...But you can guarantee, whether you (or I) like it or not there is now, and will be in the coming months, much more of this florid pooh-pah coming your way.
As you can perhaps tell, I've started a ten day countdown wrought with vicious spurts of doubt and/or fear at the thought of leaving home. Pre-emptive nostalgia's a bitch, eh?
Here's one about Santa Fe. It's untitled.
The light that appears when he drives her around town
is a grey that eats up trailers and
the hornos in their front yards, too.
A color solemn and wet
wet
sticky as she is stuck to the passenger seat.
It makes the forsythia and the apple blossoms bloom
in stop-frame
as they go.
It’s a grey that greens alfalfa
floats dust
and forces open the giant doors of that ancient adobe barn
where he used to swing as a kid –
in secret, she watched him fly then fall
grow up
and she returned to picking the black paste from beneath her fingernails,
like counting beads.
This day was like lighting a match in still air over a riverside campground.
Like opening the dense shades to daylight in a motel room.
Like resting her face on a dusty, warm rock.
Like she'd prayed-until-she-cried in someone else’s church.
They passed her house and still he drove.
And the potholes blossomed, it seemed
at the first beat of thunder.
It started to rain.
She promised that she would dress up like a burglar
and steal back these turns of the tire
if they were ever taken away –
even if by aging,
distance,
heartbreak,
drought
or the predictable forward movement of time,
the pendulum of the seasons. elh
