But on the Earth

"At this hour I remember everything and everyone,
vigorously, sunkenly in
the regions that–sound and feather–
striking a little, exist
beyond the earth, but on the earth. Today
a new winter begins" – Neruda, from "Madrid (1937)








I read Abbey again and want nothing more than to be driving along a dusty trail passing the wind carved arches and wondering, there, could I get beyond my fears?

I read a Merton journal entry. Of January. It is cold at the Abbey. He observes men cutting wood and considers his mortality that morning as he sees new creases under his eyes, and suggests "a new hollowness" forming. He is tired of war and words.

I read something of eco criticism. Of post-humanism. What will we love as nature loses all of its facades. The arches have. The eye of the prophet has. I see the arches as woman? Can I?

Neruda's poem is a splash of language, dripping along the contours of Madrid, '37, much death to come, as Orwell said, a fresh militiaman, an odd new shadow had formed over the people of the city.

The first day we arrived in Sedona, jet-lagged, my eyes tight, lungs full of wrong air, we began walking over the mammoth lobes of Bell Rock outside of the village of Oak Creek. Ghosts upon ghosts, we walked over the clay colored rock, a dusting of sand over every crack. Parades of little cairns like still fires lined along the trail, or what we interpreted as such. We bent down to our knees in order to propel up onto the mantle of the rising rock. A new blue fire formed at the cracks of the split rock. The lobes had been planted below every perch had disappeared this high up. We looked over the highest crack. Nothing below. Stomach disappeared, as though it had dropped down through the body and onto the ground.

One desert jay in the distance
a flood of blue
beyond fear