Demolition

Wind blows
Moving dark silver blue
Clouds showing moon

I wake up in the still deep dark
And in that moment pull thoughts back in through the open window
To the ground of this beginning day
The floor by the bed is wood
From my feet to planks to plywood to posts to cement to bedrock
I touch ground and stand up
In the dark life becomes clear
I'm almost 46
I have so many hopes
Behind me is turbulence
I sweep the kitchen every night
I fumble my delicate knowing
Called back in each idle moment
To the archive of smoldering old wounds
To run through them again
I wake back up

Is there a song on the wind?
Recurring questions nudge me along
People ask, and I answer that I'm a musician, but that's not it
Mother Night
The self-evidence of birdsong
I sing my little songs in a burning time of nature
And woman-denying authoritarian landlords
Of numbed-out spectators glazing over the genocides
Privileged and healthy (for the moment) while seas rise
This place where I live is beautiful and troubled
They say it's in a nation but I disagree
The sloping hill curves around and the river changes course

With decades of baggage
I moved a little bit away from the town of Anacortes
Where circling military jets roar their reminder
"There's wars
This peace you breathe is flimsy
We rule."
I bite the inside of my cheek and sidestep mere despair
At the gnashing human world
I go downstairs in the dark

A stream finds the low place and glitters

There is no other home but here and now
Here: on the paper thin west edge of a colonized continent
Enclosed and named and sold and resold
In multi-generational deep ignorance
I used to dream that my roots were strong and deep
Then I dug down just barely and found cathedrals
Here: a long guest in someone else's home
I watch the islands over the water and wonder if maybe
Someday my daughter's grand-daughter will be old here
Healed and grateful
The flat fertile sea between these islands holds everything
Like I try to
Only 10,000 years ago there were meadows here
A short 2 day walk to what's now "mainland", bison bones in the kelp

Here on this thin rind of spanning time
I laugh at myself
And this scrap of identity
Scraped from the thinnest soil of recent history
A few flashing decades of a hand-me-down homemade myth
A few more boxes of disintegrating poetry books
From a barely cohesive mouse-eaten lineage
Of white hippie west coast seekers on this edge
Trying to get perspective through the fog of America
I shrug, laugh, and count myself in
I kick and jump beyond this inheritance
This too-shallow view
From Back To The Land to Land Back

One year, late spring
I went to a meditation retreat on a very quiet island nearby
I arrived entangled in all these considerations
Why to make a song?
How to open the underworld?
Who is thinking this even?
And the weird, alienating, looming, eerie blindspot of colonization
The ignored and informative wound showing the way through
The way the roots that held the tree down left a deep hole
Now full of water, reflecting sky

I arrived weighted with all this, with my backback on the beach
One eye squinted
Murmuring who do we think we are to be doing this here, now?
I wriggled, but still I stayed
My precious skepticism got left there in the sand
And I climbed the bluff into the woods and found my campsite

Days passed in quiet demolition
Gradually I softened into the insane meditation schedule
And noticed a relief, like
A sloughing off of all the extra winter coats
I slept the few sleep hours in total black
My tent loud with indecipherable night wind through the old forest
I dreamed, until a 3am demon with a headlamp
And a wake up bell stomped through and tore the veil

Middle-of-the-night-mind still unformed
I shuffled through the salal in the dark
Toward the glowing womb window
Of the one room cabin meditation hall
Where I sat back down

The iron of the woodstove cracks
Coals chunking down
First faint blue of day
Breath slow in and out

Am I the ocean or in it?

Single candle flame still

Before the first bird and sun fingers through
One hot iron crack snaps

Soft rain begins