Cimarron Canyon

Memories of New Mexico


Here's to Father Sun and Mother Moon,
embracing me and you

even as we think we are slowly dying
(death is slow life, life's slow death of repression).


In the wet. We wait until we've gotten through the twistiest, steepest mountain roads until we allow ourselves to savor the chocolate covered pretzels; we let the rain clamber in. Weakness- pain leaving the body. The little white paper bag from the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory is perched between us, he cracks the windows again and the cold hand of liberation slides inside my lungs. Victorious release. I know I trust him because I'm able to write as he navigates through the treacherous, winding strips; I still remember when I was too terrified to even attempt to drive in abnormal weather, let alone surmise someone else to do so without tearing my eyes off the road.

And we feel solid. Rocks. Real. He told me he doesn't feel lonely anymore.

Occasional map glances for mere reinforcement, he and the land know one another, here. The best smelling air of anywhere. He wants to keep that scent in his nostrils for all time, hands sneaking out to grab droplets of New Mexico's cooling blood ("It doesn't look real"). We always share the best drives- surreal, ethereal spheres of peace. Terrenes like my painting visions; he is my blue tree in what dreams may come. My journey...the night fog creeping in and those hauntingly esoteric flashes of light in the distance. Always to the East. And in this damp paradise, I don't take out my camera, I know the futility: absolutely nothing could record or accurately capture this beauty.

I can see the ghost of fog-writing edging the window (Love)
...to see my own utter elation,
echoed across his face.

He wished for just one kiss while he blew the frost fuzz of the dandelion in the wind
breaking the mountain tide, outside the center of a community not our own (but of our kind).

Great chasm of sky bestows the steeples of earth with invisibility, this never ending solid wall of precipitation. It's just me and you on this road:
"Looks like we're driving into the abyss."
"We are. We always are."

Nihilists enamored.
(I can nearly slap Colorado's left buttcheek from here.)



oceans and grasslands and deserts and forests and mountains and plains and valleys and canyons and rivers and bays and gulfs and marshlands and swamps and pastures and meadows and creeks and lakes roil and meld and blend and meet and then a centerpoint of sudden light...
bursting over me and ciphening the poison out.

and then
a hand on a knee, a head on a chest
breaking (someday the) waves with the most pristine of whitecaps (think pre-sunrise Swiss Alps)



In the mountains I feel as though I understand myself better in my dreams,
like I am more in tune with my most raw subconscious desires. I awake believing that perhaps I had never really been sleeping, merely stepping out of one skin and sliding into another.



My life has finally truly begun
by the language of his movement and
the rhythms of his tongue.