When the earth is still

i wrote a poem-ish thing tonight. i’m not wild about it, but it is what it is. i guess i’ll stick it at the bottom of this post.

Cody Piersall just flew back home to Oklahoma today. i enjoyed his week-long visit. During said visit, the man and i spoke about just about everything that there was to speak about that we could think of, because the alternative was awkward silence. Although, admittedly, sometimes we embraced the awkward silence. But since we embraced it, it wasn’t very awkward.

One of the things that there was to speak of that we could think of was poetry. We got to talking about my time in Africa in 2009, or something like that, and i realized that the easiest way for me to remember how i felt at particular times was by re-reading some of the poetry that i had written. So i dug up the old poems, and talked him through them while i tried to figure out what i had meant in them. Usually i couldn’t figure out what i meant in them very well (a case in point).

In the process of doing so, though, it became increasingly clear that—in general—i don’t really care if people understand what i mean in my poems. If it were important to me that people understood what i meant in my poems, then i would write them in prose. Or at the very least, i would write prose explanations of them. i think that it’s more important to me that the poems exist, and if anybody ever reads them, then they can make of them what they want, just as long as they don’t try to act like they know what i meant when i wrote them.

A few Saturdays ago i went for a little hike in the Indian Peaks Wilderness, 45 minutes from Boulder. i had intended to summit a few mountains, but i wasn’t feeling particularly well, and i pulled my back a little bit. So i decided to call it a day after summiting Mount Audubon—which was disappointing, as i had planned to climb the same mountains 11 months previously, but instead ended up summiting only Mount Audubon, and then calling it a day. Following are a few pictures from the day: i was at a stream for sunrise, so i took advantage of the morning light to take a few landscape-ish pictures. i did most of the climb with assorted other groups of hikers on the mountain, and they will appear in the remaining pictures.








































When the earth is still
and the night is long
and the day is calm
and the wind is cool
and the crickets crick
and it sighs in displeasure
and the earth is still
and the night is long
and the day is calm
and the wind is cool
and the crickets crick
and its eyes in displeasure
see that the earth is still
and the night is long
and the wind is cool.
And the crickets crick
and we could never know what it is
or what it did to deserve its cricking
but the earth is still
and the night is long
and the day is calm
and the wind is cool
but we don’t seem to care
or to feel any of it.
And the crickets keep on cricking it.