First couple of runs in the new Feiyue:



They felt good. I was expecting a little rougher go of it on the first few runs. Saturday was an hour on a mix of streets and grass while Monday was 45 mins on streets and trails. Soft trails and grass felt the best but cement and asphalt were not a problem. I've been working on running more on the mids and fronts of my feet. A minimal shoe like the Feiyue really enforces that. I did pick up a couple of hot spots on the outside of both little toes. Not too worried, some tape should give those time to heal. Might try a different sock next time.

Snow comes back tonight so it will be a bit before the next Feiyue run.

...some kind of observer, in the world,
waving my books like flags –
afraid or fascinated by everything
that might or might not
                                              happen next.

...hiding away my long list of heroes
on unconnected pages in case there’s a purge
waiting
                just behind the horizon.
Then pulling out names like change –
to make up the difference
between my pretense and my trivia.

...I want to be read like translations,
a little original fame – on anyone’s’ lips.
Rushing the years, for fear:
        the table;
        the half-empty drink;
        nothing to put down on paper.


r berk
Denver June 1996

Tracks

I breathe in a chest full of concrete corridors.
A stomach with tunnels links myth to mind.
And the muffled Cyrillic sighs of simple thugs
are on a plane to Istanbul.
Green light seeps through the bars.
Private subways rumbling,
the white guard hides in the snow,
sleigh bells pass at midnight like wolves
at our windows while I lay stretched out
across the Sahara, naked, too bare
to hide bombs.

Remember the tracks over the ice,
the sentences like camel trains
reaching into the night.
Remember the tracks across the Neiva,
rusted revolutions, a poet’s
imaginary war.

Curriculum Vitae
        And what does it hear?
        Wiskawa Szymborska

What is required?
Unattached crumpled pages
gathering dust beneath my desk.

The address is:
a rock where I sat by the creek;
a chair and coffee-stained table;
a parking lot outside of town.
Mountains, deserts, oceans and an endless stream of cities
dated to here by
a summer I remember
or sometime after our 1st or 2nd meeting.

I married the madness from other voices,
but love comes only
in occasional bursts.
And the children I’ve imagined
are still unborn,
restless...and kicking on the pages I have left.

I’ve understood and forgotten.
I’ve paused at the edge and jumped.
I’ve slept and lost track of the stars.
I’ve lied and stared back at the sun.

My references could come from anyone.
And I know them all when we meet.

There is a snapshot included
(though you may hardly see my face).
Beneath the rumble of machines,
is this factory of words.

r berk
Moab, 1996

KTNN on Rte. 160

The architecture of heroes and clouds,
stories on leashes – believe,
all the concrete and glass. The words
are carried away, in grains,
one piece of sedimentary history
at a time. One ghostly piece of adobe wall.
This is a hero-less story.
Hogan architects, building empty homes,
wind storms raging, approaching
in dust, in red gray waves
under my city, under my tunnels through
myth. The storm is underground, screaming
through the clay. The dead must be
tied down, held in their graves.

The inhabitants left. Left burnt out trailers,
concrete foundations and broken glass,
from desolation to desolation.
Snow in the footprints of their heroes.
We imagine we are wrong.
Carnival of storms, not heroes.
Builders gathering white bones in the sand. Cages
keep the emptiness inside.
Keep the emptiness inside like
a promise. Reconstructing
the thin cold dream,
cracks open mouths spitting stone,
sending walls back to forgotten.
But we remember the architects in
their crumbling shadows. Red
dust moving through the pile of years,
still creating the geometry of broken
lives, breathing dust in slow revolutions.
Saliva drops from lips to stone.

r berk
October, 97 NYC

I am still waiting
outside
the thickness of your windows,
imagining all the possibilities
of warmth.
I trace the drips like
maps between glimpses – while
my shadow hopes
against circles.

Do you remember the distance?
There were books on the couch,
wooden chairs,
and all the excuses.
We were at the top of the stairs
imagining like lovers
the constant executions.
I’m reassured
here in the darkness. I’m reassured.

But it fades.
Dreams into the walls,
terribly silent, dragging my knuckles
across the cracks between your stones.
There was reason for revolution –
lips and tongues, on the holes
in all my concentration.

I memorized my feelings,
so I could fill
empty interrogations.
The touch held back
the paleness of your skin –
that will give it all away,
in stacks of details…

for the price of a poem.

r berk
May, 1996 Denver

She could have been Fellina
Or a song in a long red dress
With a six-gun and a horse
I'd rob a bank
And take her to my hideout
Hold up in Old Mexico
We'd dance to a Mariachi band
Spin circles across
                the falling stars

I think she winked or smiled or both
I held my seat on the sidewalk
Pulled a cigarette to my rescue
I offered her one in Spanish
She said no in English
Her red dress caught the sun
Wind dragged it across the knee of my jeans

She walked away
                through Terralinqua
Trailing scented dust
That blew away

r berk
Terralinqua 1992

3 In The Desert
    We stole anything that we couldn't keep.
    Paul Weller

    The point of it all is Out There, a little
    beyond that last rise you can just
    barely see, hazy and purple on the sky.
    Terry and Renny Russell

Utah in the fall:

the needles
sticking their warm sandstone fingers
into the endless skies:
canyons, inverted scars
dug into the red cartilage
of a million years
of geologic garbage;
high cirrus clouds
strung out like junkies
waiting for a change,
any change;
flatness
stretched taught,
rotting in the stink
of Big Sage and Russian Thistle;
Indian Creek
winding,
trying desperately to parallel
40 miles of asphalt.

The visitor center parking lot
netted a few stray cars
boasting out-of-state plates
like out-of-place voices
waiting their turn to be heard.
A man in the bathroom
tried to peel
the traces of desert from his skin
leaving them estranged
in a porcelain sink.

We were in the parking lot
lined up boy-girl-boy
on the tailgate of an F-350.
The Gang Of Three, smiling.
Smiling with a stolen desert in our eyes.
Smiling because we won’t give it up
to any porcelain sink.
Smiling at the whole fucking world.

I rolled a cigarette
with a torn piece of notebook paper.
The paper had been a note
no one had read.
The paper had been a tree
now stolen and dead.
I lit it with a stolen lighter.
Notebook paper cigarettes
make me nauseous.
They remind me of book burnings,
sending words to heaven
in a black smoke –
brains burning.

We burned the desert.
250 miles under our feet.
We stole the desert.
Three people with stolen finger puppets
on their hands.
Three people with a notebook paper cigarette
hanging from smiling lips.
And it was our game,
our rules,
our Gang Of 3.
3 warriors in love with life,
in love with each other,
waging a war of insanity
against no one.
But no one was the rest of the world
and against no one we had to lose.
Tomorrow was the avalanche
that in a slow second, sweeps
us from each other forever.
Like tracks washed from a canyon.

But they were our canyons,
our landslides,
our footsteps,
our sprung traps.
Sprung in the clouds
with our arrogance the bait.
Then we had time,

notebook paper cigarettes burn slow.
We passed it along the tailgate.
The act,
a simile
to our attitude.
Just 3 kids,
blowing up the corners
that god built.

Waist deep in Fish
screaming at the sky
or holding him at bay in Fable Valley,
while we choked on our dreams.
We jumped from the slick rock
into the sky
and called god on every bet he made.

We left dust through Beef Basin
and chain tracked clay
to the edge Dark.

There was no risk,
no lessons to learn –
just miles without a point
between us
to that hazy and purple on the sky
and the desert in our eyes.

We stole it from the Needles Outpost,
from the Circle K at the end of Moab
from the people trespassing in our desert.
We stole it from God
and the anaszi.
We stole it from each others’ mouths.
The Gang of 3
kids on a crime spree
with a stolen desert,
with notebook paper cigarettes that could have been roman candles
spraying yellow fire into the Utah fall.

Too mad to realize we had lost.

But that’s our secret weapon.
It is our notebooks filled with mad words
that will echo straight to heaven
when we role them into cigarettes.
It is our guns
built from pieces of mad hearts
against which reason will fall
and run like rain.
It is our lives wild
and mad in love, so mad
that even though we’ve lost forever
we’ll steal tomorrow
to live mad in love again.

I miss you man
in memory of Mike V,

    while with silent, lifting mind I've trod The high,
    untrespassed sanctity of space,
    Put out my hand, and touched the face of God
    John Gillespie Magee

rberk
Moab 1995