Place

I recently spent a week in New Mexico taking a writing class. Jumping from big eastern city to big rural desert and then back again was disorienting-- the place that I am plays a huge role in how I think of myself and of the world around me. But it was not disorienting in the way I had expected. I thought I would get to the desert and wonder why I was living in the city at all, when desert seems to fit me so well. Rather, I found myself making some peace with New York.

So, while the following poem-thing isn't directly in line with the contents of this blog, when I look back at what I wrote that week, this one seems important to my thinking, spiritual or otherwise.

Radio

Today it was the a.m. radio, murmuring news into my tent from the trailer next door, from where the man stood at the tiny kitchen window, washing his breakfast plate with slow circles of the rag.

The radio was not talking sense, rather, it was burbling like scratchy water, it was awakening me to something outside of myself, it was letting me know that I had let myself sleep in, something I will not do so often.

The sound was a strange tangle of red dirt and people walking on red dirt in sandals, it was nature and manmade, it made me remember that morning in the dunes and in the city hold some frequencies that are the same, that I do not let myself rest enough in either, that the morning of both places lift the fog of my mood just like the sun lifts up the mist that curled around the hills and the roof tops before dawn.

Yes, a radio is playing in a desert and it reminds me of 126^th street, of buses backing up and the murmur of children walking themselves to school, and someone in the kitchen washing her breakfast plate with slow circles of a rag, and I do not mind the memory, I find that I can be pleased with either morning, that as hard as I try to separate these places they will twist and weave in my half-formed thoughts of waking.