Archives for July 2017

At the end of the affair your anger destroyed me,
mine diminished me.

“When hope is gone the ultimate sanity is to grasp at straws.”

Rain water on window glass has no meaning save that it is raining here,
or perhaps, that rain has been here.

“If you write it, has it happened twice:…” this life of mine might be more complicated than I thought.

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

I was standing by the window that early morning, just like I did every morning in those years. The sky was often dark and cloudy, the window streaked with last night’s rain. In the evanescent glow from the street lamps I watched the same impossible nightly show, the one where the hooligans in their gangster Borsalinos, their thirties Packards, their dolls and their dames all fought it out with Thompson sub machine guns amid snarling, teeth-bared violence. I asked whoever it was that I was with to have a look. All they ever saw was an empty early morning street, parked cars, the occasional wandering dog, distant headlights that created shadows dancing in the mist.

One morning, just like all the others, in the midst of the recurrent St. Valentine’s Day massacre outside the window, three runners came by. They were talking as they moved easily through the gunfire, laughing in the early morning rain; they were getting ready for the day.

I watched them from the living room window as they went around the corner, and then I ran back to the rear bedroom window where I could see them turn down the road to the beach. Their laughter hung in the breeze. The sound of their footsteps echoed through the house, like the whisper of an unseen tide.

I turned from the window, caught sight of a pair of scruffy runners on the closet floor, ancient mud dried to dust around them.

Window patrol, Charlie, she said, ain’t nobody there.

She shook her head and motioned for me to come back to the couch or the kitchen or wherever it was that we were getting high that morning.

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

Last week I did a three-hour meditation
on my past lives.
(no laughin’ matter).
I remembered tall grass,
rocks, wind.
Always wind.

Mountain fastness,
Frozen passes, river banks,
red with sunset.
Far off, the fires of home.

I am always not yet there.

These pasts remind me
that there are markers to follow,
Pathways in the foothills, the blowing grass, past misted lakes,
Now I am born Wolf.
I am so very tired.

The sun was gone when I wakened
to an uncertain night.
My guide asked me what I had learned.

I told her that in the beginning,
as in this fleeing moment,
I am here alone.

I step into the relentless now.

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

Some Nights

I dream some nights that I am running alone
Along a remembered mountain ridge
The air is cool, redolent with wild sage and cinnamon.
Breath in and out, footsteps, echoes, heartbeat
My cadence of renewal.

I run with ghosts.

Dawn breaks distant over the eastern ridge
The sky is all purple fire and promise.
The End of the World Cafe below is always closed, the faded neon spreading like dirty rain
The highway is empty, save for the big rigs “rolling fast, rollin’ wild” on the way to somewhere not here.

You know, at least I hope you do,
That,”I never meant to do you any harm.”

On the ridge trail patches of wild mountain thyme are
luminous in the rising light, there are flickering movements
on the edge of my vision. Horizon in every direction through jack pine and second growth alder,
ghostly silver under a waning moon.
My dream world is sere, clean and spare.

I hear the far off sounds of dogs barking.

Night slides into day on the ridge line,
Dirt and distance, dust and sweat
The spiders and the snakes, the dope driven demons of my nights are gone for awhile.
It will be all right. I will be all right. I am all right.

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.