Four::

The clouds over the Sandias speak of snow, yet here in the lower levels it is rain warm and dry beneath the quilted gray sky. Ulf paces and pauses and paces some more, needing to get out. Once out, he sniffs and pokes about. Whatever his needs, they seem to be bids for breathing the outside air. I understand this. Inside the dryness is sometimes like breathing cotton, taking the fibers of the air in rather than air itself.

I used to like sleeping outside.  That was never exactly under the stars. All that openness kept me awake. But I like to feel the air moving around me. Screens are good. Lots of screens. A screen porch, where the outside is just there.  Or in a tent with screen windows and doors. You feel the air and hear everything but this little fabric skin keeps you safe. From insects I guess, although for me, the feeling of being protected was deep and nameless.

The first time I ever slept on a screen porch was among kind strangers in Moline Illinois. They had a screen porch on the Mississippi river. I had a hankering to go across the country. My friends all had gone to Europe for the summer months. I needed to escape the everyday and join in the adventure. There was a ride board, someone driving from Berkeley to Massachusetts who wanted riders to share the gas cost and respite for the driver. I was not quite a car snob, but it was a BMW and that sounded like a car that was going to make it those thousands of miles without breaking down. I was in.

One of the other riders had an aunt and uncle who lived in Moline. Either this couple were the coolest ever, and possibly that was the case, or it had been arranged in advance. But we showed up, four kids from the west coast with sleeping bags, and they put us up on the screen porch. They also took us out in the motor boat on the river under the full moon.

On that same journey I saw fireflies for the first time, in Lincoln, Nebraska, where flags were outside all the houses for the 4th of July. It was a sight to behold, block after block with red, white and blue banners decorating the verandas. It seemed like such an innocent love of country, a pride of belonging to a time and place where Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers could be brought to life by an entire community. Where I grew up, it was all about the fireworks. We would head out to the shopping center in the station wagon. There would be a soup pot full of popped corn, a bottle of root beer and some plastic glasses. The tailgate of the car would go down, and between the explosions you could hear everyone at once going "OOOOOHHHHH!!!!". I remember wondering if there was a script of some kind the adults had, letting everyone know the sound to make.

Today we stack rocks. I make a mistake and do one tall stack at the edge of the down slope, and it tumbles toward the road way below. All the rocks stop short of coming to rest on the road, and I realize setting these spires on the edge above may be a bad idea. There is no reason for them, other than to balance boulders. I lift the largest ones I can manage, and play with them, edge upon edge, until they are steady, then add a third. Today, it is threes only. Most of the snow is melted away from the shadowed side of the arroyo, and yesterday temperatures stayed in the 50s in the afternoon. Winter will have another go or two here in the high desert before it is done for the season, and those are the days I anticipate most, the days of the fluffy snow. I can never get enough of it falling through the air. It doesn't fall so much as swirl and dance. High desert snow is like little girls in full skirts, turning and turning.

These are the days of impeachment hearings in the senate. Someday people will ask, why was the country so divided? How is it possible that enough people believed in the righteousness of a man so intent upon fostering the divisions? How could the same people who elected a progressive man of color turn around in just a few short years and elect a man so crude? But for now, there are many divisions. The other party, the Democrats, who could put an end to the madness, are also victims of the scourge of divisiveness perpetuated by social media. Their weakest candidate, the so called Democratic socialist, an elderly crotchety man who believes in social justice but no more so than the rest of the field of candidates, is supported by a cadre of non-persons with social media accounts who publish divisive stories designed to cause people to dislike others. Ironically, they are the same non-persons or designed by the same group in eastern Europe who fostered and fomented the campaigns to discredit the 2016 progressive candidates and promote distrust and hatred. Does anyone who supports him give credit to these revelations?  Most people think they know the future now. They thought during the 2016 elections that the first woman would be elected president of the United States, and they think today that impeachment will not proceed to removal from office. I watch with only the knowledge that the future is malleable, unknowable to those caught in time, mutable, bearing surprises no one can predict.

I am not pretending to predict anything now.

There is no such thing as being right, in the usual sense of right or wrong, a sense we all agree upon. There are points of view. This is not a play on morality. They said ten years ago, one person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist. The world today is torn like paper along divisions where interests are represented one way and then another way. You can take up the banners of any side and find arguments to support it.  The subdivisions are becoming ever more numerous, and tribes keep forming and reforming. We are more and more like sand. When the tribes are so small no one can define them, we achieve unity.

For those living within them, these are harsh times. Here I am, having left my island of sanity having recognized there was no such place. Some of us feel it is midnight in the garden of good and evil, midnight at new moon. We all carry cell phones that light up, and which way is the light turned? Out into the world, or up into our faces?

Tonight shall we sleep under the stars? It is almost warm enough.

third: Stepping Out

There were the years when we were young.  We were never all that young together, but young enough that half our lives, and more, still lay ahead. There was no way then to know that, only the suspicion that we were just starting out on a grand adventure.

So much intentionality went into every facet of what we became, from before we ever crossed paths, all the way on. He, the one I had sought for so very long, had also been seeking. ISO. That was the acronym in those days. In search of. There is power in the search. The search defines the path, the search finds the path, the search adheres to the path.

There was something he did, and something I did, to bring us to each other. It was deliberate. I have amused myself from time to time wondering if we could have done it another way. I had thought perhaps I could meet someone if I went to a night school class in wine tasting. One evening I walked by one. The classroom door was open, and the room was full of men and women. There must have been fifty people jammed into that small space. I knew right away that half of them were seeking life partners or at minimum a casual date. The others, who knows. Maybe they just wanted to taste wine in an uninteresting room with dozens of other people, rather than drive a half hour to the wine country.

Early on I discovered my choice in men had regularly gone to Barnes and Noble, thinking he might meet an attractive woman among the books. I myself had patronized another bookstore, in another town, and never even thought of meeting someone there.

What was it about him, this one man out of hundreds or even thousands whose path crossed mine in a meaningful enough way that we connected and resonated like a perfect chord?

Let me go back farther, back to the man who fathered my daughters. When I met him, I was lost in the forest of untethered ideas and emotions that sought expression like fireworks. I told myself that the only way I could meet anyone who would matter at that point in my life was if he showed up at my door. Sure enough, he did that. He knocked on my door, sent by my landlord to cause mischief. Truly. I had pushed my landlord away when he tried to kiss me while screwing in a lightbulb. Yes, exactly that.

When later I set about to find someone who would go farther with me than the door of my flat, and the door of my bedroom, there were just a few little wishes. He must recognize me. How would he do that? He would see my spirit was from the mountains, in my love of tall trees, enormous trees of great girth and immense age. I would recognize him, as he would have burnished his soul with musicianship. He would be painted in laughter and wit. He would love the immense outdoors with passion and bring skill to his love. And so it came to be.

The years when we were young were the beginning. We each started from a place in the world defined by having had children with people we could not continue to live with. Having made those choices, both to braid our lives with people with whom we created both ribbons of unhappiness and progeny, we lived in a continuity of distress. The simple act of choosing someone new and a brand new set of circumstances, with intentionality, lifted us both out of that distress. There were still obligations to those prior life partners to maintain a conversation, because we had children to parent, and those obligations were fraught with the tensions that had undone the marriages. The children that bound us to our earlier choices deserved every affirmative act we could each bring forward. The children were in our future an we were in their future, but not in the way we were each other's future.

Things I thought I knew then I did not know at all. One most important thought was that if we could model a successful, loving relationship then our children would be equipped to do the same as adults. They saw both, the stressed bondage of uneven partnering, where like two pieces of different puzzles the adults do not go through everyday life with an emotional bond, and the loving togetherness of adults who recognize each other and respect and honor each other. Which way did they break, our progeny? Not in any way we could have anticipated.

In the years when we were young, we learned we could not change the world but we could design our corner of it to be whatever we wanted it to be. I moved lighter weight things, plants and rocks, and my man moved boulders. He moved entire sections of the earth and transformed them from the chaos of nature or the flattened rubble of human interference into living dioramas. I have seen this only a few times in my life. The Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco is one such place. An immense indoor garden is designed in a series of rooms. You walk from the cool foggy city into a tropical paradise where lotus flowers are constantly in bloom and ferns as tall as houses line the walkways. Butterflies flit through in colors and designs that call to mind parade floats. Butchart Gardens in British Columbia is another form of paradise, or the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. Monet's gardens. There is a theme here, the garden. The secret garden. There are many parks, many glorious gardens. And there are the ones, the gardens not designed mainly according to mathematics and proportion, but to convey an idealistic scene of a land where magic is afoot. This is what we did together, eventually. Sometimes he would take up the wand, sometimes I would. Together we sought the places we could begin with, and transform.

Eventually it seemed we would slow down, and as it turned out, we could not, would not. It was as if we were powered by a fierce wind of change. Now here, being here now, I use google earth to wander the gardens we created, and the gardens those who came after us tore apart. There are thousands upon thousands of photographs I made that form a record of places that are behind someone else's gates, now.

second :: Walk to the labyrinth

Rather than traces of snow on the deck this winter morning, frost has formed a sparkling veil over everything. Sunrise colors paint the sky, a watercolor wash of pink above the horizon. Oddly it is the northern horizon, slightly bearing west, long low winter rays above the mesas. 

When first visiting these parts, it was those mesas that drew my imaginings. When the light was right, striations upon them glowed red. When the weather produced some sort of extreme desert cloud effects, shadows of them added textures of light and dark, and the sky became a canvas of sapphire blue and brilliant white. My camera and I spent many sets of hours seeking the byways with the biggest views. 

Today belongs again to my Hawaiian crow. It would be wondrous if it made another appearance, here, where I am studying the photos from yesterday. Seeking out images of crows in flight to match the tilt of wing, signature variances in motion, I watch again and again for any nuance.

Kiwi would know the shapes and movements of the crow in flight. I could send her the video via email, hoping she will see it amidst the dozens of clamorous outreach pieces that inundate us every few hours. She is not a fan of electronic communication but it is what we have at hand for this purpose. 

Kiwi is a world renowned avian expert. She has spent years upon years as a nomad, following the birds and recording her observations. We became friends in Hawai’i through my daughter, who fell in love with her. By then Kiwi had traded her gypsy ways for a one room house in the rainforest.  All she had wanted was a sleeping platform but regulations forced her into a few hundred square feet.  She had acquired a lot one of the neighbors had hand cleared over the years, making a forest path several hundred feet long, lined with nursery logs of fallen ohia inter planted with native lobelia and mamaki. Ohelo berries grew on vines that stretched into the canopy, the food of the endangered nene rarely seen amidst the numbered streets of the subdivision. 

It is a bright day, and the frost has vanished. No mystical mist today. Ulf waits patiently for his morning sniff about. He is old now and no longer the rowdy beast barely controlled on leash. He stays close when we go out, running ahead then stopping and waiting for me to catch up before he takes off again. 

He stops to scratch the ground. As many times as we have walked together I am uncertain what causes him to want to uncover something below the surface. Is there an underground creature that has tunneled beneath the path? Is it a trace of scent from a paw? 

A shard of pottery pokes out of the dirt near the scratches Ulf has made. I used a stick of juniper to prod it fully into view. It looks to be an old piece of Sandia Pueblo pottery, but rather than the usual reddish clay with eggshell and black motifs, it has a faint white wash with a blue gray design. The shape suggests a beak design. Maybe it was a figure of a bird. 

A flat boulder nests at the side of the path. I prop the pottery shard there and we continue to walk. All along this path are rocks with other rocks placed upon them. I have done that, for no particular reason. No one comes here but Ulf and me. I know this because ours are now and always now the only footprints in the sandy dirt or in the snow or sometimes the mud. We see coyote scat now and then. Rabbits. 

A dusky grouse flies so close to my face I can feel the air moved by its wings as it circles into the arroyo. Ulf lunges toward it then stops short and turns with his tongue hanging off the side of his mouth. Once upon a time, he pulled birds out of the air, but rarely in front of me. He knew I didn’t like him hurting the birds. But he never understood that the captured torn carcasses also let me know what he was doing. 

We continue on to the center of the path. We have been constructing a labyrinth there. I carry the design sketch in my jacket pocket. Some days I add three or four rocks, some days only one. There are pieces of jasper I have brought in, serpentine, banded river sandstone, red rocks with mica sparkling on the surface. Others are simple flint from the hillside. Chunks of obsidian and textured lava from the quiet volcanoes that surround the area sometimes turn up on our journeys and end up here. I want to bring back a boulder from the far north, marked with lichen, for the centerpiece. How to move it is a mystery I have yet to work out. The size I wish for is outside my capacity. I do not wish to seek help as this is my solitary project. A meditation. 

We return to a breakfast of poppyseed strudel and cappuccino. Making morning coffee is as close as I get to a ritual ceremony any more. I used the notebook kept by the cappuccino wizard, specifying the grams to use, the timing, temperatures and valves and the feel of the thing. I used the notebook until I could just do it, each cup of coffee being like the one before it, finished with a swirl of pourable foam. He showed me how to do it, but I never had to. The coffee was his morning ritual. I made the toast and eggs. 

It is not useful to wish for anything to be different, to be as it was. As you can see the mornings are still beautiful, the birds keep us company, Ulf takes me out into the chill. The labyrinth is coming along. 

The Visit by the ʻAlalā

The call of the Hawaiian crow split the air in the key of E. Half tone E, perhaps. Its oval yellow lit eye set at the upper edge of its slightly down curved generous beak clamped onto my gaze, startled me into knowledge no bird had ever come this close to me. Then it was gone, the koa phyllodes where it had rested just above my head bobbing in its leavetaking. 

I closed my eyes to fix the image in my mind, and heard the crow call one more time. Opening my eyes I watched the bird fly off into the broad New Mexico sky. The leaf like phyllodes were just out of reach. My camera was not. I recorded their acacia curves, mentally placing the crow there in their scythe shapes. 

I opened my messenger app and sent the image to Kai in Honolulu. Together we would ponder the meaning of this visit. To my knowledge fewer than a half dozen Hawaiian crow existed in the wild, all on Hawai’i island in the Pana’ewa forest. How would a koa tree come to grow in the high desert of Placitas New Mexico? Anyone I knew but Kai would either correct my vision to having seen and heard a New Mexico crow in a North American acacia tree, or simply take it to be a St Francis moment with birds in a place where the old saints had their way with people on a daily basis.  

I made as complete a visual record as I could of the area where I was walking, an open space where the wilderness meets the edges of civilization and the sounds of the city are faint in the background, mere swooshes, heard artifacts of traffic on the distant highway 25. The sky dominates the visual plane, stretching its canopy from each far horizon. Cabezon peak is one landmark some sixty miles off, tilting ever so slightly atop its spreading base. Much closer, the rugged Sandias loom in snow speckled splendor, nearly majestic, my mountains as much as the Pedernal mountain came to be Georgia O’Keefe’s mountain. We claim our landscapes as surely as we do our human lovers, affixing them to our soul scapes. 

Even as my car comes into sight, already the vision of the ʻAlalā  was becoming more surreal. Again I heard the squawk of my bird. Setting the camera to video mode I turned the lens skyward to capture shape, motion, and sound. At this distance the distinctive beak and eye were not apparent. The crow circled and was gone. 

Kai has a complex role in modern Hawaii, a place where the ancestors and the demi-gods are often the same beings. By day, dedicated to upholding the literal legal meaning of the purpose of the state of Hawaii: to perpetuate the life of the land in righteousness. The rest of the time, an artist and almost high priest of the streets, he has formed an interface with the unseen, be they spirit or the invisible humans among us. I will be waiting for his perceptions, whenever and however he may choose to share them. 

At my car, a black iridescent feather lies upon the sandy floor of the parking area. It may be a wing feather, medium in length and tapered. It happens that I have a short length of string in my pocket. I use it to affix the feather to the rear view mirror. 

At home, I feel myself moving in something of a haze or a cloud. Time is feeling compressed and in the mirror I see fresh lines in my forehead but my lips are full and my eyesight acute. The rabbits in the arroyo can be seen hunkering down beneath the junipers. I can hear the footsteps of a pair of mountain lions sauntering across the face of the rise opposite where I stand. I feel an urge to make dessert. 

The pantry holds mixes from Trader Joe’s, cans of sweetened condensed milk, bags of raw nuts, a bottle of orange liqueur, a can of almond filling, honey, molasses, cardamom seed, anise everything. I settle upon making a blondie bar with layers of lemon cream and chopped dates and walnuts. It will be nutty and chewy and creamy and lemony. It will taste like you feel when you find a stream in the forest, mossy banked with fish and shrimp in the water. 

Now I know why we should find a place to make a secret hideaway in Jemez Springs. A place where you walk out the door and wend your way to the river. A small place with words woven into the walls and poetry underfoot. It is because life has all these surprising flavors and mysteries. In the wild, in the city. 

In Hawaii, I put broken crystal geodes and rocks with lines of brilliant minerals in them in pockets formed by tree trunks around the pond. Mosses grew tendrils that reached into the air, tendrils with tiny heads as if to breathe deeply of the forest mists. Candles in glass lit the paths. It was a living fairy tale. In my hand I hold a piece of quartz rock with dendrites. It looks like a jewel with dark moss captured within. 

Here in the winter time, when the fog descends before the snow, can you imagine the onion domed open lattice gazebo that nearly floats above the arroyo? Balalaika music floats through the scene. Lovers meet there, so young their parents cannot absorb the images or the thoughts, but you and I remember that time.

It was the middle of the Cold War. We had been taught to fear the Russians. They wanted to bury us. And there we were, two girls barely twelve. The boys lived in the City. Their fathers were diplomats. Arslan was from Istanbul, Kolya from Saint Petersburg on the Baltic Sea. We held hands under the moonlight. We rode cable cars in the fog and imagined ourselves leading lives of intrigue as double spies and baccarat gamblers in Monte Carlo. We stole away from our parents’ houses for our secret assignations and snuggled close without daring to kiss.  So we were not lovers yet. 

Nor did we become lovers. That would all wait. 

I see all this splendor in the mist as the blondie bars bake within the sounds of the balalaika. When I remove them from the oven some poppyseed strudel also comes out. Magic has fully entered the kitchen and I wonder if my lifetime allotment can be spent so frivolously. Laughter from the arroyo assures me it takes magic to make magic. 

Opening the images of the koa and the ʻAlalā on the large computer screen, I examine the phyllodes, the beak, the eyes. Do I insist on seeing Hawaiian images here in my New Mexico home? What is this? I check for a message from Kai. He is asking about my parents. They are trying to get my attention, he says. They never even were in Hawaii, I say. No matter, he says. They are not of a place or a time anymore. Go out into the arroyo, he says. Ask them what they are saying. 

I am non-compliant. Instead I go straight to the truck with Ulf my dog and drive. I cannot speak to why. It is a sense inside urging me on. What had been a light misty fog deepens as we go. I stay on the Jemez Springs road and drive through the small town. Before the hairpin loop that takes you past the the caldera I turn where the streets are named for minerals. By this time, the snow is coming down in those great saucer like compound flakes. Ulf is panting in the back, eager to get out. Soon, I tell him. Eventually there is a bend in the road with a place to pull over. Almost at the edge of the road, great folds have appeared in the earth. Trees grow amidst the folds, folds that look like origami rocks, rocks that are spires of folded minerals, reaching cathedral like into the sky. The mistiness has receded, and snow flakes are swirling around us like tiny water sculptures lighter than air.  The trees are tall like the spires, trees that seem to have occupied this place for centuries, tall evergreen sentinels with great spaces between the branches such that their heavily textured trunks show through. 

There is nothing to designate it as private land, a place a person could even own, but as Ulf and I wander deeper into it, a structure appears within.  It is a great platform mounted on pillars and posts, massive as the scenery within which it sits. Boulders have been placed upon it as sitting places. It has a rooftop, and icicles have formed along it, shaped like upside down versions of the pointed rock spires around us. Although it is not weathered in appearance, it has the look of what will one day become a ruin, a human built place that time could not erase. It is not a place to live, and how does one get there, other than as we have? 

The snow begins to blow about again, and balalaika music wraps around us like smoke from a hookah. I step closer to a ledge. Ulf barks and takes off, over the edge of this snow world. My breath catches and I call after him. I hear him barking deep in the cavernous spaces that must be below, hidden from my view. I whistle twice and like he had been attached by a great long leash, he appears just where he disappeared, studded with snow. 

As happens when you stand still in the snow, I began to get cold, to shiver. My fingers that had been busy with the camera ever since we got here feel like they are turning to ice themselves. It was time to go back for our dessert. The world often speaks to me, or sings to me, but rarely like this. I do not hear music from another land that repeats here and there, or hear the footsteps of wild animals. Birds and trees from a place thousands of miles away do not appear in my path. I do not even drive for an hour in the truck without somewhere to go, or pull two desserts from the oven when I put only one in to cook. And I have never driven straight to an ice cathedral wonderland that I did not even know existed. 

After the holidays

It is that day when the decorations come down. Farolitos are emptied of sand and lights, folded and stored until next Christmas season. The decorations are removed from the tree, wrapped in tissue, and the house is gone through multiple times to remove the remnants of the holidays.

There is the odd emptiness where the tree stood. The wall art and furniture was moved, we got used to the new arrangement. I pounce upon this as the moment to find a houseplant that brings more moisture to the air. My house could end up looking like a fern bar. Robert does not want the house to have all the elegance of a 1970s apartment in the Haight. We shop together.

Along the way we found this rock. It is a two person carry. The colors on my monitor do not convey the vivid chartreuse of the lichen. In contrast with the agave and prickly pear, the commanding nature of the color is more evident.




The appearance of lichen on rocks and trees has always fascinated me. Lichen takes so many forms, and is so evidently a living organism, and yet is unlike other forms of life. It seems to need so very little to survive; a hard exposed surface, a brittle old stick of wood. It is a little like moss, but is not moss. What is lichen? I  did not know.

Lichen is a study in symbiosis. It is two forms of life, combined in a forever marriage. Algae that are capable of photosynthesis live inside a fungus, protected by the filaments. This is most similar to another life form I encountered in the rainforest - the intense web of mycelia that connect the trees to one another and form a living communications network. It is as if the lichen is a bridge between animate and inanimate. Our narrow definitions of life and consciousness are uniquely challenged by organisms such as these. They live both on and within the crystalline structures of the rocks. Lichens are somewhat dormant in arid climates like ours, awakening when there is snowfall or rain, and the photosynthesis of their fungal partners can revive.

The oldest identified living organisms on our plants are lichens. Some in the antarctic are thought to be 8600 years old. Some scientists try to extract their chemical secrets, in search of the "immortality gene".

Functionally, lichens are the precursor to forests. They break down the rock, over eons, turning it into dirt. As the rocks are matured by lichens in our time, tiny cavities form where seeds of conifers can become lodged, and trees then grow with their root systems clinging to the boulders where there is little soil.

Perhaps this chartreuse lichen is acarospora chlorophana, a lichen that is so slow growing this piece of rock may hold colonies that have been living thousands of years already, as it grows bare  millimeters over a hundred years. We will be keeping a close eye upon it, not only to appreciate its beauty, but to watch whether it can thrive this close in to civilization with its disturbances of the air and use of water brought up from deep in the ground, from where such minerals would not usually touch the lichens.

Life is both hardy and delicate. We live in a time when we are aware of how fragile our existence as a species is, and how large a debt we carry to our planet. As we seek solutions to climate change, as we face the melting of glacial ice and the fading of species we would never have imagined could vanish before our eyes, it may help to contemplate the lichen, not because it holds secrets to longevity that can perhaps be extracted, but because it shows us survival. It shows us what it is to live thousands of years, a marriage of beings, clinging to the rocks.

Snow at home

It is still new to me
this way the snow has
of beginning to fall
nearly invisible

Snow touches me
as cold dots of greeting

Snow has its secrets
It gathers in silence
white clusters in piñon needles
soft lines within the leaves of the yucca

Desert snow
slow to make a blanket
carrying its music in notes
outside human hearing

You can see its crescendo
when the snowflakes fly boisterously
icy petals chasing into one another
beginning the snow universe
white blanket of peace

a whole new decade

We moved ourselves off the island
Over the wide oceans and across the continent
Into the desert and up the mountains to the place
Where there is snow in winter

It makes a difference, the vast sky emblazoned with cloud shapes
Or swept clean of traces of vapor
It is said the star Betelgeuse may be in the process of exploding
Once the 11th brightest in the sky, it has lost two degrees of magnitude
over only a few weeks

It is important not to get hung up in the fact that what we see now
Happened in fact hundreds of years ago
For us, it is happening now

This is us, seeing back in time
Here we are with a supernova waiting in the wings
Just the thing I always hoped for
Didn't you always imagine how outrageous it would be to watch
See a star expand and brighten and know it was doing something
None of us had ever seen?

None of us are likely to see Betelgeuse become a beacon in the night
it is a slow thing, these star supernovae
I will be watching anyway, whenever it is clear
Outside in my fur slippers
Where the sky stretches into forever