, to channel and feel
The living song of the universe
Of what it means to be alive
To replace the whispers of defeat
With affirmations of achievement
To choose joy, yet to own and understand the suffering
To be complete, as much as possible
It is all affirmation
It is the power of the word
It is the will for deeds to follow
It is understanding the power to choose
The house of my spirit has many rooms
Infinite numbers of ways
To seek them all
Is the road I long to choose