A bottle tree to catch the ghosts. They rise and rise and rise, bursting in the sun caught in the blue, sparkling into dust to scatter and gather again, rising into the future night, below the stars,
-—
Timing is everything, that’s all there is. Imagine living in the animal world, in the woods, squirrels knowing to go because of daylight, sensing deep in their small bodies the shift in season, it slowly moving on with the whirl of the planet, of the curling in the constellations, these creatures in their nests, knowing.
There are lights from old highway 61 from the window where I am living, shining bright stars. In the deep delta night, the cold fits it, the dark fits it, it feels the same as a season shifting smally and this old sorry body feeling it - in the field in the gloaming the first bright stars out in the blue grey purple of a sunsetting.
Huntsville has caves beneath it, and Florida has so much limestone, I feel like my heart is what exactly keeps me up, when it catches it gets caught and grows to see the whole world happily - tears ever brimming at the water table, there just waiting to be needed or wanted, for all the beauty in the world; if-this-isn’t-nice-i-don’t-know-what-is, this friendly-friendly world, oh.
Yesterday’s sunset a pastel dream - tiresome to say pastel, to say dream, the land out here I can’t compare to another; hard to fit shoes on a kicking horse, a —- speechless, wordless in this version of the world, a hundred poems to celebrate strange sincere love like I haven’t known it before, or known it in so long.
Even in painting and photographing now it seems like a tiresome task of defining instead of celebrating; the photographs lack anything technically good or artistically good, or whatever - but I am there leaning into the mud and the cold and the sunrise and sunset because I want to witness it, love it, be enveloped in it, because - it hurts in the way good love can be so powerful it is hurtful with goodness and joy and hope. It seems right to hunt the trail, maybe the answer is hidden, holed up, out in the bayou. The thing is, right or wrong, this land hits like an icepick shattering into disassociation, into lost empathy, hidden figures and feelings of each name, hits into it seeping same as cold fingers warming up against the fire, awakening and hard to define, but it hits, it hits, it hits, like the blues - maybe these are soul plug-and-socket finding one another, blues and the delta, heart and soul, heading down the road how you’re supposed, on the way to the meant-to-be.
