to sit in the forest, awaiting Winter and wolf

or stand, walk, pursue the hungry two

is the question at the edge of Fall

is my body ready to release the fear of dying?

letting go is the pain

the pain that is gift

Wolf and Winter chase unto death

demanding all in my hesitancy

enter then the dark wood

where night comes quickly

and dawn, as dreamy way

enter where the creatures spy

and God might forsake

all seems cruel survival

but survival is a blessing

for those who strive

as dying, a blessing

for those who try

one never knows until you're done

crossed the ice floes, exited the grove

stand alive through the trial

yet then you may die as all will die

but you'll will know why death is what it is

with joy exciting your tightened mouth

go! face them both

they may befriend you

where you might betray your self

*Thoughts of Richard Rodriguez:

-...seventeenth-century Mexico calls the children of Indian-African marriage "Chinos."  Latin America is extraordinarily playful with matters of sex, which is to say of matters of blood, whereas the United States is severe and Puritanical about notions of blood precisely because we are insecure about issues of eroticism.  So we influence each other in exactly opposite ways.  I think Latin America will be highly influenced by the American notion of free culture, for the same reasons South America now is converting to Protestantism and capitalism and looser structures of family - meanwhile in this generation in the United States, the Latin American freedom from blood leads to a kind of explosion, a freedom from the notion of fated blood that earlier generations assumed.

-One sensed the same desire in the Columbine massacre in Colorado, where the grandson of an observant Jew chose Hitler's birthday to charge into the cafeteria.  These are children who want one pure thing in a world in which they suddenly realize there are only mixed things.