So there I was ... I had taken three months off and had left with $1500 earned from a  job running a 1500 ft. water line from a creek to my friend's cabin, and I was now completing an overland adventure  from Nogales to Honduras (flight from Tegucigalpa to Barranquilla) thence via Otavalo and Quito to Macchu Picchu... I was in Otavalo, heading back to my happy home in the mountains in N. Calif where I lived happily indeed with my happy family... when I got a letter at Poste Restante from my darling wife which starts out happily enough with chit chat and gossip but which gets crazier and crazier as it goes along culminating in a scrawled salutation of "Fuck you, you creep!" and a plaint about how I had drained her of all energy...  She was mad and crazy enough to put it in an envelope, affix a stamp and drive the ten miles to the post office to send it off.  And there I was, wending my way back from S. America on the cheap... not enough money to fly back directly... so I was still no less than a week away whether I went through Mexico or Florida. Besides, she had screamed at me not to come back... For a  day I had feelings of confusion, loss, abandonment, but went through the stages of grief pretty quickly... This poem was written from the final, acceptance, stage...

Not too long after this, I received a telegram in which she said she would meet me in Oaxaca, but that never happened either and I flew to Miami and hitchhiked back to San Francisco where she met me and we enjoyed a few more variable years before it all fell apart again.

Make no mistake I do blame neither her nor me.. nor do I complain about anything.  I have learned much from every experience I have ever had. In fact, I have this strange idea that that is the only way we really learn anything at all
For anyone who is curious about how my poetry "works" this is a good example.  Though quite simple, it flourishes on many levels.  It reminds me of the Zen saying that before enlightenment, rivers are rivers, mountains are mountains and after enlightenment rivers are again rivers and mountains are again mountains. Once we stop the internal dialogue, we just experience more directly whatever it is that is.  Also the psychological concepts of Jungian archetype and of projection are referred to. We can also, if we know that it's there, recognize the quality of magical realism that I felt on the S.American continent in which Macondo could have existed and we would not have batted an eyelash. And, strangely enough, it is a love song to life... and says it's okay... everything is okay.