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By chris Date: 2006 Dec 11 Comment on this Work [[2006.12.11.19.44.581]] |
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(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 phases 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 trail.) 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. |