The news today, dividing our property according to the ascendancy of our deeply held myths. Everything that happens in a day is like the clanging of church bells, the lumbering trucks clogging city streets, the shouts and noise and sonic chaos, and a weariness that says, die innocent. Ashamed to ask for what you desperately want. What is wealth if not the absence of want?

She was a young woman, dedicated to the great and remorseless enterprise of simply being herself. He asked her to fill the emptiness that haunted him in polite conversation. She said, there are no ladders to my window.

the homecoming waltz of silence and song
of speech and touch
of humor and sorrow
turning slowly in the empty gymnasium
beneath the ghosts of streamers and confetti

fallen hours, the years a shipwreck
crying out like wounded birds
melodies like worn out pastures
horses grazing on major thirds

Clumps of wet snow hung heavy in the boughs of pine trees, and the angled down across the trunks in dusky streaks. One breath, spring coming, life in the air, the wet breeze as the sun goes down and the forests deepen, full of things you'll never see, shadowy half animals shuddering awake in the unknown, roaming the hidden wilderness, whispering in a dead language across the span of centuries,

everything is here that was elsewhere.

It was a long slide. It was a tough sell.
But know you know,
everything is funny in hell.

One thing new was the mountains. The first time he saw real mountains was the summer after college, during the opening stretch of the first west coast tour with the Kissers. He fell asleep in the back seat of the van after Fargo and when he woke the next afternoon they were halfway through Montana, and a solid wall of snowcapped mountains framed the horizon far off to one side of the interstate. He kept staring.

Now, he sees mountains every time the sky is clear, from a number of vantage points around Seattle, the Cascades off to one side, the Olympics off to the other. Standing guard over the city.

he put books onto shelves in his room. It was the first time he'd had his own room since graduating from college.