Yellowstone Poems: The Waterfall, The Dragon's Cauldron/Persephone, Geothermal Beach, Portals, & Lavender Night
Greetings — and thanks for reading Life is Strange!
I just left Yellowstone after an extraordinary second day there (much more on that in the next blog post coming tomorrow), but here are five poems I wrote there, inspired by a truly unforgettable landscape.
The Waterfall
There are things that words can’t express
Things that images can’t contain.
The feeling of wind
Or the spiderweb shivers erupting from the touch of another’s hand.
The dampness of ocean spray
The laughter of a hawk mirrored by a distant other.
The feeling of wings blooming out of your back
The feeling of entering a new world in your mind.
The subwoofer boom of a waterfall smashing against the rocks beneath it.
The feeling of entering another’s mind, walking around in it for a while.
The tingle in the air as summer shifts to fall.
The lush burst of a first sip of cool water against your dry tongue after a long day.
The creeping presence of time passing
The warm bliss of a moment that seems to stretch into eternity.
Yet words and images are the closest we can come to holding onto these things
After their fleeting presence has faded.
There is no spell for immortality, yet here I am
Playing at alchemy, throwing sheets over ghosts,
Daguerreotyping the outlines of things.
I can’t bring you to this waterfall, but I can tell you of the wind, the shadows of the trees
The sunlight glittering off the pines, the ragged cliffs, the rhythm of the water’s motion
Thrumming under everything.
I can tell you how it feels to be here.
It feels like
There is a golden light shining through everything.
An elixir beyond name
Shimmering like the rainbows
That glance off the edges
Of the waterfalls of the turning world.
There, did you see it?
It was beautiful.
When you look at it slant
Through these words, from this overlook, through these slats in the windowpane.
From here the view isn’t so bad.
From here this twisted life
looks something like heaven.
*
The Dragon’s Cauldron/Persephone
I.
There is a hum that underlies everything
Pushes these bubbling, smoking pools into being
Casts the radiant sun over the hills and draws it back
Crushes the heart in and out
Pulls the lungs open and closed
Sparks wildfires out over the hills
Weaves songs into being in the depths of our chests
Keeps my fingers tapping and my mind racing all night
Keeps cars out on the highway til dawn
Keeps the gears churning in the factories
Pulls one body to another and rips them apart with equal force
It’s 432 hz emanating from the depths of the ocean
And the same frequency beating in the core of a black hole
It’s the good vibrations we sang of on the beach at dawn
It’s the low drumbeat of time passing
It’s the fuming earthquakes and the churning of the coming apocalypse
It’s the screams of revolution and the nuclear ritual of collapse
And it’s the transformation that riots new worlds into being
It’s the bioluminescent spores at the bottom of the sea
And the mineral biomes that sear these jewel-colored sinkholes into their blood orange madness
And the raging cauldrons of mud that churn volcanoes into oozing gulches
It’s the knife that rips the flesh apart and sutures it back together
It’s the spark that brings us into being and just as fast pulls us out
Turning and humming, howling and roiling
I have heard some call it the quantum field, while others call it God
And I think of it as a song that sings through everything
Divine chaos, laughing trickster
The weaving spider spinning its world into existence
To watch it fold with every evening storm.
It’s the gleaming rocketships of tomorrow
And the mammoth ice ships of a million years ago
It’s life — you can either stifle and deny it
Or rip your clothes off, dive in the river
Get in tune and dance along.
II.
This life — you can either stifle and deny it
Or rip your clothes off, dive in the river
Get in tune and dance along.
I choose to do both.
Sometimes I sleep on the shore
And lurk in the quiet caverns of relinquishment.
But today I sink my teeth into the peach’s flesh.
Today I let the hot magma in my chest spill out in the form of wild dreaming
And pomegranate-red desire. I embrace
The way I ricochet between the sordid halls of Hades
And the wildflower-shrouded springs of innocence.
Today I jump into the dragon’s cauldron
Let the red wine and the fountain of youth sweep me into its pull like a summer night
Live in the largeness of my imagination
Plunge out on the open road and soar.
For better or worse I’m alive.
Sometimes I wish I wasn’t
Often I wonder why.
But today in the thrall, by the mineral-soaked shores
The hum is loud and divine.
It’s louder than I’ve ever heard it before
As if it is playing out on a cosmic amplifier
All around and above and below and within everything.
This could be my last life on earth.
Might as well dive in.
*
Geothermal Beach
Oh the rivers made by time.
Oh the lines and pockmarks on our skin made by time.
Oh the landlines laid by sunlight as it streaks across the pines.
Oh the steaming pools at the edge of the beach.
Underground rivers run beneath the sand.
Pulled by time and animated by the song of the universe.
Time makes the wind that makes circles on the lake.
We move around each other in circles, sometimes overlapping and becoming spirals.
Time is a spiral that moves through us all.
I’ve been here before and have always been here.
There’s an underground river that ripples through everything.
Could you meet me there, in those dark waters.
There’s gold in the hills and wolves in the pines
And strange towers in your dreams.
In my dreams I hear a record playing in a post-apocalyptic desert town.
Something awful has happened here.
Beneath the surface of this serene shore a geothermal spring bubbles and fumes.
Beneath sweet desire is a burning fear of solitude.
Within the warm honey of the setting sun is the cold specter of the coming night.
Yet I have seen solitude
And I have looked in the eyes of the night
And seen myself reflected.
There’s a spring underground and it sounds like laughter.
Sometimes the blank canvas of this life rips open and I can see the blood and veins behind it all.
The raw and sublime violence of being.
The pulsing absurdity of being alive.
There is an underground river beneath us.
A clan of ghosts rows through on a gondola.
An owl twists its head around.
There are times when we can look death in the eye.
Taste the blood of love.
Become conscious of what we are
These burning things.
There are places where the skin of time peels back
And when I can see the machinery below.
There are times when it burns so bright it breaks through
And all I can do is spill these words out on the page
Singing the geyser inside my heart out over the shorelines of the simulated world.
There’s an underground river in everyone.
The scars on your skin are the stalactites grown from your time there
Underground in the labyrinth of your deep raw core.
There is an underground river running through everyone.
There are places where it breaks through.
Places where the pain runs so deep you feel you could never be understood.
Places where the love burns so strong you feel if you released it it would obliterate the world.
There is an underground river running through everyone.
There are places where it breaks through.
Where one heart touches another in its core
And sees that it is the same river and we are always in the river.
And the river speaks the language of birdsong.
Walk with me on the boardwalk by the geothermal beach.
Where the geysers smolder at the edge of infinity.
Let’s touch that other world for a moment
The place where everything ignites
And swallows the world until we are nowhere but everywhere
And nothing but everyone.
*
Portals
It turns out that if you stare long enough into the abyss
The abyss stares back at you
and smiles.
And if you jump into it
you discover that the abyss is also a portal
and the portal leads to wonderland.
In wonderland you will find the gardens of paradise
the circuses of purgatory
and the fires of hell.
And once you have met the fates
and had your fortune told at limbo’s carnival
and met your shadow in the wildfires of hell
and burned through every illusion
and seen time as it really isn’t
and left your identity at the door
I mean once you’ve really let the strangeness unfurl inside you
messed with identity, gone into the woods
eaten the apple, made the sacrifice, been reborn
You arrive back where you began.
On the edge of the abyss.
Until the next journey begins.
Within each cycle through the abyss
you collect gemstones, artifacts, relics
bits of sacred songs and litanies of sins.
Your house grows so full you burn it down
and become a child yet again, naked and lost.
Sometimes you wonder at the wheel.
You wonder at it until one day you decline to enter the abyss.
You wave goodbye to its blue waters.
You walk away.
Only then do you realize that there never was any abyss at all.
It was just a story someone wrote
A wrinkle in the mind of the first human to see her own reflection.
You see the truth.
A great golden light carries you into the air.
You dissipate into the steam that rises from the water.
You become the wind.
Until then
I’ll see you down there.
*
Lavender Night
In the stillness of this dancing world
The river turns on and on.
Above the cliffs, the ragged pines
Are like dancers frozen in time.
The blue part of the night opens
And carries us all to sleep.
Dream now, river
Smoky steaming cathedral
Ink blue midnight of the soul.
Now it is time to follow the silver fish to the ocean of night.
Follow the moon and be unafraid.
The sun is coming soon, and for now
Rest your weary eyes in the silver cradle of night.
The night’s arms are open like a lover’s.
This open time lies waiting like a promise.
Matter never fades, only changes shape.
And we are changing shape, my love.
It’s only a change of state
Only a trick of the light.
In the stillness of this dancing world
The river turns on and on.
And my love rolls on and on.
And changes shape.
But never ends.
Thanks for reading!