There is no breath I can take that is as deep as one we take together. There is no dawn that stretches as far across the sky as those that break from our union. Bird song falters incomplete. Waves stumble upon banks and slip back into dark silence.

I am here eclipsed without her, anima and animus divided, the shadow of something large and earthly rumbling in slow revolution between us. And I pull up my knees and wait. I drum in the heat of her. I fall on sharp stone and bleed into it, lean into it, sway into the howl that begins in the first molecule and extends to the last shudder of being.

Hovel, growling on haunches, crawling on bellies under grey-tipped branches, the hole in the sky flickering in the lattice of broken fingers above. Wrong. Every cell screams the wrongness. I hear my own voice, primal, enraged, like a wounded god. I am bellowing and my eyes sting with pain.

I am lucky. In the small, throbbing death, I am shown the way. In the bear heart it is born again. In the wolf breast it grows strong and fierce. In the raven's wing it unfolds and disperses like seed that roots even in the shadows of gravitation.

I am patient with prey. It will be brought into the light, it will find the field and I will take it. For when you are hungry, you know the meaning of food. And I will have this thing I want, for only now do I understand how much it is wanted.

There's a planet between us. But it is moving. And my muscles tense, and I watch quietly, vision sharp, breath shallow, eager.

When you spend enough time living by large bodies of water, you eventually meet this wind.

It's the kind of wind that begins across the calm surface, hidden away in the carved tree house of the wind people. It has wide wings, this wind, and launches itself out over the railing made smooth by many hot hands. It soars like an owl, silently down the depth of rock and wood, ripped and serrated leaves a mossy green blur in its passing.

A few inches above the water, it pulls back and lets its momentum propel it. It races, its power a wake behind it, its presence a sound wave that rattles the scales from fish. As it goes, it picks up debris, old iron buoys, amputated tree limbs, fisherman mosquitoes out too far too late. And when it reaches the other shore, it slams into the first structure it finds, spreading itself over glass windows and dodging its fingers through cracks of walls.

One by one, its brothers, its cousins follow. Over the railing, down the cliff, across the water, and against the cabin. They roar in coup. They leave the scattered remains of their found treasures on the banks. And as the sun rises, they float their secret canoes back to the tree house to wait for the call again.

( Last night... )

When he called, he made a sound that was a cross between a cat's meow and the lowing of a cow. He took a breath and thrust his head forward, slamming the vocalization deep into his gullet so that it began with a croaking, like the start of an ancient machine.

It came in threes, this noise, obviously picked up from his time around humans. Was it the mimic of an animal or the bleat of some piece of landscaping equipment? Wherever he's gotten in, in whatever secret corner of shiny things he'd discovered it, he was obviously fond of both the sound itself and the attention he'd get from making it.

And so it was, that I was sung to by a crow.

I arrived at Lake Crescent very late, speeding across the darkened Olympic highway while shuffling Rush songs. My finger throbbed from where I'd sliced it open on the cat food tin, a deep gash that had poured blood for half an hour and almost ended my trip before it began. The parking lot was empty; a complete silence, a starless night hung over the cabins. In the yellow haze, the humped shapes of a raccoon family could be seen making their way towards the water's edge. I tossed my belongings on the extra bed and settled in for the sleep born from an exhausting week.

Now I sit in the windowed lodge room, on wicker chairs. The same crow that sang to me this morning, who followed me around for half an hour, never more than 15 feet from me at all times, has arrived again and is surveying the lunching guests in the hopes that some small tidbit will be left behind. To my left, across the wide expanse of shimmering water, two anglers wade knee-deep and cast hope into the depths. A handful of boaters row lazily into the grey-white mist. A woman in red with long boots kisses her lover, not knowing that I am watching them.

Everyone is drawn to the pier, unable to resist walking to the very end. The compulsion is irresistible and I watch people try to pass by without giving in. But one by one, the instinctive pull, or the human desire for exploration, or the indescribable need to be joined with water, tugs them along the weathered planks towards those last few inches of wood.

The sun comes out to burn off the fog and it nears the midpoint of the afternoon. I've been awake for five hours and have no idea where the time went. This is a blissful realization, because I've done nothing but be. I've watched a sparrow mob leapfrog across the shoreline, pausing to gobble insects before lighting as one to land a few feet further on. I've watched the ducks quack-launch themselves off the driftwood and heard the sound of flickers and the symphony of birdsong to which I'm still unfamiliar after seven years.

And now the child takes off her bright orange life vest and the crowd noise from the last group of lunchers rises behind the plate glass. All day, alone in this room, I've had old woman and their daughters stroll in and remark on me. "Oh, he has his laptop". "He's all set up reading". "See that man, honey?" Seems that I too am this odd and fondly observed creature.

I'm already feeling more connected, like I can hear again. There's so much to be changed and reclaimed in my life. But for these two days, I'm happy to be a singing crow, alone with his shiny things and looking for tidbits.

So, it was like this. I left on a bus to travel far across the city to the fair land of Ravenna, where I was needed to feed, water, and poop two cats. The Blackwingedmobile was in the garage undergoing some basic customization, the adding of thrust boosters, another set of under-bumper machine guns, and changes to the aquatic transformation algorithm.

Taking the bus is always the cause of adventure for me and last night was no exception. Typically, it was late, as it is always is late, and I stood for a good twenty minutes past the scheduled bus arrival (happens every time) wondering why the bus stop was facing away from the road and into a quarry. Then I thought, well maybe the bus will rise out of the quarry like Brigadoon and I just have to wait for the right environmental factors. I even squeezed a passing cat hoping to make bagpipe sounds, but before we could become even better acquainted, the bus arrived.

( Bus travel... )

Three plump strawberries, hidden in the corners of leaves, in the shadowy places where the wind waits. I eat three more and talk to the kami and the fair folk and we share our summer fruit under the moonlight and yellowing street splash.

A moth as large as moths can get swoops towards the doorway, knocking itself against the flaking wood and I ask it to please stop it's self-destruction. I turn off the lamp and curl a while in darkness.

The chocolate is eaten down to the last bite, as we used to do, that mad, red-haired thing and I. And as I drop the remainder into the dry leaf hollows, I speak to her ghost. I still cannot touch the pain after six months. It is far too profound for me to fathom. And so I let it sit for another time.

I apologize for not having milk, but it doesn't seem like a night made for milk. And so, as midnight comes I leave the porch, my offering of fruit and sugar remains behind.

And now comes the slide down the other side towards the lifting of the veil and the long dark winter. But it's not a diminishing, a rapid gradient to grey. Potential energy turns kinetic and passion burns until the harvest. This is the season of manifestation.

Happy Solstice.

I walked into the Subway streaming water in great wide rivers from the ends of my hair, which lay flat and dark with rain. I wiped the expanse of my fivehead with the back of my sleeve and moved the soggy shirt from my soft belly bits, because who wants their soft belly bits clung to and exposed like a Christmas ham wrapped in cellophane?

"It's raining just a bit..." I said.

The Subway Duchess turned around while speaking, "Yeah, I saw that it was starting to rain a OH MY GOD, YOU ARE DRENCHED!"

I dripped on my sandwich and on my bag of chips and on my two cookies and on my cup, and when I walked back outside, it was raining twice as hard as it was before. It was like one of those comic books where the rain is drawn with dense lines of white and silver.

I walked back to my car, thinking that it would have made more sense just to be naked, but stopping myself in the reminder of just how close I am every day to incarceration or committal. I dripped on the car and on the car seat and on the floor mats, and when I got up to walk inside my home, there was this moist indentation of my butt on the fabric, kinda like the days where I went swimming as a kid and rode back without laying a towel down first.

When I walked in the rain with my Subway in hand, the rain had stopped being rain and had reached such a level of ridiculousness that it made me giggle. And I walked and I giggled and it was like walking through a super huge shower with a really strong shower head. And I giggled more and my shoes filled up and my socks filled up and then there was an alligator and then a submarine and then I found Atlantis in the muddy footstep of a passing dog.

It should rain on me more often like that. It's amazing how happy I am when I give up and give in.

I'm not going to try to force these thoughts into a format of paragraph and form and matter, because now they are coming hard and fast and numerous. And I need now to get them down before I forget and I need to post them before I decide not to.

( okay... )

Porch Sitting Days Approach
Originally uploaded by blackwingedboy.

It's been quite a day, facing up to the extremes that my child will go to if given his way, the realization that this is both a good and a bad thing, the source of both my creative spirit and my behaviourial addictions.

I had a chance to embrace my single day lifetime concept this weekend, however, the idea that each morning is a new life and each night is the transition into the Dreaming. It's given today a new color. Instead of a mad tumble forward, losing time, catching time, it's resolved into the humor and good natured wisdom of letting flow be flow.

In twilight, the last minutes before and after the sun set over the Olympic peaks, I was on my porch, leaned back in the cradle of my chair. I remembered how often I would lie in the cradle of the giant maple tree in my front yard as a kid, feeling the wind on my cheeks and the texture of wood knots under my blonde scalp. I remembered the innocent and goal-less moments of passing time in the inbetween, of the crow calls and the swish of tires on pavement, the last scrabbles of squirrel feet and the far away train whistle.

Tonight it was the Fremont bridge horn, trumpeting like a giant waterfowl, one long and two short. It was the reminder that listening is only just being open to whatever silence or syllables will come.

Each morning as I woke up, I pushed down into my sense of what was, down until I could touch the awareness of her death. When I felt the sharp sting shoot up my coiled snake, when I felt my stomach clench, I would stop and go about the business of the day.

( ”I )