Saturday, December 5, 2009

Final Night's Camp, Chesuncook.




The Crooked Blue Spine Of Maine

"a heaving, swelling, sea of color, chanting overhead."
"How deep our sleep, under the starry composite. Only the unwinding yarn of our exhausted fire, scribbles itself against the dark cluttered backdrop."
"The light, its cheek pressed against the lake, burns the skin of the deep unsettled. Over in the trees that spring from shore, as arrows do from the chest of an unfinished man, labored breath laps at the shore I can hardly see, my squint filtering nothing. My blindness on this day, that took so long to arrive, is more apparent than the clear-cut scars along the soft crooked spine of Maine."

Leafing Through The Last Days "Journal Quotes"

"The lake jostles in it's earthy cup -reverberating against stars that tonight are tourists that flock to my magnificent sleep."

"So big a lake, after being confined to the hallways of the Penobscot, you feel and hear; rising and cowering tides."
"Paddling open wind swept lakes -keeps shores at a distance and arms strong."
"No matter how glorious the river is, rushing beside this campfire I enjoy alone among the quiet; it is meant to be shared!

On Chesuncook...


the hours wait, hanging in the sky smelling of charred arrangements, the sun expelling itself wringing the lake of light so that emptiness could only be more emptyto voyeur the nudness of loons and the great body of Chesuncook curling its shoulder into the corner of the open rock, accepting it’s loose advances,

so that underneath the retracting tide the hips of rock hiking skirt, reveal the dried bone and warmth, bed and coal of what we could and shouldn’t be.

bivouacked in moonlight and sound so that escaping the wheeze of shore in a scattered lace written out along the beach you can read you, in a scribbled, tide-abandoned tongue, the hours waiting and smelling themselves.


Prose Flows Down The River


the linoleum reflecting cheap 70’s blue sky, the covers of magazines trickling through the limbs of downed trees, newsprint smoldering above poorly enunciated fires and books, books stack, leaning and reaching towards the sun, telling no stories, inventing no truths about eddy foam swirling, panting after crawling through the lungs of wheezing channels and roads that swell and slosh against the creek of camp, searching the cracking and aging, the pale and smooth bed its flesh sweats against.