Mittens

Calling for the cat

at dusk -- stars emerge

one at a time.

Mittens, my first true feline friend, I will miss you. Your sapphire eyes, your six-toed paws, your fur as thick and dark as a seal's--I will never forget your strange beauty. When I came home to my apartment alone, you greeted me. When I was anxious and overworked, you lay down and napped with me. You voiced your complaints and requests in the flat, off-key tones of a Siamese, making me laugh whenever you talked to me. You will always be in my heart. 

Haiku first published at A Hundred Gourds, September 2013

Waiting for Firewood

The truckload of firewood that we bought in October won't last through this arctic winter. November's blizzard left the pine logs locked in ice, and we have to use an axe to knock them free from the frozen snow. We leave the damp logs in the sunroom to dry out so that they'll burn efficiently. Warming in the sun, they fill the room with the fragrance of evergreen. Meanwhile, we're waiting for our second load of firewood to arrive. Last year our fall delivery lasted well into March or April. 

I know the cold won't last forever, but there's a feeling of profound stasis about it, as if time itself were stuck at sub-zero. Late at night, when I come home from work, the house feels like a tiny box suspended in a frozen black ocean. Its only sources of warmth are the leftover heat from the day's sunlight and the little wood stove. For the first time since we moved here in 2009, our jokes about death by hypothermia have a note of reality. On the coldest of these frigid nights, I long to fall into a bed warmed by central heating, with the musical click-roar of a furnace soothing me to sleep. I want to forget my fears about the pipes freezing, the electricity failing, the firewood running out. 

But there never seems to be enough space in centrally heated rooms. The mechanically generated heat feels dry, claustrophobic. It smells of dust--or worse, of nothing at all. 

Sunlight and pine sap --

on a January morning
I lay the night's fire

Entangled

After a summer of rare, drenching rains, tumbleweeds took over the Valley. Dislodged by September winds, the skeletal clumps huddled along our dirt roads, skittered across stones, bounced hopelessly in the wake of speeding vehicles. They ventured out of the rural areas and ended up in town, always in the most inappropriate places. One afternoon I passed a pickup truck driving down the highway with a weed stuck in its grille like a jaunty brown corsage. Another thistle-ball, at least two feet in diameter, blocked State Street across from our favorite coffee shop, mocking that small attempt at civilization. 

Uprooted flocks raced across the plains when the wind kicked up, their passage blocked by barbed wire fences. They clung to the wire with grim desperation until a November blizzard released their grip.

softening under snow

the harsh entanglements
of autumn

Signs of Winter

October morning --

the mountain's blue couloirs

have already gone white

*   *   *

Tufts of ghost sage

turn to powder between my fingers:

all the words I've forgotten

Irrigation

Sleepers Awake

Snow melts in warm dust --

under a net of pebbles,

the snake's eye opens. 

In the desert a whole ecosystem thrives under the dry topsoil, where it's protected from the hard winds, extreme temperatures and predators of land and sky. As the days grow warmer, new generations of rabbits, mice and birds populate the landscape. Underground the snakes and insects begin to stir, their spines and wings unfolding as the snow disappears from the mountains. Soon the rattlers and bull snakes will come to the surface again in search of  prey and water. 

Sentinel

The crow guards two posts;

at the thud of my footsteps,

he rises skyward. 

This pair of old corral posts stands about two miles from the house. Those faded wooden stakes remind me of a gate without a fence, the entry to a parallel world. One day as I was jogging up the dirt road at my usual slow pace, I saw an enormous crow perched on one of the posts. He sat there, a dark sentinel, as I thudded up the road, then slowly lofted away as I approached. For a moment, I thought he would let me get close enough to touch him, but he took to the sky -- as I would, if I had wings. 

April Wind

Housecleaning

A new tribe of ants

carves tunnels in the sand --

time to clear the dust. 

Making a Path

Snow masks the sheep trail

where fat finches browse for seed;

we make our own path. 

Buried Thorns

Hidden ring of thorns,

the snow-covered prickly pear

lies in wait for us. 

Lost Villages

The basalt hills rise

like abandoned villages

from clouds of snow fog. 

Distance plays tricks on the eye here. I can never photograph the San Luis Hills the way I see them -- so close that every shadow and hollow is visible from my window. In the aftermath of snow, they stand like empty buildings in banks of white fog, like the mirage of a failed human settlement. 

I'm always a little dismayed by the way my mind projects the images and sounds of civilization onto this barren landscape. The wind sounds like the voice of a radio announcer; the hills look like broken huts; the full moon is a streetlamp behind my shoulder. If I moved back to Denver, would I hear the North wind in the drone of traffic and see basalt hills in the skyline?

Looking back at the photos I've taken of the view facing South, I'm reminded that there's a stark monotony in this landscape. You have to look carefully to see the variations that unfold through the hours and the seasons. As hard as I try, I don't capture the way life proliferates here, even in the winter. The fat cottontail rabbits bouncing across the dirt roads . . . the noisy finches squabbling over seeds . . . the enormous black raven who's taken up residence near the house.

Instead, my imagination dishes up empty villages. And the cries of ghosts. 

Skeletons

Tangled skeletons

of tumbleweed and sagebrush --

winter survivors. 

Surprise Guests

Two yellow flowers

on a new tomato plant

bloom against cold glass. 

We didn't expect that one of our indoor tomatoes -- left for dead when winter blasted into the Valley -- would give birth to a new plant, much less that two fragile blossoms would develop on its branches. Who am I to say whether it's too early for fresh tomatoes? Stranger things have happened in our sunroom garden, like green-and-orange bell pepper mutations and red Roma tomatoes dangling from the vines long after summer. This plant is an offshoot of one of our orange tomatoes. These plants produce bright fruit in Day-glo colors, sweet as candy. 

Winter Voices

Sounds engulf the house:

wind, coyotes, and ghost voices

broadcasting warnings. 

New Year with Ghosts

Each post emerges

like a separate gray soul

on the snowy road. 

On the last day of 2012, I went for a long run. A light snow fell. Milky banks of fog shifted across the landscape. Along the sides of the rutted roads, old fenceposts and signposts materialized one by one, like memories stepping forward from my subconscious. Beyond the border of the road, the horizon was a cloudy sea, marked by underwater dunes and mesas. In the distance, the Dome reminded me of the volcanic rock that rises out of Morro Bay in Northern California, where I spent so much of my life. 

I often miss the Pacific Ocean. But has it ever left me? Have any of the faces, seas or skylines I knew in the past really left me? I thought once again of how this ancient lakebed acts like a canvas for the imagination, how its shapes and sounds evoke remembered beauty or pain at every shift of the seasons, at every turn of the light. 

According to a Chinese superstition, ghosts of the past shouldn't be mentioned on New Year's Day. We should look forward to the future, focusing our thoughts on the coming months. But I don't fear these ghosts, or regret them anymore. I live with them comfortably now -- much more comfortably than I did when I was younger. I greet them like old companions on the road, like the old wooden corral posts that I've come to know so well. 

Snow Brooms

Like brooms against snow

shadows of the rabbitbrush

sweep a restless mind. 

Snow fell again on Saturday night. Its planes and hollows are laced with tracks -- birds, coyotes, rabbits, dogs, humans -- like frenetic thoughts crisscrossing the mind. The rabbitbrush blossoms turn dark bronze in the winter, their fine branches spreading like broom straws agains the snow. The sagebrush have turned powdery silver against white. 

Yesterday morning I was lighting the propane stove, when I remembered that we've always had the tank refilled in December. I checked the tank level, and it's down to zero. Why can't I remember this? Meanwhile, we have just ordered a truckload of aspen logs to heat the house for the rest of the winter. We use propane for the stove and for the hot water heater, but those two appliances are responsible for hot showers and coffee -- two of my only remaining addictions. Filling the tank and loading up on firewood can get expensive, but it's still cheaper than heating Eric's turn-of-the-century house in Denver. 

My thoughts are as scattered as the snowtracks. I come home late from the nursing home, and my brain is still numb from the alarms and call lights. I fall into bed and dream of charting I forgot to do. In the morning I have to ask Eric to repeat things that he told me the night before. I worry about forgetting something important. I worry that I've inadvertently harmed someone.

The blue snow shadows calm my mind a little. 

Winter Maze

Walking in a maze

of prickly pear at sunset,

I lose the dirt road. 

Gravel

Sifting damp gravel

over a red wheelbarrow

I smell last week's rain. 

This pile of gravel is our latest Sisyphean project; we have to sift through it to remove the dirt. I like big, apparently insurmountable projects like this. I spent over an hour shoveling and sifting today, burying my fingers in the damp soil as I spread the stones across the sieve that Eric made. He constructed the sieve by nailing a piece of mesh to an antique window frame. We sift the dirt out into the wheelbarrow, then haul the soil over to a ridge we're creating to defend our struggling flowerbed against rabbits. The gravel will fill the trenches that will form the foundation of the strawbale addition to the house. The addition is intended to be a mudroom, but it will also provide extra insulation against the winter wind.

I can't believe winter is on the way already. The sooner we fill up the trenches and finish the addition, the warmer we'll be when the winter winds start in earnest.

Sublimation

The coyotes glide

below the dry chamiso --

my forgotten fears.