Honoring the Lizard of Oz

This is from the first time I met the beardies. They belonged to the super sweet family I was working for at the time, but they are ours now. Their names are Crikers and Beaut, in honor of the late Steve Erwin, I believe. They look fearsome for the first thirty seconds or so, and then they just look sort of earnestly vacant. What surprised me most was their fragility, and warmth. Normally when I think of a lizard, say, an iguana, I think of something cold and slimy-hard like a crab, or leathery like that little rubbery plastic alligator we had for years until its bottom jaw eventually got ripped off by a couple of vigorously well-meaning tykes. But these little guys, just beneath their fearsomely spiky skins (which looked almost like exoskeletons, but were thinner than mine), were as soft and delicate-boned as rabbits. One hung down the front of my shirt like a huge brooch, curling his sharp little claws into my mercifully thick sweater. The other draped himself across my shoulder. Mom, who was with me, held one in the crook of her arm like a baby and rocked it for awhile. She discovered that when she turned, the lizard would keep his head in the same place and let his little body pivot around it like a door-hinge. The one I was holding did that too. One of the Thomson boys said his grandmother’s chickens do the same thing. He said he could lift any of them up, down, side to side, and it would stretch its little neck as far as it could to keep its head at the same point on the x, y, and z planes as it had started. With that kind of 3D precision, I think we should start hiring lizards and chickens to be fighter pilots. Who knows? World peace could be just around the corner.

Supermassive Black Hole

Last night dreamed big again. I don't remember what I started out doing, something social but boring I figure. It must have been boring, because somehow I got detached from the globe and started drifting out into space. I picked up speed the farther I went, and wrapped my arms around my head to ward off all the planets and stars I was bumping into along the way. There were lots of glimmering clouds and arms of galaxies with stars and all sorts of stuff in them, and as I flew by I got to thinking I must be on some sort of "Powers of Ten" journey and would soon be able to see the whole universe before I drifted off into infinite space. I didn't get that far, but far enough out to see a whole bunch of individual galaxies. Many of the spiral ones had rays and curtains of light refracting out in all colors from supermassive black holes at their cores. As I passed through one of these curtains/columns of iridescent light I felt a tug from the immense gravitational hurricane at the center and started to worry. The pull of the black hole was such that it sent ripples and distortions through all of the surrounding light, and felt like a current pulling towards a maelstom in the middle of the sea. So I started to swim, and barely reached the other side of the light/rainbow/gravity column before I would've hit the event horizon. I kept drifting on, a little shook up, knowing that with all these supermassive black holes floating around and me with neither rudder nor engine, there was only so long I could last. I hit the next gravity column (which was really quite beautiful, like rainbows and the aurora borealis - they all were that way), felt that massive tug and thought that was it. But when I got to the event horizon, the great heavy darkness in front of me dissolved and changed, and I stood up on the floor of a room covered and lined with old brown paper sacks. There was some kind of square black processing machine (like the x-ray machines you put your stuff through in an airport) on a long fold-up table that was slowly sucking in and digesting one long sheet of this rainbow material, construction paper or something, although nothing was coming out on the other side. There were two or three people in the room: Krystin and Allison were there, and maybe one or two others. I think I was slightly annoyed, or just puzzled - I don't remember, because then I woke up.

Black and White and Red all over...

Cover them in black and white stripes. Dust and picks drum the red clay road, kicking up rusty clouds the size of carpetbaggers' pockets.

Humdrum rumbles the hole in the window – sucks downwind and I hear the rhythm of the men on the road. Their faces are rosy as the pale sky cools. A magpie lands on an old barn. Coal piles shift and crackle under sifted snow next to an iron-red stove.

The children cry as their mothers knead. Flour sifts through the air around them, cottony clouds, sticky on the tongue. The black bowls fill with sugar and cherries. The ovens gape their wide red mouths. They are first fed, then feed.

Black skirts swim around my ankles, the rim of white hugs my cheekbones as I smile. I hold a thick red book above my head, its pages flap open at the vaulted rafters. Quiet now. The children are fed, their books are open, the room is cold, their noses are red. Clouds roll blankly against the iron windows.

Appleskin breaks at the blade of a knife. The flesh under the blood red is snowy, and the seeds nestle like negative diamonds deep at the heart, dark and smooth as the pupils of eyes.

Listen to a black violin. The man under his snowy hair strokes the strings, sounds like the color of your heart.

The man's hands raise against the air. His shirt is white. The gun is black, and quick, and dark. Death follows in flowing scarves of red.

Newborn cries, the whites of its eyes and the red little mouth are round. Black is the tiny fuzz of hair. You are newer than copper pennies that glint like fire on the asphalt.

A beat of drums pounds red in your bones as you run from the moon, bathing you in white, in silver, in the colors of the old. You breathe hard with your red mouth and run and run and run. You run from the shadows, and you run from the light. You run from the only thing you cannot leave behind. You run, maybe forever, into the blackest night you ever saw.

One day the road will end, and the sun will set and flush against sharp black mountains. You will pause for breath then, and you will see, in the distance, a humble white light. You will watch the sun and say a prayer, and then you will run home.

Her Morning Elegance - Oren Lavie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_HXUhShhmY&feature=related

One of the cooler videos I've seen recently. I guess you'll just have to copy-paste the link.

Great Blue Wolf

I see Great Blue in the mountains. He is the color of dusk clouds, his eyes are pieces of the salmon moon that the sun leaves behind the horizon. He is the color of dying light. He is so big – I see his long jawline in the foothills, his great soft footfalls rumble the pavement next to me like distant thunder, his dark lush pelt floats and ripples in the breeze as if it were alive itself. He is silent as an owl, watchful as a hawk, steady as the mountains. The snow dusts his back like silver. He doesn't shake it off as he looks at me with those great warm eyes. Great Blue is silent. If he howls I've never heard it. Maybe I have. I know he does. He appears and disappears as invisibly as clouds. He walks the backs of the hills and the peaks to the east. When he is still, he is part of them.

I think he must be mother nature's dog.

=
I wrote this a month or so ago. A couple years back I got to go to the Colorado Wolf Wildlife Preserve with my grandparents. One or two of the wolves let us touch them, and we got to howl with all the wolves and coyotes and foxes on the property, which was awesome. I've always had a thing for wolves, and Great Blue just sort of evolved out of that. I wrote a short kid's book I stilll intend to illustrate about him and his pack and a little girl and her blanket. We'll see if that ends up going anywhere ....

Fly!

Today everything was singing. The mountains, white in snow and cloud speckled by trees and shadows like owl feathers, were singing “Love the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.” I heard them through the pavement; a low rumble like thunder. The trees reaching overhead were sleeping, but in their stillest places I knew they were more awake than I was. There was music in everything, and when I closed my eyes I opened other eyes and saw the most beautiful colors and songs wrapping themselves around everything. It took my breath away, and I almost stopped in my tracks, even though I was still on campus caught in the flow of between-class traffic. I had to resist the urge to spread my arms and let the colors and the soft inviting sky carry me away to heaven. I only resisted because there were people around. I was sure that if I stepped in just the right place I could kick off into the atmosphere and ride the wind over the mountains to find the places where snow is made. I would talk to the stars until it got too cold and I'd have to come back. There has been the most glorious stillness in the past two days; in the stillness I can hear and see things – colors and music and the love of the Lord, the voices of the mountains and the bones and joints of the earth moving so smoothly underneath, a vast old clock winding everything closer together. Peace, peace, peace. Everything had meaning, and I was a part of it all. There were messages from heaven in every little breeze or falling leaf, and I heard them. By the time I got home I could see that my shadow had wings.

Nothing is impossible anymore. Anything we can conceive of, we can accomplish. Most things we dream up, somebody has done already. Some say there is no originality left in the universe, but they are usually interrupted by people doing original things. The world will surprise you as much as you allow it to. We let walls fall so easily around us, we think they have always been there. There are no walls. There. Are. No. Walls...

Tomorrow I will spread my wings, and if I succeed I will return and show you all how close we are to the sun. But I guarantee somebody else will have beaten me to it.

Getting outside does stuff to you...

One day I was a woman king.
Swords swung at my side all the way up to the hills, where I held them like flowers.

My eyes held the golden mountains, behind my teeth were songs and war cries. I was as a warm stone. The wet air shielded me in armor light and strong of cobweb and silk and I was not afraid of men, or of shades, or of anybody.

I walked upon drums and felt the heartbeat of the earth slip under me like waves. I wanted to kiss her brow, the mother earth, who watches over me, a daughter and heir.

Branches pushed all directions with tattered leaves, to remind my hands that they have learned signs and symbols used by the silent; I am insured for the day my words fade and I have nothing now to fear but sleep.

I reached out and touched the air; it lay soft and cool at my fingertips, stirring very gently, like the breathing of birds, the soft grey reverence of doves.

I turn on the skin of the earth, I turn like leaves to the sun. We told the sun to bleed once, and it obeyed, leaving a deep red streak along the last horizon of the day. A moment later clouds closed over it like tears, and something soaring on black wings screamed overhead.

A gull calls across a thousand miles and my hands drop, remembering when once he held my heart in his hands and told me it was heavy as the sea. It was then I watched his wrists turn upwards, dark and worn thin enough to see through all the veins.

All I lack is flight, now, and victory. But I won't catch that gull.

My swords swing at my sides like breezes, sweeping away the shades of past and present, crushing through the ice of culture and brick, slitting the throats of the stone-faced and empty, who may never know.

The sea runs still in my blood, all of it, but the mountains are in me now, growing like ash grows along the arms of a burning tree.

Kind of absurd, really
bitter, like lack of sleep
but comfortable because I know its anatomy
and I know what to expect;
that the taste of salt is safer than to guess at the flavor and texture of honey.

But you blink for a moment, for a night only, and in the morning the sun will bring armfuls of new light and new bees. The salt wanes then, and honey colors the world like Midas, and you find even your footprints filled with the sweetest softest gold.

Maybe then somebody will teach us how to open our eyes.