No Amount of Miles – Lend Your Tears Back

We know that grief refuses to stay in its assigned lanes.

It spills—across categories, across places and species, across distances we try to keep between things. It also accumulates, adding layers that thicken our lives.

Over the past year, I’ve been working on a collection that lives inside that spilling and accumulation.

It’s a book that doesn’t try to tidy grief up or find easy resolutions, but instead feels grief’s textures and allows it to move—through the body, through language, through the wider watershed we’re not separate from. From ancestral wounding and mom’s garden after her death to collapsing ecosystems and violence of empire.

I try to honor the contradictions and complicities as well as the numbing and raw, uncontainable tenderness that keeps breaking through it all.

It’s my way of touching into the basket of personal and collective grief and rage that we all carry.

running our fingers
over what needs
to be touched

I’m sharing one poem from that unfolding here.

No Amount of Miles

It’s the 5th month of the year
and we’re out here foraging mushrooms
and mass shootings
nettles
and the good ol’ business

of war—it seems they’re always
in season now

climate reports
outnumber monarchs
in so-called California

those who love butterflies
just a little too much
found at the bottom of wells

those who love trees
just a little too much

found cross-legged in tents
with bullet holes
hands in the air

headlines blur—
historic highs
historic lows

cop cities and open-air prisons
added to budgets
already bloated with bombs

Our language thins,
shapeshifting—
rage farming and trauma dumping
added to the dictionary

acorn, wren, catkin—cut

replaced with cut-and-paste
AI and delulu

I can understand adding
deadass and pink-washing

snipping Vitamin G
and frutescent snollygoster

(though the latter might offer
some comic relief
amidst the hellscape—
which they also added)

but heron and newt
sea otter
Inyo rock daisies?

somewhere in this pruning
something goes missing

a thread

tying the loss of words
to the loss of lives

and aren’t we all at a loss
for words

at a certain point
we are no longer able
to gather our griefs separately—

one for this meal
one for that

we put them all
in one deep basket

stack them
or dam them
and call it survival

There’s an app
that can locate us precisely—
where we walk
how far

but not why

you can walk from anywhere
to anywhere
with enough heart
and heart-ache

yet miles are just another metric
and we’ve already walked everywhere
on this exhausted map

no amount of miles
will carry away the ache of

the missing dreams
the missing birds
the missing streams
the missing words
the missing stars
the missing justice
the missing village

that our basket expects

we can no longer summon
belief in the places
they told us to believe in—

new coordinates beckon us—

but walking might be holy now
might make the sky inside us
a little wider

not enough to hold it all

but just enough to stay human
to each other

enough to keep us here
running our fingers
over what still remains

what still asks
to be touched

---

The collection is called Lend Your Tears Back to the Watershed.

To be released later this summer. I’ll share more soon. Be on the list to be among the first to know when its available.

For now:
maybe the work isn’t to hold it all—
but to let it move. Together.

Returning to the watershed.

—Ryan

P.S. Header: actual photo of the day the sun didn’t come up during the California fires -”Orange Skies Day” – Fall 2020