The Giant Eye

There is something suspicious
about the cloud formations here.

We find ourselves glancing up.

The way their tentacles creep over the mountains.
Groping over the dark forests
like giant blind insects
who are always searching the Earth.

Or how they can suddenly open up
as endless terrains.

As if, for a few hours,
there’s a great kingdom,
and the sun participates.

Setting off the golden columns,
painting the arches and illuminating
the temples.

But mostly, it’s the constant promise
that at any moment
they’ll reveal
a great mystery
that was always there
like an alien ship
or a giant eye.

Headlines in the Background

The headlines read:
“BLOOD EVERYWHERE!”
and I continued walking.

The day went on as it should.
Cars seemed not to notice.
None of us saw an ounce of blood.

Except, there was something in the background.

It was a day heavy with dreams
from the night before
that we couldn’t quite remember.

None of the details could be remembered.
I didn’t stop to read the story,
and continued to walk around
with all the blood in the background.

Blood everywhere—on the walls of buildings,
arms and legs, cement, smeared and darkening.

The fog was there, when I woke up.
Covering the mountains, hovering
just above the town.

It was a scene after a tragedy
that we knew took place
but didn’t quite know what.

“NATURE HAS BEEN VIOLATED!”
might have well have been
the headlines for that day.

But we continued walking
trying to figure out
things for ourselves.

Trying to push forward
into a clean future
but seeing only blood.

Two Red Balloons

We close our eyes
in order to close
and open ourselves.

The slightest rustling,
a child’s voice,
the river over its stones.

These are the sounds of things
busy being themselves.

Our bodies becoming the pastures and the winds
sprawled out across the grass.

A couple of lazy dogs
that don’t know any better
cradled in the slightest sound,
the sky’s breath.

Even the dark thoughts
we don’t push back
knowing it’s as useless
as pushing back the clouds,
the storm front.

Tomorrow ice will descend again
and the warm winds will have visited
for only a single day.

We were two red balloons
set loose on the warm currents
over the green meadows.

We were a couple of kites turning circles
over the tiny town,
that sun patch.

Backdrop of the Fled

It’s Colorado, it’s winter.
The trees have been deserted.
Standing as statues to their former selves.
Their spirits having been sucked back to the caverns
of introversion, down into the earth, hovering
around the roots and their fungi. Or having fluttered off
with the migrating birds, only to return when life returns,
when the flowers stretch, and the leaves burst, but until then…
The houses will be lined up as they are in single file, on either side
of the wide streets—rows of empty skulls, as spiritless
as the trees, this town,
with only the appearance of life, cars moving like zombies
in caravans, then groaning to nothing in the distance,
a man’s silhouette, crossing down the road,
in the corners of our eyes, from the grocery store, a shadow passing
over asphalt. There is a desolation
in how it all adds up, something emptier than a wasteland, the people
in their living rooms half asleep in TV patterns, having fluttered off
into fantasies of the past, regret configurations, families having failed,
the once passionate having failed to live, the houses: monuments to lives
not lived, to lives living on in imaginations…Walk down these streets
where the crows perch in empty branches, and then fly off…Walk down
these streets, where there’s a great hollowness that floods the plain and
all of the street lamps and the city building façades and the ambulances
and the grocery store clerks, their shadowy prospects, a hollowness
drowning everything that we can’t speak, that everything speaks,
so we take solace in each other when we can, playing ping pong
in the basement at midnight, hoping for a moment that feels right,
to remember, against the backdrop of the fled, its endless winter.