Some Leftover Journal Notes

We really are young, aren't we?

Or small?

What is a desert? And what is a jungle? They are both the human body.

Rocky swales like some sour-backed Stegosaurus.

The illusion of the desert is less like an endless, unknowable vastness, the expanse at hand surrounded exponentially by identical vastnesses, equations in perfect balance, trees and scrub and prairie dog holes arranged in an endlessly yet predictably random formation than it is like a private singularity of loneliness, a whole and finished world, the horizon described by a three-mile radius around the lost one signifying only the edge of the earth, or wherever this desert is nominally located, revealing beyond itself only humid black space.

reflected pools of blood and sherbet

Bleak, unforgiving landscapes have perhaps some precedent for our hearts and lungs in the __ __ and __ __ of __ (youth?).

If I slashed open your stomach now, with a three-dollar machete, I can imagine your pink guts wriggling, yet keeping me warm in the night cold, like in __The Empire Strikes Back.__

Reserva Nacional Pacaya-Samiria
Puesto de Vigilancia Nº 08
Santa Rosa de Tibilo
Cuenca del Samiria
Río Tibilo

An environment is less of a sense of place, or location than it is like a vast flesh, but dynamic, arteries changing with every large rain.

You sit so low, and there is so little freeboard (two to three inches at most) that you feel like you ARE the river, one sentient chunk among many, moving with the water, seeing what the water sees.

Or that the river is the timeline of your life made into a geographical space, finding you here traveling with companions, there without, meeting people, seeing places, stopping for a while here or there, doubling back, taking shortcuts yet sticking primarily to the widest and deepest channels, feeling vaguely or acutely lost most of the time.

maelstrom of bats

partake of a wild and intemperate pleasure upon meeting another American.

like swimming in a tincture of

Black Hawk-eagles eat monkeys.

Water with the texture of vellum.

con cuerpo tinto

What does the moth seek when, time after time, she vaults the candle's flame with an endearing lack of grace or poise, and, having failed to be transported anywhere, falls or careens into the ground? Finally she seems to achieve her goal: She must be aiming for the brightest, whitest part of the flame, but this time she falls just short of her mark; maybe she is tiring, but this seems a less likely force than the pure and deft hand of fate. She strikes the black wick, she's trapped in the corona of melted wax, and in a few seconds she is immolated. It can't be that she sought warmth,