This ground..

an uneven place

Near the mountain

Jagged rocks like teeth

Naked

Scarred and scorched

Soaks up the drought

Though all is still, 

all moves

See those clouds above the mountain?

Like memories

When we walk here, we must dance

With careful choreography

past and present

Or fall, still, still, still

–

Remember?

The boys in the neighborhood

Smashing my face into the ground

Pounding me into the dirt

Searching to find whatever

Wounds I owned

Or could offer up.

I looked at the powder on my hands

Scuffs, reddened with red streaks and

The brown stuff of soil.

They kneed me in the back

Spitting on what must have appeared

To them, a stiff unliving body

A shape familiar to them

–

Then on some other day

When my curly hair shined

kissed me

With candy breaths

And bacon and egg lives

As if nothing had ever transpired

As if time did not exist

As if memories were lost

As if the earth would dance

Like a child

heal itself

As all believed it would

If left to its own ways

–

August is crueler than April

Bare ground reveals

Dryness, truths, & harshness

the collective abjective gait

Our gangly limbs move

gather, acquire. 

“You know now, you understand

That’s the way you’re supposed to walk.”

And this haze, this smoke

From the myriad fires 

we kindle

We nurse

We attend to

Creeps into our lungs

“Oh, do not ask what is it”

Etherizes everyone

Into a dull wade

through shallow air.

And

Thick late summer 

only promises

An upcoming layer of snow

Prayers to western rivers

–

And while dancing

In this present or past

I turn my palms upwards

Blood and dirt and all

feeling the sun’s heat

Scraping the surface

Like a reader of braille 

On its way to its most

orange of hues, setting

on hills

The wavy horizons of

our furthest view

Wandering in sober desire

To be filled In,

by night..

                A night…

                                Any night

Cobalt to licorice

–

Then

To the cool morning

Speaking

with eloquence, still

Still, still