–Trout Lake, WA

“Sometimes, we’ve seen this 300 foot being with lights rise up on the side of Mt. Adams and then walk down the mountain right towards us.  It was amazing.”  -James Gilliland

Tasked with the arrival, the lights are out.  Drums thrum
the obsidian skin of absence.  Sun, an afterthought.

Here’s the real show.  Our minds grow centuries
and charcoled images of Greek gods lend themselves

to ones self-professed.  They embrace orbs.
Orbs shedding themselves, divesting themselves from

alien parents to cleave to us.  Transient bodies denied
vessels: an apophenian universe of everything we in turn

contain. There is a blackened land out there.  No water
shall save it, yet someday flora will return it.  Shotguns ride

at the ready.  Scattershot. Buckshots burst everything
into small light holes; petroglyphs of arrows

and the faces of all whom we’ve disappointed, betrayed
and loved.  Such sorrow in the satellites that consistently

track neat lines above.  Watchers wish for the odd turn left,
for any sign we aren’t alone.  Everything we are;

glass in dark desert, sharp shell fragments, diodes.  In truth,
we are frantic scans for the faintest moment.  The wet grass smell

as we wander further from the fires.  The iron blood
stench of crusade.  We drive and drive our

horses forward onto the spears of loneliness. We create
gods for our mountains and skies.  The sun rises

over that beast slouching more times than we really care to admit.
And the colors are variegated, a place revealed;

a skin with veins pulsing, with endless days turning towards
our northern-most stars that rise again to be whatever we need them to.