Leaving the Wash

(March 2021, a poem about leaving homes, written upon leaving Craggy Wash, a random piece of desert land that had been my home for a month. I realized then more than ever that anywhere can be a home, and that buslife would involve a constant making and leaving of homes. You can see some seeds here that eventually bore fruit in my Green (home pome) 7 months later. My interior meaning-making is sometimes consistent. The observant reader will notice multiple strong references to both Whitman and Eliot, perhaps with hints of Stevens and Graham.)

Quickly my Craggy time ends
After a month of more and more homing, ever climbing,
Ever increasing height of hope of home, evermore rootdepth
Green-colored— the seventh sacred direction, deictic,
Here-in-the-center, the timeless intersection where the story
Happened, happens in the ears of those to whom I am
Ancestor—
Green the color of home, where I sunstruck
The blue yellow and something living has grown, here
(Even the desert rocks grow green
Under my bootsoles, leaving living gardens of unseen
Meaning.)
Here I stopped and did miracles, still and still
Moving.
Home is between here (the rocks) and here (my mind),
An electron cloud pinned in my observation,
Merging.

Climbing the crag higher and deeper I feel I could settle
Here forever— gravity’s desire— to leave is to leap
From an ever-rising height faithing the new
Greenblue of Lake Havasu will catch you,
That the cliffjumper will live to open
Eyes under clean blue Colorado water and see green.
Rip yourself from these roots, cliffjumper!
Home grows like weeds wherever you are!
It blows like dandelion seeds in the wind—
Fear not this small death. It breathes.

The homegrown magic is this: in leaping from the cliffgarden
You leave it larger and greener than it was,
And yet in your landing splash you realize you, too,
Are larger and greener than you were.
In cutting the vine between the world and I,
I behold the divine miracle of unceasing parturition.
No halves remain, but two larger wholes.
No loss, only gain, and one larger soul.
No death succeeds, but seeds blossomings.
Wild gardens grow the great spirit of our earth,
And pain leaving home is but pain giving birth.