We should have started from this: the sky.
A window without a sill, frame, or pane.
An opening and nothing more,but open wide.
I need not wait for a clear night
nor crane my neck to examine the sky.
I have the sky at my back, at hand, and on my eyelids.
The sky wraps me snugly
and lifts me from below.
Even the highest mountains
are no nearer the sky than the deepest valleys.
There is no more sky in one place
than another.
A cloud is crushed by sky as ruthlessly as a grave.
A mole is as enraptured
as a wing-fluttering owl.
A object falling into a precipice
falls from the sky into sky.
Granular, liquid, craggy,fiery and volatile
expanses of sky, crumbs of sky,puffs and snatches of sky.
The sky is omnipresent even in darkness under the skin.
I eat sky, I excrete sky.
I am a trap inside a trap,
an inhabited inhabitant,
an embraced embrace,
a question in answer to a question.
To divide earth and sky
is not the correct way
to consider this whole.
It merely allows survival
under a more precise address,
quicker to be found
if I were to be looked up.
My call words are delight and despair.
My housemate is a 70-year old woman from Sicily Island, Louisiana. She's the Distribution Manager at Gardiner Laundry. She talks in a twang like my grandmother did, and it makes me miss grandma. I cook Leona suppers of potatoes and onions and tomatoes to remember grandma. Leona puts ketchup on everything.
I go out hitching to Mammoth today, on Sunday. I walk from the arch to the check-in station before two men pick me up. They've been in Yellowstone since I was born.
"Forever, for me," I say to them.
"I guess," one laughs. "Makes me feel old.
The air is cold in Mammoth Hot Springs and my face goes numb. I walk out to the terrace. I smile so hard, so long, my face hurts.
On the way back I ride in a yellow jeep with a man from Bozeman. His name is Jeff and he's a land surveyor. Isn't this so pretty, I keep saying. Yep, yep, he always replies. Oh wow, I say. I feel so lucky.
