Natachee's Longhorns

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.  Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

            -Rainer Maria Rilke 

Portrait

What I read and drink is somewhat limited. 

The only source of reliable information is

poetry. I’d love to fall in love with red wine

but can’t afford the good stuff.

Birds are tiny gods although I’m no

birdwatcher. I have no interest in cataloguing

or naming except to know what they call

themselves. I have many favorites but they

seem to change a lot. But I’ll always love

crows, the way they wait by the highways

like the widows of Juarez and Kabul.  

I’d like to become more beautifully indifferent

like trees, although I’m no farmer to love

a piece of earth forever. Before I set

a taproot, the next storm carries me away.

I don’t have any close friends within six

hundred miles of home but beyond that, many.

I’ll always dream of Paris and Madrid even

though I’m just an Albuquerque kind of guy.

Miller Williams said everyone is a battlefield.

I don’t trust anyone without a pocketful of

secrets. There is a hole in my pocket but I always

keep it full so I don’t have to wear the iron mask

I threw away at forty. 

I like the jazz of Chet Baker, the blues of

Lightnin’ Hopkins, any cowboy songs

sung by old men.

I like to dream of simple things like waking

up early, writing until noon, cooking dinner,

going to the bar. When I need to recharge the

batteries, getting lost on a highway pointed

anywhere, flying along with birds.