What Men Talk About Around A Fire

“A man is found dead in the desert wearing nothing but a backpack. What happened?”

All the good places to eat breakfast in Durango, Colorado

Our favorite shows,

and how you can remember the year the horses were brought over–1694–

if you put the date in the drawer of the kitchen closet of your brother’s house.

How many men have been born to your uncles,

and where did your sister go when she ran away for two years her junior year of high school?

What will you build above your garage?

What will you do with the airstream, now parked in Maine–how beautiful it is up there?

We could be in the high country how wide these ponderosas,

but no,

desert, just look at the red.

Look at the cliffs, the stars.

Did you see it?

The times we found loves.

What will happen in our corner of the world?

When he moved from Austin.

How much time we’ve spent in these woods.

Our plans to continue.

The times before in this same spot.

The time I so deeply hallucinated I perceived the world not as myself,

not with my own eyes, not as me,

not as camper or laugher,

not as my grandmother’s joy,

not as a learned privileged man,

not as a man at all,

not as a lover, not as a planker,

not at all in my own cup, waving like the fin of some judgmental whale,

not as one who touches trees,

not one at all,

but instead as the generic observer of perception itself,

as a fertile ground for earth’s molds,

as an un-scared knower of death of all things,

a shaker of the eyes of consciousness,

the culmination of all the world’s complexity,

now, honored, somehow,

now, later, sitting taller,

brighter,

at a river.