The winnowing of notes, of language. All day a deep dusk swaying in the southern sky like a hung man. Beneath our surfaces are fractious rocks, molten cores. The lines of time forever drawn and redrawn. What I need is time, place, cohesion. My god who holds the pencil (sic).

oh and…the Gallatin Canyon.

It happens over and over and over. I point myself toward the mountains. The prairies are consumed; plains devoured like a weakness or a dream. The rock begins to loom, becomes a fixture. The sun is swallowed at higher and higher reaches, bits of light poured down at angles both oblique and completely appropriate. Creeks and streams becomes rampant, clear as the air. Stand and witness as they eternally feed the larger, hungry rivers. We are so lucky to live within. Each time I spring away, the cord reaches capacity and I am thrown, shuttled, and flailed back to geographic home. The fast lights of towns, thick messes of black forest, and the puttering laughter of automobiles is flown through with nary a thought but to hold the fuck on — buy the ticket take the ride. Somehow I’ve come to live in Montana.

Lifted. Shot through with light. We board and are bored, sanded to an unimpressed state by these total tubes. Glint of this evolutionary peak literally peaks in the parabola of things witnessed in air above. Eyesight one of those peculiarly centered endeavors. Regardless, the bird is soaring. Mountains. Plains. Twisted highway. Rivers that carry all earth’s tears to a sea. We want to so badly to crawl safely from our exit row seat. The red emergency handle jutting from the door simply a soporific in these gray, year-end months. We’d go down believing we were survived by our legend ala D.B. Cooper. Wind rushing by at 600 m.p.h and all we can do is wish for another drink or love with the becoming rarer sexy stew. We parade ourselves through gates and probes and scans all to get where we were already going. But sometimes, the plane is empty; light twinkles far beneath reminding you you are where you are; a hand is held as the great engines whisper their sucking noise of sleep.

Palmer, Alaska. Just moments before we began to slip, slide and wind our way back south this last month:

under construction…