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Months, years, and days
By Chris Clarke on 2011 10 22 at 8:17:00 pm | 7 comments | Shorter URL: http://coyot.es/x2FeThe news from the Bay Area is full of remembrances this past week. Twenty years has passed since the big Oakland Hills fire. A lifetime, really.
More than a lifetime.
It doesn’t seem that long ago. I was working a dead-end job answering a phone
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Chuckwalla Valley
By Chris Clarke on 2011 09 11 at 11:31:28 pm | 9 comments | Shorter URL: http://coyot.es/x3le
I went out today to see a landscape before it’s completely altered. My camera is on its last legs after only 6 years, but I squeezed a few more washed-out shots from its unwilling frame.
It was in the Chuckwalla Valley, site of the Desert
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Spent
By Chris Clarke on 2011 09 02 at 12:41:07 pm | 11 comments | Shorter URL: http://coyot.es/x3feWednesday marked the occasion of my first visit to the Ivanpah Valley since construction began in earnest. I’d been there in October during the Spirit Run to protest the project, but they’d just barely gotten started at that point — putting fences
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The Curious Case of The Peanut Butter Sandwich in The Night-Time
By Chris Clarke on 2011 05 20 at 11:58:50 pm | 6 comments | Shorter URL: http://coyot.es/x2LdAfter I moved out of Zeke’s house, divorce papers filed and storage locker crammed full of the leavings of what had been my life, I flew elsewhere for three weeks, to a moist green place that was not the desert. A friend met me at the airport. We
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How will I know when it’s time?
By Chris Clarke on 2010 02 16 at 9:53:39 pm | 21 commentsOne of the results of having written about Zeke, on the old blog and in the book, is that on occasion, people come to me as their dogs reach the end of their lives, in search of a sympathetic ear.
A lot of times they’re just looking to vent with
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Zeke
By Chris Clarke on 2010 02 03 at 9:42:19 am | 17 comments
Three years ago today I said goodbye to the best friend I’ve ever had.
A week or so later, around what would have been his 16th birthday, I wrote what I’ve pasted below.
It appears as the final piece of my book Walking With Zeke.
What blithe
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A sweet little wistful nostalgic love poem
By Chris Clarke on 2009 12 22 at 2:58:03 am | 8 commentsI wish that I had never met
the one who set my heart aflame.
All the decisions I regret
I made after I learned her name,
excepting those I’d made before.
I used to long to hear her voice.
I never do that anymore,
which seems to be the wiser choice. -
Bibliomancy
By Chris Clarke on 2009 10 27 at 4:42:40 pm | 2 commentsRunning these days through the comfortable neighborhoods of West Hollywood has made me nostalgic for the garden I left last year. During the divorce and subsequent dislocation, I didn’t let myself miss my garden much. My enthusiasm for the garden
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Dodging the random beautiful
By Chris Clarke on 2009 10 11 at 10:08:37 pm | 5 commentsI have been thinking about love these days.
This is of course nothing new.
Relationships end and they begin, relationships maintain themselves and they wither. These days I am both buoyed by love and burdened by it. The last vestiges of my
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Trinity
By Chris Clarke on 2009 08 04 at 10:32:05 am | 2 commentsA draft of this fourteen-sonnet cycle was on the old blog. I took it down and fiddled with it, then submitted it to Camas, the environmental and literary journal of the University of Montana, whose site seems to be down at the moment. It ran in
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Lunch Tuesday
By Chris Clarke on 2009 07 14 at 10:34:38 pm | 6 commentsThis was for the best, you said, and I think
you were a little disappointed I agreed,
nodding against your shoulder in the parking lot.A year since we met last, that day I loaded
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a few last boxes into the Jeep, kitchen things
and what camping -
A year ago
By Chris Clarke on 2009 06 16 at 5:24:03 pm | 6 comments | Shorter URL: http://coyot.es/x2xbStarflower was beginning to bloom near the beaver marsh. The remains of lady’s slipper blossoms rustled against their pedicels, fluttering as yet another rainstorm approached.
We came together and the skies opened up. My hand took hers and roads
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About love
By Chris Clarke on 2009 05 27 at 2:19:15 am | 16 commentsI have often wondered whether this love for the landscape, this ardent longing I feel for dissolution into the wild is not a symptom of some ancient hurt, a way to salve wounds that should have healed long ago.
I speak of kinship, of the shared
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Storage Locker in Barstow
By Chris Clarke on 2009 05 02 at 10:47:48 pm | 9 commentsIn this box, a set of dishes wrapped in shirts I’d forgotten I had.
In this box, stacks of books.
In this box, a set of screwdrivers, a circular saw still covered in sawdust. When was the last time I used it? Building the garden beds. Six years
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Stargazing
By Chris Clarke on 2009 03 29 at 12:49:31 am | 3 commentsUnder this vault of stars I am content.
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Stuck fast to this small rock I am at ease.
Minuscule, ego fading by degrees
and what remains of little consequence.
Only the wind and stars, and nighttime shades
of loves abandoned, fire going cold
as in the -
A moment for Oolie
By Chris Clarke on 2009 02 06 at 11:32:15 am | 1 commentOur pal Sherwood has lost a good friend.
Based on what Sherwood’s shared of Oolie’s spirit over the years, I suspect this is how he’d want to be remembered.
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2008
By Chris Clarke on 2008 12 23 at 12:18:47 pm | 11 commentsIt all fell apart this year, the affected exoskeleton I’d thought of as my life: the garden and the art, the home, the writing. There was a moment this summer it all sank in. I had been Becky’s husband, the one who walked with Zeke out of the house
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Jerky Treats
By Chris Clarke on 2008 11 18 at 1:46:54 am | 13 commentsReaders who have been around here for a while will recall that I used to have a dog, a fine and patient and only a little bit neurotic dog, whose name was Zeke. I loved Zeke. Zeke loved me in return, and others who have loved me will attest to the
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Letters from the desert: Seeing stars
By Chris Clarke on 2008 09 05 at 1:08:10 am | 0 commentsAnother sunset, another sky over the Clark and Ivanpah ranges turned by imperceptible increment from deep blue to blood red, the slow tilting of earth and air erasing shade after subtle shade from sky. Soon all that is left is sanguinary. Soon that
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Buyables
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