Author: Ward

I’m the creator and operator of this little corner of the internets, writing on all things related to art and more specifically my experiences trying to figure this whole thing out. I guess I’m trying to figure out life, too, but mostly I just post about art here.

wondering

sometimes i wonder.  i wonder if i were you who i would be?  where would i be?  when would i be?  were i you would i love me?  or would i feel nothing?  what kind of days might i have?  would i still feel the same about life and friends and love and life?  would i no longer dream of waking up to you if i were to wake as you?  would i worry your worries and cry over your sorrows and laugh at your humors and would it be queer to feel your flows and ebbs as par my natural course?  would i get up in the mornings still wondering where you are and whether words from you were going to find me in my inbox?  would i look down at myself and be aroused?  i wonder if you follow me.  do you?  would i get in your car and find it strange that the stations are not in the same place on the radio as in my own car.  would i listen to your music and know the words and sing along the way you do?  were i you would your shoes fit my feet?  and would i find it awkward trying to balance in them?  if i were you is it inappropriate were i to gently caress myself?  and would it be strange were i looking into the mirror wondering why i can see you staring back and not me?  would i even know i were you or would i just be me being you with no mind of distinction or difference?  would i just cease to be me with no way of getting back?  i wonder.

crush

over the mound and up into autumn brown grass sky is an ocean of sand and unswept tears.  i am here and i am dead.  behind in these trenches are dug the unspent moments between scenes of youth.  i am dead until i return with all the carbine spent and casings hammered like nails in dead plank boards.  i am no hammer nor gavel; i am bankrupt beyond means to exchange lives for life.  there is no return nor untrod path back to a breathy lightness.  i am here and i am dead.  i sit under this only one tree lone and bare of leaves and bare and lone of bark.  it the only respite, a shade from the grime and smoke amongst the grime and smoke.  it is your tree.  our tree.  my tree.  i dig deep and deeper and deepest till the roots pass over my eyes, bone wisp hairs to call me back to moments in summer next to green grassy water where kisses fell like august rain on hot cheeks and butterfly eyes while pink lips whisper of how forever will unfold.  but that never happened.  you went away.  you went away into war and stayed there under the bloody boom and scream of levanthian brothers.  i saw our never born children grow up.  i fed them.  i cradled them.  i taught them how to string a bow but never taught  them of arrows for love had died and gone away with you.  i saw them grow up and grow out and move away, our children that were never born.  there never came a letter from that place you had gone off to.  only silence came to sit next to memories that when left alone like children turn themselves into a wintered howl. i am here and i am dead crawling under your tree to hold your hand.  it is not much but it is more than i have ever had, more than i ever hoped.  i loved you and you went away and i am content.  i missed you but i would have missed you more had you stayed and lived that dying descent while your heart never stopped crying for your cedar scented brothers and your mother’s land.  so now i am dead too and under this tree with you.  i can feel the inch of earth worm its way downward crushing.  i hold your hand.  i am here and i am dead so i might open my eyes one last time upon you.

chloroform

here on the surgery table under the tin capped incandescents there lingers the lungfuls of purpled dust motes.  outside there are too many. is too much.  but inside more so than all else so little left remains.  bone and sinew wrap in desperate defense protecting a muscle which when opened to the airy whispers and delicate caresses needs no ward.  there is no doctor who can file and crack and break away this barrier to lay in heaps the bone-tendon-sinew mass which now wraps around, strangling in child-acting-motherly embrace and lay it as heap to our side.  scalpel in hand might we auto-lacerate and sop up in buckets our flood of starved blood and let in with hungry gasps breathless reality to find under the flickering sun conductor to our cadence and trill to a new rhythm that time can only rest aside and wait while eternity ticks its ways down toward nothing.

Dunno

Here this morning under the dying Autumn sun the bus rocks over gravel slick roads and fluorescents flash steadfastly over the slated cherry slumbering eyes all while a metal bird chirps excitedly to the rear.  We call this something. A life. A routine. A ritual. An exit.  I wish I could tell my child this is all right. But how come?  Everybody is on a shoestring, hamstrung into a bus where we grit our way no different than those that once creaked and cracked and broke on once our ironic laden rennaisainced oceans. How come? Can you tell me the difference between this world and a death wrought on flowery treachery of servitude?  It matters little this that answer, the key to that lock-in-step thought is nothing next to this: that I am already free to think as simply as I breath and to embrace as humbly as I may even as this day that cools under the shade of this our modernity also warms contentedly to this the beat of our unimagined and simply real humanity.

And if you still cannot get off at the next stop then listen carefully to that tin brittle bird in the back because it is no bird as much as it is the creak and the grind of metal on metal, the scrape against casing that bullets you down to the dry well upside and inside out in Murakami form.  Time to get up and get out.  And remember your time now is no more than a monkey face and some wrinkles done beautifully under a mop of gorgeous hair.  Smile.

“My god, it’s full of stars!”

I left after work yesterday to drive out to Deer Park in hopes of finding clear night skies at its Denver-esque elevation of 5400-feet.  I had originally thought to join a star-party down in Goldendale this weekend but I bought tickets to PAX without realizing they conflicted with each other and so opted for my own star-party of one.  I arrived around 9:30 at night after driving the last some 10 miles up a side of a mountain in near pitch-black conditions.  Upon reaching the entrance to the site I mistakenly took a left instead of a right, which would have taken me to campsites, and instead ended up even further up the mountain near its very top.  Given that the stars were already out and rather risk driving up and down dirt roads that strangely had one side mountain and one side pitch black (I discovered the next day on my drive back that there are some very nearly sheer drop-offs at points so I think the decision to stay put a good one.)  I decided to park there and just unfurl my sleeping bag in the SUV.

And stars there were a’plenty.  While Sequim and Port Townsend obstructed some of the viewing to the north, by and large the entire sky was available to me.  It is really hard to describe that feeling when you realize the clouds in the skies are really the Milky Way, itself full of a hundred thousand million stars.  And just seeing the constellations and asterisms and how really they do stand out in the sky it is not hard to understand how our ancestors who came upon these patterns in their sky night after night would have eventually come to provide them names and histories unique to each of them.  I took a few breaks through the night to get some sleep but the stars were easily seen from inside and I kept just rolling over to look at them.  And most happily, I was able to see my old favorite Orion before sunrise as it currently rises out the East along with the Moon.

After watching the sun rise over the Puget Sound from atop the mountain, I then tramped my way down the side of the mountain, following the Three Forks trail that drops 3,300 feet over 4.3 miles where it comes out upon the convergence of three creeks, Cameron Creek, Grand Creek and the Upper Greywolf.  Note to self, that which goes downeth must eventually go uppeth.  And further note to self, it is better to first go uppeth and then proceed to go downeth than its reverse.  Regardless of the fact that I ended my hike drenched in sweat, it is wonderful trek that traverses conifers then the remains of the September 1998 fire and finally down into the very cool shade of deciduous trees.  And of course, a day is not complete without a couple of hours sleeping on the beach such as one might find at Dungeness Reserve on the way back from a jam packed night and day.

See all the pictures from my trek out to the Olympic National Park.

And an easter egg, cowboy-style.