I want you to have

The girls and I spent today exploring the Emerson Center for the Arts here in Bozeman, which hosted a mid-day woodwind concert on its lawn.

Lying in the grass, listening to the music and reading my new 100 Day Hikes Near Bozeman book, I felt serene, a welcome respite from the more agitated feelings I've been having over the past few days. 

We're interlopers here, intruders. We don't belong, though this town and these mountains feel very comfortable. After a dozen years in San Francisco, I've grown accustomed to feeling a part of my surroundings so this alien feeling is disquieting, and I'm sniffing it out. I also don't always enjoy the solitary confinement experiment that we're conducting on ourselves, but it's a big part of what we signed up for. I know there's a lot of growing to be done if I can just keep one foot in front of the other.

Which is going to be a daily - hourly? minutely? - practice.

In the meantime, I wanted to share the poem we pulled out of the Poetry Dispenser today at the Emerson.

I want you to have
By Rebecca Rose Amethyst

I want you to have mangos
just pinched from limping roadside
trees
three in each hand
one on your lap
and one in your belly

I want you to have guitartones
trembling the insides of your
vulnerable pointed ears
itching the untouched mindskin
over bodies of
who you are
to you

I want you to have moments
on tops of hills and peaked
sunworn sanddunes solo
swearing sacred dedication
to divine alone

I want you to have memories
of rainbows shooting from my eyes
dusty light pouring from my fingers
heaps of mist diving from my open arms
and millennia of thank you's between them

If you would like a poem of your own to be dispensed, email it to mcorriel@imt.net.


If you have any poetry or music or books that you'd like to share with me or the Vance gang, please pass them along. We're exploring on all fronts.