Palos Colorados: Gravity & Growth

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I'm sitting on a big rock again today. This one looks over Sausal Creek in the cool slant of the ravine above the freeway. 

Everything has changed since the big soaking! The hills are turning green and the creek is dancing with water. The dusty tension of autumn is past, with relief there was no disaster here this year. Now it's as if magic has been born again. Someone had hidden miniature garden gnomes in the trees. Forest gnomes.

Water frolics down the slope in a sliver of silver, singing to the ears of my heart. There is a certain kind of solitude you can only find near a bubbling stream.

This is not music you can play on a scale, music you can transpose on a sheet. I want to set lyrics to it but I can't; the poetry comes separately, in its own capricious rhythms.

No matter; I have a rock. I have these sweet few minutes I claimed for myself, away from the shoulds, to listen to the woods, to channel this stream of consciousness into a trickle of words.

I walk back through archways that make me feel grand.

There are galloping dogs and spying gnomes

There are fairies in this wood, humming towards Glasgow

(Where language mimics the gurgling and gargling, the whispering and wandering of streams just like this)

Reporting on the too-warm air above the cool shadows.

Trees at all angles: the downwardness of gravity, the upwardness of growth.

The downwardness of gravity, the upwardness of growth.

I want that to be the chorus of today's song.

~ ~ ~

The gnomes cry out, "Men off Earth Now!"

The water whispers "Hu men can stay."

(Hu is Sanskrit for God, for unconditional loving, the woods reminds me)

Huuuuu men

U men

Wuuuu men 

Wooooooh men

YUuuuu men

As I pad back to the world on the sticky path, 
mud kisses my soles, 
my solitary souls,
and a tune follows me home.

The downwardness of gravity, the upwardness of growth.

—Kristen Caven








Location: Joaquin Miller Ct, Oakland, CA 94611, USA

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