Denver’s Parade of Lights was quaint and small, as the woman from New York predicted. I liked her, but I liked the parade less, arrived late, couldn’t snap a picture without a quarter of some old woman’s head in it, couldn’t see the whole of the fairy-blue pirate ship. I chased it via the streets not blocked off.

Eight-deep crowd:

fairy-light floats around the corner

and disappears

Market Street Station was nearly empty. Ah ha! I could be the first in line for the B. I claimed my spot by Gate 8’s double doors, sitting cross-legged, eating mints covered in dark chocolate. I had never been first on a bus in my life. A boy joined me, also seated. Three women clustered to my left, although the line had already formed to my right. I glared at them, defending my position.

The bus pulled up, and the driver dismounted, declaring, “I’m just coming in, folks.” Puzzled, we maintained our positions, me against the three women. I would be first! Then another driver announced, “Gate 7!” A Denver-sized rush ensued. The three women reached the door and turned around, one looking smug.

Dad, baby in backpack,

declines my seat with extra legroom,

stands.

Yesterday, we traveled for 13 hours. The Sunday after Thanksgiving: in Denver and Chicago, new snow. Friends left behind, grading in Chattanooga; mother-in-law at one gate whom we couldn’t persuade to use our guest bedroom.

I’m on East Coast time now, detoxing from a week of southern food and wine.

And now my mind is muddled, can’t light on a good subject for this poem.

It’s dark, except for lights sparkling on the river. I walk to the edge of the concrete plaza, where kayakers launch themselves into the Platte, and look down on … trash … or rocks. It’s too dark to tell.

REI is closed, and it may be dangerous to sit down here by myself, but I am nothing if not happy.

I can see the dial of the clock tower on the 16th Street Mall. I can see “Qwest” in blue at the top of one tall building.

Joe Nacchio was the only telecom executive who didn’t sell us out. He ran Qwest until 2002, and in 2007 he was convicted of insider trading. In 2008, his conviction was overturned.

He says the government retaliated against his refusal to cooperate with warrantless wiretapping.

I say, I have no love for take-no-prisoners CEOs.

But I am grateful to him.

I was listening to the Bruce Springsteen song from The Rising over and over today as I dusted.

When I was young, I wanted to leave my family, had to go as far away as possible. I was going to explore. Now I think of my thirty-year voluntary separation from them and wonder if it’s time to wander home.

I’ve been retracing my steps this past month, pacing a neighborhood, circling and returning to locations I’ve already visited. And I find new corners in them.

Maybe the city of my childhood also has a new face to show me?

Yesterday, when my husband told me his plans, I was reluctant to be left behind.

The plumes of fountain in City Park Lake shoot up and arch northwest, misting the paddle boaters far away. Trees wear their leaves around their feet, like a dancer who’s lost her slip but won’t stop dancing to hitch it up.

So I followed him to the museum.

From here, the world appears to be open to anything. That which closes us in is transparent, and we feel comforted by the space between us and other things.

Now I await his return from adventures with dinosaurs.

***

After writing haibun on Mondays for two months now, I discovered I was making an embarrassing mistake. Instead of having the haiku at the end of the haibun run 5-7-5, I’ve been writing them 7-5-7. I knew that haiku were not supposed to exceed 17 syllables, but somehow I wrote a bunch of 19-syllable ones without noticing. Then I read this post on Editorial Ass‘s site and thought, “Oops!”

Not that haiku have to be 17 syllables. Or three lines. I’ve seen them in Frogpond written as one line, or stacked, or in the typical three-line structure but with fewer than 17 syllables.

Maybe I should go through the most recent issue and see how many were 19.

I’ve been traveling in my head. One town after another along the coast of France. Diving kelp forests near San Diego. Into the forests of Congo, and then to a hospital where rape victims are being treated, where a mob forms.

But I’m not sure I’m that much of a hero.

Not a tourist either.

Some days, I’m simply absent. When I should be tending my relations. I stop and think, I meant to call ___ months ago. What happened?

When I pick up the phone, rapt in the warmth of her voice, I’m also not there—I’m in Scotland twenty-five years ago, cradled by a feather bed. She’s in the next room.

I’ve arrived here again. Faced with a deadline, racing to get there. Dozens of pages short.

We sat surrounding Dorianne Laux, up a twisty stair in a room at the top of the Tivoli. She was warm. We were worried, for our poems would be critiqued in the next three hours, and no one yet knew how it would happen.

I answered the call to adventure weeks before, via email. And when I stood at the bus stop in the rain, my guide stopped for me and took me with her. But when we reached the city, I wanted to navigate alone. I ate a large, mango-magical salad and made my way to the dark brick tower that was the Tivoli and climbed.

We took her tests: a memory, recited as if from within it, no matter how long ago. A poem about an object that mystified us. And then she grappled with us.

We hadn’t expected roughness with a smile. We’d expected poems on paper handed back marked up. But she held our poems in one fist—later, as we would discover, hardly marked at all—and told us where they wanted to go and how we were holding them back. More spit and vinegar, please. As if they were our children and we’d raised them to say nothing at all if they couldn’t say something nice.

I don’t ever want to leave this view. Some days I won’t even leave the yard. I venture out on the deck, bask in the sun, still myself until the birds return to the feeder. I wish to be part of the landscape, no more remarkable than a patch of buffalograss or a black-eyed Susan persisting into fall.

Clouds clump over the mountains, as they have all summer. Will they deliver this time? Will I wake tomorrow to sugar-coated mountains?

I almost didn’t get there. “Zamia?” said the bus driver. “Never heard of it.” But the man with the unplaceable accent led me there. Trouble was, the houses were too big for a cohousing development. I trudged to the other side of Broadway, down Yellow Pine, up the street by the park, until the couple and a dog, faces obscured by dusk, showed me where to go.

I joined the group in the common house, filled a glass with water, but passed on the wine. Last time, I’d drunk a glass of wine before the reading and nodded off in the second row. I sat in the back, gaining a great view of everyone’s hair.

All I remember of the first reader, a man, is this description: funny. All I remember of the second reader, a woman, is a father and daughter canoeing the Missouri, following the trail of Lewis and Clark. All I remember of the third reader, a man, is this line: We want America back! And that was enough, for a while.

All I remember of the fourth reader, a woman, is this description: boredom. And the word chrysanthemums. And possibly iris. Her voice slow in that sleep-inducing rhythm of some read poetry, while I watched the dancer’s strong face. I didn’t want her to lull me to sleep, and there was wonderful hair all around me: coarse and long and brown, wavy and white and neck-length, dark and curly.

Saturday was a day of quiet loneliness, the Boulder Reservoir deserted by people and, mostly, by sun. Even the lifeguard had time to chat, and a man with an Italian accent accosted me about the movie that night. I wasn’t there for the movie but to grasp summer and keep it under my arm, remembering childhood holidays at Lake Tapawingo where the evening air and water stayed warm past Labor Day. I waded into the shallows; even the water was withdrawing, the solstice only a week away.

Two boys built their own lake and canals right next to the beach. Their father watched, then buried one up to his neck after the lake breached. I christen the boys Gustav and Ike as I drive to Walden Ponds, still in search of the perfect body of water.

Bristlecone pines twist for strength at the top. Micro-landscapes shifting every few feet, spongy grasses to willow carr to scatterings of violet flowers, smaller than my thumbnail, the tallest of the tundra. Cairns point to nothing.

We drove from home to Windy Ridge to Windy Point, and home, to see 1,000-year-old trees. We are not there yet.

One, blown over, sliced, and carved, still roots in two places. Nearby, the phone line ends, as if nothing more can be said.