Notebook

This is something I wrote fireside a few years back. You could say it is prophetic.

Evening on the river and the night sends a breeze through the tops of the jack pines away from the high country. The moon turns the clear and moving river into a hundred mile highway from up on Lizardhead down through the flume and on into a lake where I have people buried in a town underwater. The quicksilver from the sky bathes my old beat up truck and gaudily minimal Jamis, igniting polished surfaces–lugnuts, disc rotors, spokes–into a pale silver. The work of men explodes in faddish display when light hits it. The work of the earth only gives a demure translucent opaline river, the height of class. Upriver about three hundred yards, I went under the water and gave myself to Jesus. Now I sit here in the moonlight killing the night, wasting good whiskey futilely trying to drink your infidelity off my mind.

The fire’s banking low. I spent a good hour gathering and chopping wood laid down by last winter’s snow. The fire still can’t keep up with the cold. July means nothing to this altitude. When I come down off the pass, I saw nothing but you defiled. But it won’t be forever.

I still love you. It screams out of my chest and colors my words and drains down my back when I grind up another climb. I drink it from your coursing waters, which of course should have killed me long ago. But still you give yourself away.

To adobe sand castles where your iron stripes flanks used to show. Paved thoroughfares where double track four wheel drive only roads used to live. To every last subversive with a wad of cash and every last terrorist with fountain pen and a subdivision development plan. You are not a reliable lover.

But I do love you, ancient Yavapai. Because I like my orogenies like I like my women. Dark, a little evil, and part Mexican.

***

Unrelated!

I really like this picture of me and my room mate. That is my salt shaker emptied out and full of rye. And I swear I am not doing the Shocker.