in the desert I have no words

Honestly I wasn't sure how I was going to get in the car.  A hundred what if 's clicking through my mind like a slideshow. What if I hadn't let the kids out for one last jump before we hit the road? We wouldn't have found the injured dog laying in our yard. She would have died alone. What if I had let them go out sooner? She might have been helped before it was too late. What if I had taken the time to stroll the yard last night? I might have helped her avoid a long night of dark and pain. What if this dog.... was someone's Kilo?

It is the innocence of dogs that gets to me.  

Eyes that mix fear with trust. 

Their silence too- the inability to say "I need help."    

The pictures I have of her are too graphic but they were taken to help find her owner.  The only way a dog with that broken of a leg could have gotten into our yard was if she had been hit very near our house. And on Easter Sunday the only chance we had to help her was to go door to door and find her owner.  

Who would have a cattle dog with a leather collar but no tags: the Wayman's. Together BC and I walked down the street. Me holding my camera. It goes like this: Mr. W dressed for church opens the door. Are you missing a dog? A dog that looks like this? We believe she was hit....

Turns out it was a Wayman dog. In fact Molly was the mother of all the dogs they had. Her owner one of the adult brothers.  A man with small children.  A man called down the street by his brother to retrieve his dying dog on Easter morning.

I feel complicit in the demise of this dog. It is not fault or guilt it is connection. The same connection to Kilo and my sister. Deaths that teetered on the edge of isolation. Suffering in plain sight.  The drowning man.  The call from Everest.  Texts from a plane. 

Of course I didn't do what I should have. I didn't destroy the photos. Like the stories I took from my time working in the hospital I hold on to the images of other people's pain. It is not so much morbid curiosity as it is the need to take what I can't justify and cage its power with words.  

Turn it all black and white and flatten the demons.   

There are other reason I take photos. I don't trust my memory to hold enough. I have times when I need to see things and if I can't find them perfectly resurrected by the words in my memory I panic.  I don't like to be startled- I need to know right where things are.

Often it is the missing details in a dream that are the triggers of my nightmares. I still remember the overwhelming urge to photograph my sister's apartment. I never did but perhaps I might have been better off if I had. Instead I drank it all in and it ate me up. In the end I had to tear up my mind to get free of it. 

 These days I have learned to find ways out without setting my mind on fire. 

I have erected small shelters from the wind. 

But nothing works as well as the desert does. Even when I sleep words and phrases dominate my head. My mind is always writing and I have a hard time keeping up. But in the desert I have no words. They pass harmlessly by like the shadows of clouds rolling across the sand. I’ve tried listening but I can’t quite hear them. They flutter away. I have taken a hundred notebooks for long car rides down dusty desert roads and they all come home empty. 

So of course I did get in the car.  We did go to the edge of the desert. Bathed in silence I could make out in the distance feelings that shimmer like a mirage I knew there was once a dog named Molly whose life did not end they way it should have. I knew of a lost sister and the broken body of a black dog, both died reaching for what they never would have. Somewhere deeper the fears of a young mother with nowhere and no one to turn to for help. But the feelings fluttered and faded into the sunlight, whisked up by ribbons of heat.   

And as I reminded myself if wanted to jump from where I was I had to let go of the want of ground first. I had to look ahead, loosen my body, and push away the world beneath me. Right then something caught in my mind: What gets me about dogs is their innocence, their fear & trust, and their silence.

     

    Forever rest in peace silence~ 

a chance of you, by mlb

a chance of you

a chance of you  mlb

It’s like holding hands in the dark

peering, waiting, wondering
feeling the wind move in

the leafs rise & fall as waves in a broken amber ocean 

chill reaching
the strength of a look dropped half way

the touch stopped before it started

silence is clouds bridging the gap from here to where I stand

the shadows long

the highway drab

watching, waiting, wondering

as the storm crawls nearer

and never comes

standing in the absence of rain

in the quiet of an afternoon

in the middle of nowhere

the sky streaking by without touching the ground

the wind a whimpering  embrace

I could pretend to stand beside you

your shoulder against mine

as if we weren’t at all

I want to whisper in the air is that you?

Are you really there?

Are we really anywhere?

 eyes shut tight, waiting, wondering

a storm blowing by in the night

whispering but never speaking

over the lights not on in a house well lit

turning the pages of a an empty book

pretending not to see what isn’t there

when you rolled your mouth to mine

words falling like snow in lamp light-

If I have never been here, you will never know me to miss me.

the storm blows over in sunset

flame embedded in the bones of the rising dark

followed by a morning that hangs

stark & empty

I just don't know

Officially the garden is now the chickens' domain though few have dared to wander in after the long summer of the Farmer Chicken Wars.   

 This little one is perplexing.  BC was in a bad mood last night.  Not only had he shot a nail into his thumb he'd been wrestling with the new joys of having a teenager.  "Hello new full time father meet Mr & Mrs. Parent Teacher Conferences."  I'm sure I didn't help...earlier in the week "Have you seen your kids grades?!" Conner's Mom asked Fisher's Dad choking back copious amounts of laughter.  He took it well considering he was owed about 7 years of "Not quite so simple in real life is it buddy?!" What does any of this have to do with Beach- absolutely nothing but she's the one who went to bed without comment after being chewed to pieces by her grumpy, well meaning, dad. 

And this morning she slept in.  

Stayed in her PJ's well past noon...

 After not dropping dead hiking yesterday I got the nerve up to go for a run.  All week its been killing me I think about it all the time: 

I want to go for a run, I 'd love to go for a run, I need to go for a run...  

Feeling well enough having less to do with it then the need to clear my head   If I had thought I could have made it farther than the mailbox I would have tried it days ago!!!!   As it was I made 4.5 miles with nothing to report but a beautiful blue October.

...yeah, I just don't know.