Curiosity

Alight on the thermals over the sandstone cathedrals today, a golden eagle circled for about a half hour. Since I had nothing more pressing on my agenda, I watched him disappear into the clear sky. A light breeze was kicking dust up the face of the slope and into my nose and eyes and everywhere else defenseless. The sun screamed out white today. The humidity was a little high today, for the desert. Probably upwards of thirty percent. It was just enough to make sweating necessary and a left over talus boulder into a very nice cot. Eventually, a nap found me.

I dreamed about eagles and an angel. She smelled like smoke and coffee. She had on black mascara, which I thought was a little odd. She wouldn’t show me her tattoo. I’m guessing it would be barbed wire or cinnamon. I’m not sure what a cinnamon tattoo would look like. Later, I found a cobble sized piece of mossy agate. And some agate that is a striking blue. I wonder what manner of beauty the cretaceous must have sacrificed for this.

I wonder now what a cinnamon blossom would look like. Probably just delicate.

I have a small glass with mostly ice and a little caramel skim clinging and creeping farther into the container as the water dilutes it. The drips are slipping farther down as gravity wins the fight against cohesion and adhesion. Then I help the process along and pour the half melted ice and a little of the sweet smoke into me. The eagle is worth a thought.

On the eagle’s way up into the thermals, I wonder who it carried with it. I wonder what rabbit or marmot found itself towering above its former domain. That makes me think of other birds out in a different desert. Gray ones with a prey easier to kill and not nearly as beautiful. I wish I knew at least a few of those I owe an apology.

The barite concretions of the Mancos Shale formation boil out of the interbedded mudstones and calcite veins and they compress into hard nodes. Then, as the water falls onto the tender slopes of the easily soluble, the nodes are left sitting on the surface, exposed to all the world. Below the drab brown, you can find crystals clear as glass as large as six inches long. If you remove them, you must transfer them immediately into some sort of cooler or other means of protecting them from the above ground heat and sun. If you don’t protect them from the rapid temperature change, they will crack and maybe shatter like ice pulled from the freezer.

One time I dug for hours into the soft clay of some ancient loam from the time of enormity. I found radiating acicular habited barite and gypsum. I carved one into an Easer Island figure one afternoon when I was finding reasons to keep breathing. Someone had wandered off on me. She just sort of got lost and went away. I still think she was wrong, regardless of how things may have worked out. But even then, the irreversibility of all things was apparent. We could never fight the entropy that had moved into the void where some sort of affection and need had lived. We were done and even if we had not or have not moved on, time and space did without us.

Some answers can’t be found in rocks. Possibly.

Ice is a mineral. Not too many people know that. The problem is that, depending on the definition, the ice in this glass may or may not be. It is anthropogenic in origin. Some definitions do not allow for any sort of biogenesis.