For some of us it's the words that keep us alive. Words and music and rivers and waves and mountains. Everything else, from health insurance to where and how we will make money and live for the next six months, simply falls into place however it may, as long as those "Higher Laws," (to borrow from Thoreau) are obeyed.

I've been living like this ever since my junior year of college when I made the simultaneous discovery that I wasn't really all that fired up to be a doctor, and what's more, there were all these rivers nearby, most of all the Chattooga, that needed exploring.

The latest chapter is Seattle. I have my eye on new rivers, ones that flow from the Olympic Peninsula unobstructed, undammed, to the Pacific Ocean.

Some of you (hermanos y hermanas) have been wondering how the move has been here, and I lament being out of touch, jammed up with editing and drywall dust and never quite enough time left over to give the necessary reports and stoke. When my time breaks down like this, sometimes all I can get off is a poem or two, but that's all it takes really. Waking up in the morning and just getting one true dream or thought down just right: for me that's all it takes.

Here's a couple pieces from move here . . .

The soldiers in the Atlanta Airport

The young always want to be in
packs, and part of me wants to go with
them, wherever they’re going, but I don’t
like how they walk. Shoulders squared.

Here at Gate 33, a frightened-looking woman
in her late 40s holds a coffee cup in both hands
and dances slightly to the generic adult contemporary (Where
is Brian Eno’s Music for Airports when we
need it?), her feet locked in place but her
knees moving back and forth, slowly, a few inches
at a time.

We’re all on a flight to
Las Vegas. It’s easy to tell
who is going there to gamble (the kid with the class ring
and the vinyl jacket) and who is connecting with
other flights (the Asian man with a suit and tennis shoes.)

But I’ve never tried to explain the American Zeitgeist
And won’t start now.
For me it’s always been
about trying 
to make it home.

Hearing the rhythm

He hears somewhere that I can play
Bossa Nova on guitar
and after a couple mighty goblets
of Malbec I pull out my party
trick and play for him.

For a second the chords take me back
to the first time I heard Gilberto and Jobim:
“Corcovado, Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars”
on the old jazz show at WUOG on a Sunday night in Athens Georgia
after a day of paddling the Chattooga
 
and how with my eyes closed I could still feel the river moving
there under my bed in the darkness
and now with the headphones on
and these new (40 year-old) sounds of
Brazil and the ocean
mixing in to that river,
it was like seeing
upstream and downstream from both
sides of the river. Seeing your future, in other words,
and understanding, even as it was happening
that you were seeing your future.

And more than a decade later,
the last maj7 chord still floating through the room,
the kid looks at me amazed,
“How come more people don’t play this kind of stuff?”
he asks, and my answer comes without thinking
and yet loaded with waves and stories and pots
of beans and rice cooking over fires on beaches:

“It’s because they’ve never really
heard the rhythm.”