if not, winter

(seattle, 2011)

this evening i followed a pair of very tiny footprints : those of a newborn baby walking barefoot in the snow : it was, invariably, walking home :

(seattle, 2011)

the emotional machine travels in circles : circles within each other & circles crashing into each other & even lone, rogue circles : there are some circles so large that they don't complete themselves : despite what i have to this point believed , a life as a thing is decidedly non-linear : nor, really, does it exist temporally : these are not the circles of Emerson, somehow divine & washed in light : these are seafaring circles : & thus, there is a weather, too : the sidewalk was cloudy where this evening, on the way home from a birthday party, i was asked to think of something i had never previously considered : for the rest of the night, i stuck to myself :

(florence, 1990's)

this evening i was plucked from a barrel filled with boys & led down a red street at night : in the cornerstone of a church there is a finger set in concrete : it points up : ten years later i would walk into a church in brittany only to take off my jacket & warm my wet hands above someone else's lit prayer candles :

(british columbia, 1997)

this evening i sat at a distance thinking that it is impossible to know just what you are : a moment i now consider best forgotten : on the hill opposite a brown wolverine lay in white snow picking at its teeth with one of its four paws : the water there is still trapped in ice :

(san francisco, 1999)

this is the day i thought of a friend who died 6 months prior : that evening i walked straight into the surf without thinking : an hour later i returned to the beach wet & smiling with shame :

(right now)

my mother used to opine that if you want something done right then you ought to do it yourself : she may have been right : i'm ready to make my own family now :

(north carolina, 1990's)

this evening i slept suspended a few hundred feet from the ground : sometime after dinner i began to see flashing lights around everything in my field of vision : i was convinced that i must be very close to enlightenment : later, it was explained that the flashing lights were the effect of the sun reflecting off the dust settled on my corneas : i wasn't disappointed :

(right now)

i have difficulty understanding what geography settles if it, itself, isn't quite yet settled :

(nevada, 1998)

this evening my tent was shredded in wind so i slept outside once the storm settled : in the middle if the night i woke thinking it morning : behind the eastern rocks the sky was glowing : hours later i realized that it was just las vegas somewhere in the distance : probably laughing :