Under a National Forest bridge,
the Fork of some river cut under us
and on the hills we could see where the water used to be.
Vast squares were cut out from the mountains,
timber lined the roads in wet piles
as the rain in the our higher elevation
fell on us and us alone.

The clouds and the fog met their harmony.

The river was flat and flowing,
the bridge looked its age
and the rust was another soft color
for the flow below it to reflect.
I read signs and learned history
while she took the trail
that seventy years of feet had built.
Someone must have seen us from the road
but we never saw anything truly move.

National Park greens and reds,
erosion through time and beating,
creating these greens and reds.
The water, being fluid and clear as it is,
and the idea of a lack of creation.
There’s a historical stigma,
a Protection stigma,
there’s a frozenness to even the brightest of days.
The waters are calm,
the storms are harmless;
distances are never too far.
It’s alright to stay on the beaten trail,
it’s okay to go off,
the land has yet to be fully trotten,
but it will never grow old,
no, it can never cease being ageless.

There’s a sensation, undeniable,
the dream of being the first to see something,
to think of those who came before
and were the first to be struck by beauty.
But we all get it, we all are the first,
this land, so harmless, so unharmed,
so restless but unfiltered,
is something new to gaze upon
from any vantage, from any eyes.

The Serbian Permanent Mission to the U.N. in New York is a lonely place.
There used to be days when the run would set
on the Police Guard in his almost primitive hut,
crouched inside his tall box,
for the imminent attackers on the Yugoslavian Permanent Mission to the U.N.
in New York.
And on the days they came,
the Officer was joined by throngs of friends, both in uniform and in the streets,
to make his little nook worth the months if not years of waiting.

The Serbs and the Croats, and the Yugos and the Kosovians and the Bosnians have changed that,
they took his little world.
And where once say the officer in his tall hut,
now sits a restless cook out for a smoke,
or a Visa seeker eagerly waiting for the doors to swing open.

Peace has its pluses and minuses,
but for the Kingdom of one man,
while he’s on his shift,
peace is nothing but another word for destruction.

There was something eating at me,
after I’d eaten quite a bit,
and I swam to the shore so I could throw up
on a tree stump that also held my weight.
I learned my lesson that day
and swore to never swim on a alcohol filled stomach
at least until the next time I forgot.
I was in shorts, not a bathing suit,
and the water had that clear taste to it,
like water suddenly has a taste sometimes
and the entire thing tastes clean but wrong.
I thought about all the times I pissed in a pool
or the few times I was sea sick,
and how water is always clean,
like it goes through a huge purifier
right before we see it,
through some process that we never see.
I guess that’s an inane thought,
but there is something to be said there.
I’m just not the one to say it.

I saw fireflies in a city park
like they were meant to be there.
Near the homeless people sitting
at the checkers tables,
it wasn’t a big local park either.
This wasn’t a place where you could lose yourself
or were in that perfect spot
where the tall buildings rooftops can’t peer down upon.
No, I could see the bar lights and taxicabs,
and then a wisp of flickering light before me,
graceful unlike any other bug.

I’d prepared my belongings for the summers catch.
Two months at sea, I had nets and poles,
and plans and charts.
I treaded waters in boats and brought up empty nets
time and time again.
I was hunting an elusive fish, or fishes,
up and down a coast line straight.
For two months I weathered storms
but rarely truly cast a pole in hopes of catching.
I was more content at sea than on land.

“The Lights Go Off”

From the golden towers view
A light goes on in the Spanish embassy
and a few stars make cameos in a city sky.
I can hear when a garbage trucks coming
And silence includes the vents on top of townhouses below.
The buses slow down for passengers waiting in the dark
and I could literally count the number of lights on in the surrounding apartment buildings.
How strange that the unnecessary lights stay on now through the whole night but a damn lot of it and at some point someone figures no one islooking anymore.
Obviously someone is and it turns out:
12:30 is the hour the lights go off.

The warmth of the day seems to rush by
in what seems to be a flash of wind
just perfectly as the sun disappears.
Branches on trees highlighted,
an eye drawn to the golden glow
shimming with long dark shadows.
How the world was it’s easiest to look at,
the sun gazed upon with no remorse.
I felt the cold air run over my skin
pushing out the last debris of the sun.
I loved the moon over head,
realizing it’s there for the first time,
and how in those last daylight hours,
it looked like it had been cut in half.

The sailor approached me one day,
he said he’d been at sea for weeks
and was never in one port for more than a few days.
This was his sixth or seventh stop,
the Port calls just seemed to bleed together.
He asked if I would show him around town,
after all, I’d been told he was coming weeks earlier
when his sister sent me a letter.
Her brother was coming to my town,
a sailor on a merchant ship.
If I could put him up for a day,
he’d surely love to see something
other than the bowels of that boat.
It was the last letter I’d get from her.
After months of exchanging letters,
maybe it’d even been a year,
there’d been a month without a note exchanged,
that there was nothing that the other needed to know.
We’d only started writing when I’d come here,
leaving behind the cobblestone streets of the city.
We’d grown close fast,
spending three nights in May
as I prepared a bag for the summer move,
which became a year.
We talked about why I’d chosen to leave,
the advantages and disadvantages.
I told her I was leaving to escape the people,
the congestion and anonymity.
I’d lived there fifteen years after all,
having moved there from back East.
I was from the Coast there,
a town that was dominated by its shoreline.
Growing up there,
it all felt so much like where I’d come,
and that first escape from urban life
hadn’t even happened at all,
I’d only told myself.
So when I had a visitor that one afternoon,
the woman’s brother, the sailor,
I knew it was time to leave.