Cricket and Grey: A Landscape Exercise

Slow organic rot.  Entropy in the rain, the gutterless buildings, the tin rooves, the  perpetual rivulets wearing wood down to corrugated hollow boards like thick paper that smells of wet timber in memory of origin.  Wet resin stiff in the cold, fragrant in precipitation, sharp in morning sun.   Broken empty windows like gouged eyes, an empty nest of ideas, flying out in crows and pigeons.  Blood is old and as impersonally insulting as the perpetual crawl of rust across the machinations of mankind.

Birch soldiers stand listening, caps removed, in funereal defference.  With no words, no song, nothing but the shushing breeze through crisp dry leaves like the rustling of the devil in the nest of god, there are no words, only gravity.  Ribbons of road salute, and wind away into the waiting arms of the damp.  

Watery ditches, teaming with insignificant blooms struggling to rise to the light.  Stop and there is sustenance.  Stop and say nothing, the bright faces will speak into the metallic air and reveal your hunger and reflect your face in narrow petals brushed with colors only the finest artist might mix with metals.  Dig the bulbs up and roast them in a fire pit, char them and release the sugar after days of coal heat.  Be clean with them, be true.  They will taste like the drippings of life; make you live one more mile than you thought you could.  Follow.  Taste.  Sweet, not sharp.  Where white shines up into the light, limbs will melt to puddles of marrow; death camas will hold your hand until you're being wheeled through the dignified stands of birch.  Blue is your hunger, white is your spirit on a tear through the appetites of death.

The camas drifts like blue water through forests of young trunks, inviting thirst to absolve itself of shame or pain.  The traveler unaware might trip lightly into the clouds of blue and mistake himself to be in a lake of endless dreams, perhaps with silver hands and bells to herald the soft dew of morning into fairy cups for celebrating.  No sleep in this field of blue.  No grace will flood weary bones, but sit and wonder at the tricks of light that make it appear you are swimming.

Lay down if your bones are shards and your head is weak, but beware, be sure you will never rise again from this blue watery mirage.  Perhaps it is better to imagine the brook than drown in it.


Paradise has two things in it: an orchard of fruit to fuel summer and a small lake on whose surface the dragonflies skim and in whose silvery face is reflected the breadth of all love.  Hills exploding upwards with the viscera of the forest, in light round maple shapes arguing with the darker rougher shapes of pine, making a patchwork of trees in light and dark greens punctuated gently with heathery ghosts.  Low old orchards in clearings of light remind us that fruit is as wild and sweet as the best human spirit.


Dense dark patches of forest planted by men wishful to fill the emptiness left by industry.  Indiscriminate close trunks; evidence of human folly.  The place where stags come to die.  Listen closely and you can hear the velvet peeling from the horn.

Entropy is the great equalizer.  It crushes timber as ruthlessly as it crushes the first flush of awareness in a virgin heart.  It makes a slow but relentless crawl across the universe.  Much more beautiful to those who haven't wrecked their entire body to make and deliver a whole life, meant to participate in the same slow stretch into the black hole of entropy.  

Delicate petals on the back of a horse, standing tense in the belly of a tiny orchard where a soft brush promises sweet apples and other treasures in the breast of summer.


Eat dust.  Tastes like dust but looks like a mystical fog falling on its own heels in a race to outrun itself.  Billowing on hot days like gusts of poison that hang thick and then drift away through boredom and neglect.


Moss, damp, dark , arms of it hanging...drifting... leaning into your breath like great mouthfuls of cotton.   Drifting left and then when you sleep changing direction so that the next time you observe the direction it's all turned around.