It has come to pass, hasn’t it, that I am in the writing burrow I was making for so long. I camped in here with a loaded 12-gauge shotgun when it was a lopsided, handmade construction site in the middle of the woods, i lived by fireplace alone while the walls came together, the floor was made, gorgeous thing that it is, i can’t believe the wood floor re-spins remembered floors of coffee houses in hundred-year-old spaces, historic state park lodges, and tipsy Victorian 3-flats,  wooden floors in bookstores in all the right places, and fully functioning mercantiles that make you want to abandon your life and start something new. and then holy Colorado-organic-grocery-with-creaking-screen-door, here i have underfoot a handmade plank floor of falling down barn red oak that simmers with clove and chestnut and straw in the long orange sunset. Then I placed a comfy chair by the fireplace, and took 2 years putting in the galley kitchen using salvage supply and reworked corrugated metal roofing., the floors and walls and doors, the wood trim, on the screenless back porch I sat on a camping chair. Then came electricity, the screen, the tilework, the metal barn roofing I painted by tracing reflections from the pond near my back porch, that turned the shack  into an outsized version of a painting I had made years prior, At Least Ten Leagues Distant From Here.  In the rearranging shuffle, atoms were flipped and not everything had a carbon translation. Same but different, here I sit writing largely undisturbed in what I consider Ideal Conditions. Excepting the ruination of our natural environment by The Man and his money-hoarding, and people who touch the walls of caves, and snap greenery on trail.

machine taunts me, just when I’m ready to shampoo, it cuts the water off. it makes me do what I set out to do, it makes me write into the night as if I don’t use the writing like netting, like hammocks , to hold all my stuff and the diamond ropes pull in every direction no matter where you set your ass in. i listen, again, to the chirping night woods, and how I vowed to quit living away from them, and how I made it true. behind the bullfrog, and the call and response pond, and behind the unfortunate highway noises i scan a map quickly in my mind’s eye and to see the sonic imprivateness.

Let it be known that late July is perfect for night writing, once there’s a screen which is held up by a house with all the idiosyncratic ways it has to be, as a project, creating with time and material. by making a wooden house in the woods, so much for permanence. the coyotes answer the long, oily train howl in the tone of the heart chakra.