It was 1962, Wichita, Kansas. My Dad surveyed the front yard—a very big front yard, a grim look on his face.
"Weeds," he pronounced sullenly, as if our front yard had become the equivalent of a
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My intention was to head West, up the road towards my brother’s ranch. But upon spotting a squirrel crossing the road and making its way leftwards down the rare-visited dirt trail, I turned my horse and we rode that way.
Through the architecture of a dripping living world. Green pointed cedars that hung and green-blue grass, shifting red birds and the wind.
When we reached the end of the trail I saw the old cemetery, the stones of my baby sister and father and father’s fathers and mother’s mothers.
I stopped my horse and took off my hat. I had half a mind to disembark but I felt these graves were unified with the earth and that to touch them would be as senseless as touching any stone among stones.
My sister and father many years gone by cold winters and hard sickness. Their ever present absence.
To touch those stones would have been senseless. As though touching the obsolete key which had once opened a portal between two worlds.
I turned my horse. We rode up the trail and continued on our way.
Through the architecture of a dripping living world. Green pointed cedars that hung and green-blue grass, shifting red birds and the wind.
When we reached the end of the trail I saw the old cemetery, the stones of my baby sister and father and father’s fathers and mother’s mothers.
I stopped my horse and took off my hat. I had half a mind to disembark but I felt these graves were unified with the earth and that to touch them would be as senseless as touching any stone among stones.
My sister and father many years gone by cold winters and hard sickness. Their ever present absence.
To touch those stones would have been senseless. As though touching the obsolete key which had once opened a portal between two worlds.
I turned my horse. We rode up the trail and continued on our way.