A wave inside I did not expect when I walked out the door early Sunday. The sun did it or the clarity of the air, but out of a missing or a mourning for something never possessed, I thought of New Mexico.
New Mexico Storm
This brilliant morning it arrives, a rolling grief because it is so far away. On hard, cold Pennsylvania ground I consider standing on a rise and looking out at a spare land — red rock, long glides to a visible horizon, a sky a huge stage — three-quarters of the rich world all in my unmoving sight — a long view, a high, dry place, an imperishable sapphire sky — an open door, all the drapes and cloaks thrown off and cleaving into a boundless, untethered vastness.
Maybe the desired absence of so much trying to seize me counsels me to go — the minutia of ‘do this’, ‘must do that’, ‘that too!’, ‘what is broken?, ‘‘we owe how much to whom?’
Maybe the sense that death, that small thing with teeth, is trying to attach itself to my shoulders.
Gravity seems more at home in my hands and knees, and all I want is to break away from its force at a gallop, at a motorcycle-rush, and never turn around.
This restlessness is maddening. It feels as if casts are assembling piece by piece around my limbs, the molds that begin to creep on with age, these goddamn bony straitjackets — I want to hold off the skull showing through the skin.
Last night I dreamed of coming down the road from the Big Horns into the Shell Basin, into the high desert of Wyoming. It was wonderful. If I believed in signs, I would know what to do, but there are no beacons out there to show another way. It makes no sense to roll bones or read the world for runes. This is a rational life. So then, what is this wildness I feel inside, this sense that I could burn through anything if I touched it?
The Shell Basin of Wyoming
You KNOW what you want to do. Life is short…I’m just sayin’