still here. wet winter. [mostly] white.
Something of a portrait. Shaky, but withstanding. This world falling not so much asleep, but necessarily dormant. Trees gone silent, uncorrupted. Rivers icing in their sleep. The sun a pale, invisible stab above. Lovely to be heading toward winter, her coming grasp all but certain.
Fall lengthens toward. The Termination Dust marching resolutely down and down and down…
Not yet cold enough for errant snow to stick. A stillness, a reason. The birch peeling small scrolls on which it is written. The sonic, the intimate. Pages turned. Each day a notched celebration of living, life’s first second third act. It’s haze, a high lonesome of distance and noise rushed for no apparent reason at reader and writer alike.
In a story so short I’m really not telling it: Erin and I are, for the next year, carataking a lodge on Mikchalk Lake north of Dillingham, AK. Comes with pictures to boot!
Fall in the Chugach Mountains of south-central Alaska:
And it’s cool.
And there’s snow already falling high in the hills.
We wake to a distant white bloom.
It’s eventual locomotion never denied.
Winter a deep burden.
The summer not gone, but somehow forgotten?
This day wakes but doesn’t move.
It slanders nothing,
the leaden skies refusing to drift.
Fogs in the river bottom gone nearly permanent.
What temperature does to the brain.
How it winnows
and focuses,
shaping survival and movement of necessity.
Our house is an ever-shrinking mass
of things being hidden in boxes and boxes
The heart lunging with urge,
the mind taking space for words,
their transient powers just that.
It is momentarily still.
cloudz: cha:
A man walks from the stage. Dark. Gloaming. The hiss of some crowd still static in the ears. In a word, James McMurtry. Musical. A slipping poet. A man sent here and there to preach gospel, types of freedom, living’s lust. I celebrate the show, the reason. It peaks and wails. Scatters and drowns. The creeks and rivers but mute roars as language takes stage. Some decide they’d like to be remembered, and so here we are.
East from Rammel Mountain Ridge, Jedediah Smith Wilderness, Targhee National Forest WY:
