Creek Running North

Calochortus, South Kaibab Trail

1.

One foot goes out to plant itself in front; thigh pulls the rest of me forward. Momentum carries me; I topple slowly. The other foot swings out in front to stop my fall. A walk is a cascade of arrested tumbles. I am a pendulum drawn by the sky’s gravity, anchored to the earth only by my feet.

Writing is walking, and too much thought paid to the mechanics of it makes one stumble. Better to think of destination, to note the unexpected at trailside.

The day will come when I do not retrace my steps, when I walk out into it and do not come back. This is no self-destruction: it is arrival.

2.

The sound of packing tape sliced by a key, the creak of cardboard. Inside, a half a loaf of bread. Wildflower seeds and lichen on red pumice. A few dull coins, 1.70 Bolivianos, and piñon pitch has dripped onto them. I bring them to my nose. The dull numismatic clink of Sucre: the scent of the Pine Nut Range near Carson. I close my eyes and see silver.

3.

At roadside, a glint of desert sky among the sodden leaves. The word Cyanocittus springs to mind, and I am right, oddly enough. A Steller’s jay has lost a tailfeather. There is no blue in a jay feather. A million internal prisms refract the sun: a colorless feather borrows pigment from the sky. I muffle a shout of joy. I feel sometimes as if my heart has been pried open, roiled by ecstasy and bleakness. I choke back tears at bird song. I laugh crazily at rocks.

4.

Beauty is more frightening than death: the sudden dissolution of the self, the swift incorporation by the other. The light shifts and you lose yourself. Defend, defend! Faced with honesty and love and anger, hide behind your cynical smirk or withdraw in fetishized civility. You bear no responsibility for the world. Do not allow it to mark your heart. To fully live a life takes too much effort. Keats is dead and died again in high school. Best to merely watch it happen, peering cautiously around the corners of your sneer.

5.

In my mother’s house last night we were besieged by cats. My niece took time to stroke each one; the tortoiseshell clawed at my chin. Here and now, Chris. My mother pressed two gifts on me. One was an old paperweight, heavy glass with an embedded photo, a half-century-old souvenir from the Grand Canyon. The other: We Eat The Mines and the Mines Eat Us, a book on workers in Bolivia.

6.

Aji de gallina and chicha morada. In the wet pavement, the shine of stoplights turning yellow. A susurrus of tires and water. Clouds spill over the hills, stop just past the ridge. The staccato whistle of flushed mourning doves.  Green tea with roasted rice. A perfect paragraph, distilled, in a voice I could never have. The wind bursts and dashes rain against the windows.

7.

The day will come when I do not retrace my steps, when I lose the line that marks what is internal. It is a dissolution devoutly to be wished. The world will roll in and at long last will not recede. I eat the world and the world eats me. Let this be my testament: I did not flinch, or if I did, I laughed.