I have bought so many books across the span of the years, and so sold, and so gifted, and acquired yet more, that from time to time I catch myself staring at one spine or another, as you would your lover’s profile wondering: Have I seen you before? Did I know you when the pine on the rock outside, bathed in mist and light, was still young? Or… Even before the rock was old— perhaps that’s when we first met.
Sometimes, there’s a place where the grass and the sage, pine and cottonwood, rocks and scrub and a cactus or two — maybe piñon and mesquite and yucca and so forth — they all get together and make up a kind of existence that’s mildly intoxicating.
Places like this are important if you’re extra-sober to begin with. Say if, for example, you happen to be born that way.
Little breezes ruffle and shift the scents around. Sometimes the wind really kicks up and does its best to rearrange your day.
Mostly, these areas aren’t burdened with an overabundance of trees or houses. You can see the horizon. You can breathe in deep and feel your mind flatten out. Memory and time stop fighting each other. Your worst enemy might be a fence or two.
I don’t generally have anything against concentrations of trees or houses — or people, for that matter — but I need to be out in the wide angle, out in the open kind of wild.
You can see the storms coming in of an evening. Hear the wind searching. Feel the thunder unroll, look at the lightning crack. You can see the sun breaking in yellow through the mist or dying down red in the clouds, and you can watch it all coming in and get yourself together.
You can give yourself to it. It’s like getting ready for church or mass. Like a wedding or a funeral.
Folks tend to be fearful of a skeleton. Something about bone laid out bare to the weather, I’d wager. Out there, you get reminded you’ve got one inside you. You were born with it.
Things in the land and things within us consummate and live and die all the time. Out there you can feel it, know it for what it is — a sort of honesty uncontrived.
You know how headlights, when you’re near a desert highway, pan across material like a searchlight, casting incoherent shadows past whatever they happen to catch –
sage, cactus green and praying to the rain, hitchhiker’s drugstore cowpuncher boots, corrugated lean-to slumped up against the wire?
Well that isn’t happening just yet.
Coyote isn’t on the wander right now.
The sun is still walking, heading west, knowing exactly where to go.
Daylight melts over dust and hardpan, yellow, umber, ochre, neon hot pink.
Memory melts like daylight.
Those clouds, see. That’s what I mean. Cirro… cumulo… cirronimbulus?
It rises, dark and thick in the gloaming. It drinks the melted daylight.
A rush of cool air. Scattering of sand. Silent stab of arced lightning. One million volts in a terawatt cycle.
Thunderstorms drink memory like daylight. They amplify. They make ready for the night.
You should come tell me what you think.
Silence. Rumbling over the distance of the earth.
Silence.
Cumulonimbus. That’s it.
You’d have gotten that quicker.
Silence.
Scent of the dry before the wet.
Burning gold at the end of the sunwalk underneath the dark tower.
There. Coyote’s on the wander. Hungry.
The semi-truck moves past and headlights cast no shadows beyond a ghost.
when driving with old music under slated smoke against the brushstroked horizon fading along mountains to the west as the sun-heat of the high desert reflecting off the scent of sagebrush gives way to a chill mist collecting on burnished sandstone and granite with small patches of veridian moss and lichen in the wild geometry of a late afternoon as amber light stretches out into a blanket under which nothing can harm us
(not even the future not even the past
[this is a good place to stop and get out the cameras] ),
our gaze sweeps the scattered domains of the earth, of the coyote and the elk and a railroad track not used in years;
soon, we will start thinking of good food and something cool to drink.
The moon, in her wisdom, hides for the day; and the sun tumbles in photonic procession over hills of tree and rock to come gently, unassuming, in between the curtains.
The cat stretches.
You arise first, usually.
You are the concerto’s opening notes.
You tell me of the mountains- the old ones with long and white hair falling over their shoulders, guarding the far and wild reaches of the old country.
You tell me of the realms of your imagination; of the paths traveled with companions, and of those without.
You tell me of the burning light of hope hidden in the deep night of the soul.
You tell me of faith. You tell me of mystery. You tell me of love.
And I see the trades and skills and crafts concealed among the books on your shelf, and in between your piano fingers.
I see the nameless fears waiting in the dark.
And I think it is no wrong thing to take a step back in time, and say “thou art Rogue”- feline-footed and shadow-friended, come to meet me at the edge of field and the forest, both of us bringing secrets for trade.
And I see the sun coming in.
I want to hear more.
I want to hear why you think the violin is the most beautiful sound in the universe.
I want to close my eyes and see more of the piano fingers at play.
It’s hard to close my eyes around you, but I will try.
I want to hear more about your paths, see more of your map, taste more of your wine;
only because I’m not sure anyone’s listened long enough to hear the song of the golden threads that hold you together- the ones the world tries so hard to unravel.
So let me check today’s itinerary:
Ah.
“Hunt for rocks.” “Eat food.” “Dance in the kitchen.”
But first, breakfast.
Coffee.
Then come and meet me at the edge of the field and the forest.
Does it fly full-out and free under the sun? Does it hide and whisper its dreamings in the dark? Does it drift in fitful slumber beneath the sea?
What voices, still, are carried on the horizon’s wind?
Where do they go?
And why, why is all this insanity very much like a coming home?
(does it even matter?)
Here, I’ll tell you a secret:
I have no idea.
But I think it’s very close
to whatever makes a horse dig its hooves hard into the ground, playing with the earth at the scent of rain, throwing out ripened patches of green grass to an evening blanket-sky burgeoned with pillars of midnight as the final spears of sunlight slip past the edges of thunderwaves forged in hearts of lightning.
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