By chris
Date: 2006 Dec 10
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[[2006.12.10.03.41.30636]]

All Stories Are True

(For Spalding Grey)

On the day I decided to get lost, I
drove down the road
(living as
I did
in the foothills of those
mountains),
to Piedra Lisa Canyon -
a name so beautiful
that there seemed no better place
to start and end
an anonymous solitary Saturday
in July -
or any other time plucked
from a calendar as willing and open
as a woman
heavy with secrets hidden
among days and
cycles
of the moon.

(But where was the
trail?
It came to me while climbing water-
smoothed
boulders that where I wanted to go
had no
trial.)

The city smaller now
and curiously green amid the vast
brown-
was that really my home down there?
Must be,
I thought,
not really believing it but
deciding for the moment
to make friends with the
uncertainty
until something broke
through
or
answers came.

Then rain -
far off on the high peaks and steep
evergreen ridgelines
beyond my reach
that day.
And,
realizing the trail I'd created was
really only an arroyo,
a place for water at times
like these,
I turned back,
fled,
waiting and listening for the flood
to fill my ears
and carry me
to a place I didn't want to go -
not yet, anyway -

while down I went,
all the way to where the
arroyo spread out on the bajada into
a wide flood
plain,
caked with caliche
and dust.

Seeing my escape as complete,
I rested,
breathing hard on my knees
grateful
on crushed
pink granite.

I watched the monsoon
now out over the city -
dropping chill rain
on the heads of couples in love and
running for the shelter
of sandwich shop awnings and
wetting
the hair and clothes
of a woman weeping in a South Valley
back yard,
eyes swollen shut,
arms raised to a sky
impossible to see.

Still dry,
I found my camera and took a picture
of a world I'd come back to,
a world that came back
to me.