Jake and Blanca

Hard Frost

After a hard frost

the last of the tomato vines

freeze into brown bones. 

The frost and snow were late this year. We didn't have our first snow until Sunday; for the first time this season, Blanca is truly white. Our tomato plants have withered to skeletons in the greenhouse. The plants in our sunroom are still eking out a few orange tomatoes, their sweetness concentrated by the cold. We eat the small, candy-like segments on our salads. Their flavor is a ghost of summer.  

This is the time of year when everything shrinks into itself, hardening against the cold. The dirt roads have turned into rutted ribbons. The rabbitbrush and tumbleweeds are stiff hands, raised plaintively against the North wind. 

Shadows Roll In

Up the green foothills

the South wind pushes the clouds

in a shadow tide. 

On a windy autumn afternoon, masses of clouds roll across the Valley, darkening the plains and flooding the roads with shadows. The shadow wave moves over the Blanca Massif; the clouds will hover over the peaks all night and leave a dusting of snow by morning. 

I watch the wave of darkness roll towards me as I jog down the road. I wait for the moment when the wave will overtake me the way I used to wait for the waves of the Pacific to fill my mouth and nostrils with salt and the taste of seaweed when I was a little girl. 

The months go by quickly. It's already November. The little pile of firewood that was left from last winter is already dwindling; we've started lighting up the wood stove at night. The clouds roll fast. The shadows come in. I walk and jog and stretch to keep my body as straight and supple as I can, but at times I already feel the pull of the earth below my feet. 

Dawn Light

This view of Blanca at dawn reminds me of one of my favorite Mary TallMountain poems.

Bright Shining

Companion to me in every place,
You stretch your hand: I see
Majesties of mountains
Crowned with living light.

Your arm flings wide: I see
Wild little islands wrapt in fog
Grey luminous; hidden folds
Of emerald and ermine earth.

I fly free clean through glowing
Cat's eye aquamarine
Filled with light air breath

Swaddled in this cocoon
This dense and lifeless mass
Yet weightless I
soaring with it shall be for you

Light bright shining


by Mary TallMountain
The Light on the Tent Wall
Los Angeles: University of California, 1990

August Shadows

Clouds over granite --

suddenly your face appears

in August's shadows.

I haven't written any new haiku since August. I guess I've been in a survival mode, trying to finish my reflexology program while scraping together enough income to keep things going. But I also believe that poetry and photography are also necessary for survival; maybe that's why I've had such a deep sense of fatigue lately. I want to be able to stop worrying about money, bills, taxes, etc., but I also need to start writing poems and stories again, and taking walks with my camera the way I used to.

Rain Offering

I throw coffee grounds

at the foot of Mount Blanca:

Bring us summer rain. 

This blog feels like a dusty house, closed up for months. Everything looks and smells different, but I'm the one who's changed. I couldn't write haiku for several months. I finally realized that I was grasping too hard at them--struggling to make them work. Then I stopped for awhile to focus on other things. A couple of weeks ago I read a copy of Clark Strand's Seeds from a Birch Tree: Writing Haiku and the Spiritual Journey. I read it from the perspective of someone who's lost the ability to write haiku, and then one day, after I'd finally stopped trying, the fragments started coming back. 

Every afternoon the sky fills up with water, but we rarely get any actual moisture. Thunder growls, and a hot, white wind blows dust into the kitchen, but no rain. The coffee grounds are my rain offering. In the morning when I make coffee, I throw the old grounds at the mountain in hopes that she'll make the clouds let go of their burden by the end of the day. With these wildfires, we need it more than ever.

Morning Mist

Gray morning drenched with sage --

snow on the mountain's crest

turns to mist at her feet.

Blanca Meets Alma

Eric hand-painted this sign to mark one of the roads on the way to our house. The sign had been missing for months, and we were worried that our friends would get lost trying to find our place. We have very few visitors, so we try to make it as easy as possible for those who venture out here to find us.

Writing haiku and tanka has been very hard for me lately. I've been distracted by work and by worries about finding work. I've applied for jobs in larger areas. I worry about leaving the Valley. Thinking about leaving makes me feel like I should start to separate myself from the area. But then I wonder why I eventually detach myself from everything that's deeply important to me.

A Place in the World

When the world outside meets the world inside,
the ragged edges of a torn self
find each other, settle in,
and form a seam.

And you learn that gravity is not a force
that keeps your body on the earth
when you most want to leave,
but something more like grace,
guiding you to a place
you never left.

Firewood

Under morning frost

a fragrant massif of pine --

winter's last firewood.

Widows

I know the wooden widows.

With their silvered backs to the mountain

they wait.

These posts mark the site of a ranch that has vanished. The stones that lined the foundation of the house still exist, but the walls have fallen away, and the barbed wire of the corrals is warped and rusted. These posts line the road that leads to the highway. On my early morning drive to work, I used to silently greet the posts, especially the one above, which I called "the Widow." I envied her unmoving solitude, her stoic stance against the hard Northern wind.

When I worked at a nursing home about 30 miles from here, one of the elderly residents told me that a rancher had hired him years ago to graze cattle out in Blanca Flats, but there wasn't enough vegetation for the livestock to eat. Ironically, the disappearance of edible vegetation and the thinness of the soil may be caused partly by the lack of grazing -- the symbiosis between livestock and the land has been broken. The land grows increasingly dry, the brush more sparse. The old irrigation ditches are parched seams, and the sheep trails have faded to gray threads. Space and silence are our bumper crops now.

After an East Wind

patch of snow --

dropped by the East wind

her abandoned dress

When I'm out walking in the winter, I come across these little heaps of snow here and there. The snow here is usually very dry, like tiny flecks of sand. Sometimes, for no reason I can identify, a patch won't melt along with the rest of the snow cover. Spotting these patches in the distance, I've mistaken them for discarded paper, old bandages, toilet tissue and abandoned clothing. This terrain plays tricks on the mind, creating tiny mirages of civilization in an area that's all but uninhabited by humans. On the other hand, it's very common for bits of human refuse to travel for miles in a strong wind, and we'll find scraps of other lives scattered near our house.

Happy New Year

dawn leafs the mountains

as if the stone were paper

as I watch the sun

candle the ancient granite

the luminous pages close

Blood Sky

Along the dark cloud path

a lifetime sentence begins

as a dead man's blood

rises to the horizon

to paint the sinking sky

Today is the anniversary of a murder that I can't seem to forget. I didn't know anyone involved in the crime, but the circumstances haunt me. Memories of my own mistakes, the rancid emotions and overblown fears. After the murderer was sentenced a couple of months ago, we had a series of flawless sunsets in the Valley, absolutely cloudless, with yellow gradients giving way to blue, and I felt that in some way, these skies held a gift of serenity for the man who died so violently.

In the Cloud House

Who lives in the vault

of the cloud house?

Only the wind, who shouts

down the light shafts to

the mute mountain.

Masses of clouds over the mountains take the shape of corridors, rooms, hallways. I see vast ballrooms in the sky, and secret passageways, and foyers that open onto stunning caverns of light. Did you ever wish you could live in the clouds?

Stop

Ghosts

Blanca Flats has never felt haunted to me in any way. This spiky, drought resistant ecosystem is alive with spirits -- wind, clouds, mountains, stones -- and with coyotes, snakes, mice, rabbitbrush and prickly pear. But ghosts?

I haven't felt any. Only the ghosts of my own memory. Sometimes they cross my inner vision in a continuous parade, sullen and relentless. Every mistake I've ever made, every regret I've ever cradled in my thoughts, every act of cowardice, every act of neglect. Steeped in solitude, this life forces a constant confrontation with the past.

The wind is an indifferent listener.

The massif is engaged in its own endless transformation.

Photo by Eric Havelock-Bailie

Freight Train

You can hear the freight trains coming for miles before their appear. It's a low, steady drone, combined with a gathering vibration that spreads from the floor through the marrow of your bones. Nothing captures the wild, lonely melancholy of departure like the train's whistle.

This photo was taken by EHB in March of this year, before the snow melted on the peaks. Now the snow is largely gone, and the massif will be bald for a month or two before winter starts to rev itself up again.

Loss

Blanca's presence in my life helps me cope with the sense of loss that haunts my subconscious. All of the friends, city streets, casts of light, poems that I've loved, buildings I remember seem to be constantly in the process of disintegrating, the way the mandala in a kaleidoscope collapses into colorful shards and light at the slightest shift of the tube.

Blanca brings the shards into focus. Just knowing that she's there -- always there, barring some act of war or massive geological upheaval -- brings the disintegrating fragments of memory to rest.

Widow

Maybe it's a sign that you've had too much solitude when you start naming inanimate objects. It's not just a matter of personifying them -- you start to seek them out, to rely on their reassuring, silent presence. These old wooden fence posts belonged to a ranch that no longer exists; the ranchers and their livestock have long since vanished, but the posts remain.

I call the post on the left "The Widow." The soft, silvered wood reminds me of a widow's shoulders, curved in quiet defense of her grief. I say a silent hello to the Widow whenever I drive by. She acknowledges me, and I acknowledge her.

Greenhouse

This is the greenhouse that Eric has been building. Its plastic "walls" have been delivered and are coming soon. The young herbs and vegetables have been growing in our sunroom, waiting for frost danger to pass. In the San Luis Valley, that doesn't happen until mid-June.

I have an apple tree seedling that I've been cultivating. I found the sprouted seed inside a Pink Lady apple.

Photo by Eric Havelock-Bailie