what has made this skeleton so bold
beauty sharp obsideon so cold

wellsprings

i sing for all these nameless endeavors
the steps out the door unmapped
freedom to wonder and wander alike
to find what well-spring's untapped
there's a crack in the earth i'm certain of it
bleeding with deep red wine
where everything grows in reckless perfection
and boasts to the world that they're fine

again

after awhile it feels pathetic to continually wake up still wearing skirts pearls and makeup

10 miles

on Thursday i asked Zack if we could aim to do a ten mile run by my bday in June.
This morning i ran ten miles

my body has a love hate relationship with this ten mile run, but it makes me feel alive and it makes me feel grateful for every last muscle tissue and every tiny cell in the structure of my bones

someday this body will die

but until then... what a thing to marvel over: our bodies and how each portion works in some kind of strange harmony with the others

it blows my mind and floors me with grattitude

windows

windows frame everything so spectacularly
the pale yellow of the warehouse next-door and a set of weathered telephone poles become artwork, fit to fill the greater expanse of a wall simply because the air around it is real and the weather giving its backdrop changes.
a bird comes to perch, then leaves.
a horse pulls its passengers hypnotically by
and the storm-threatened sky has made everything gray
ish
like a lucid film that lifts and settles, back and forth to change the shade of the warehouse's yellow brick ever-so-slightly

This makes it worthy of my glance

the life in it

wonderful as it is, i'd rather be on the other side of that little square frame
running on my trail
i'll get there yet

grace

Grace all sufficient
indeed i beleive it
but grace is something i wear in part; like a jacket that hangs around my elbows while i focus on the sweat that cools off my shoulders and the heat in my exhale as i run.
it isn't on
it isn't off
simply accessible

unused maybe

it's just a word like the others in my ear

but i need those words to run to or at least the chorded notes that crack open like eggs that might one day become words, oozing all over my guarded heart. I wonder how to survive the knotted chaos of fighting rhythms: the pulse of feet on gravel; the rise and fall of lungs and ribs; and the crushing strength inside the song.
cracking outward
storming downward
desperate breath caught in pattern and laced to the break of waves and the beat of wings til i'm part of some natural pendulum that all of life fixes its rhythms to
i am fastened somewhere in the same cyclical repitition as the heartbeat of a hummingbird

all i can do is breath

nothing left for singing amazing Grace
just feet that drum on gravel
and lungs that rise and fall

and a jacket that hangs around the elbows in unuse

maybe grace is the exhale and the sweat that cools from my shoulder

instead of the jacket no longer need

unworth

i hate going through college things.
it reminds me i haven't changed a bit

chapter one

Of course she's from Virginia's Blue Ridge, this author: this observer. She speaks beautifully... but who can't speak beautifully about what's beautiful, i wonder. Even so, there's a peculiar difference when someone writes with truth and seeking in the back of their brain as the context for every observation, like an accent that turns ordinary speach into echoes of some ancient royalty.

Of course she's from Virginia's Blue Ridge.

I'm tempted to think that's where she finds such beauty but the truth is, a mockingbird can fall to the grass anywhere. The art is not in the context, i know i know. It's in the eyes that have taken that smallest step of "being there," and accepted the miracle of being opened to notice
and observe.


what is it about places that render me so ...thorned and snagged like a patch being ripped from the quilt until it's nothing more than a stringy-edged square of fabric without a place to belong? You could sew the patch back into place, but the edges have frayed and the shape has changed. It would never fit the same.

it would need a new place

or perhaps my eyes need opened to notice and observe the beauty in place-less-ness.
or the beauty in awkward fits