Watercolor by Sandy Vaillancourt

of the Sandia Mountains

New Mexico 

“As a child I began to count birds.  At age fifty the sum total is precise and astounding, my only secret.  Some men count women or cars, but I have my birds, excluding, of course, those extraordinary days: the twenty-one thousand snow geese and sandhill cranes at Bosque del Apache . . . the one-thousand cliff swallows nesting in the sand cliffs of Pyramid Point, their small round burrows like eyes, really the souls of the Anasazi who flew here a thousand years ago.”
            -from the poem “Counting Birds” by Jim Harrison

Everything lawless including sleep.  His afterburner dreams.

As rockets fell in the distance he remembered the pocked sidewalk that Choctaw Scott showed him, the result of shrapnel from a suicide bomber.  He couldn’t help but think that even though a desert they drew lines across her shifting sands.  O Afghanistan, the stench of sickness drifts with your winds for a thousand years.  How much is left of your broken heart, a heart that once knew the ways of what was to be done before the madness of the world?  Interminable bleed without a tourniquet.   

He then looked up seeing three doves on a wire.  In Afghanistan they call them laughing doves not mourning doves, an obvious irony in this inconsolable place.  He also saw a magpie in the crown of a conifer which made him pine for New Mexico.      

There was an explosion and then as if he was outside his body he heard the unholy sound of air expelled from the depths of his lungs.  Burning upwards into embarrassment.  A high pitched squeal.  A sound he didn’t think he was capable of making.  Perhaps the sound of death before dying.

Happiness came late but then again he’d always be around, waiting for spring’s particular shade of green.  And expectant rivers.  The fleeting wildflowers he’d dreamed about even before he arrived.  The kind that return to dust after a spring rain bloom.  But the season of green and water is also the season of fighting, when the snow withers from mountain trails over which they descend to this place, strangely beautiful wearing sandals and Kalashnikovs.  For them happiness is an unknown luxury, not even in memory, as pawns on an ancient chessboard, caught between the greed of tussling empires for millennia.  Their dead children flying off in the shape of question marks.

To glance into her eyes held such consequence, but it couldn’t be helped.  The beauty of the world painted on a tiny canvas of green eyes, black mascara, behind a veil coal black.   

He bought a cheap painting at a bazaar from a boy named Azimi, the same age as his daughter.  Most of his work wasn’t worth hanging on the wall.  But there was one that spoke to him, especially when Azimi said it was of his father and grandfather, before the Taliban captured their village, killing them both.    

1/15/18

Afghanistan

“Once I had a moment of absolute balance while dancing with my sick infant daughter to Merle Haggard.”

            -from the poem “After Ikkyu” by Jim Harrison

"Dallas Alice"
Miss Magpie

“Inside people fear the outside; outside, the in.  But then I’m always halfway in or out the door, most comfortable and at home in this fear, knowing falling is best for my nature.  Backward works well, or gathered for the leeward pitch, imitate the sea in perfect balance in her torment.”

            -from the poem “After Ikkyu” by Jim Harrison