I'm Not Ready

This season is throwing me. I'm not ready for this warmth. I'm not ready to lose my winter muse, she, with La Luna, playing in the frozen strawberry daiquiri sky and dancing across the creamy snow out my windows. Those two, they called me to my home floating like a houseboat near the edge of the Rio Grande Gorge. I'm not ready for the social explosion of spring when my butt does not want to stay in a chair. I'm not ready for the gears to roll the soil and pop the buds on the tips of the branches. No. I'm still romancing the hulking, sharp-branched cottonwoods, gnarled fingers jiggling an accusation, the boughs yawning against the wind with sideways snow glued into their creases. I'm not ready to push the clocks ahead. For now, I come home after a back country ramble and the light drops; blueberries and pixilated cranberries and, sometimes, electric salmon snakes waver over the dark covered nipples and humps, pursed lips and haughty buffalo flanks of the caldera. I'm not ready to give up the mourning for the people I know who have not slept all winter. The vigil, in my bedroom, on the satin blue zafu, looking southeast, the light already poured into the building navy of night. Looking at the foothills and the snow-streaked rounds above treeline leading to the pinnacle of a circus tent that is Truchas Peak. Sometimes the stars shine like a Bunsen burner blue gleaming razor blade and allow me to see shadows against the snow, silver clouds from the west lit from behind by the moon. And you can feel somewhere in the bowels and down through the legs the echoes of an exodus that happened a long time ago, and gets played out through shadows on snow over and over throughout the winter; the dying of something large, the leaving behind of the story, the bending of time. I'm not ready for that story to end. I'm not ready for the caress of solitude to be driven from me by my tensing muscles, the thrust coming up from my feet and feeding my thighs. But it's coming, the end of this and the beginning of that. It is too early. I see as I hike Devisidero in the mid afternoon, the warm wind blow-drying the mud and decimating the snow. The Taos lowlands are back to burlap, that patchwork I wrote about in November, those last days I followed my green velvet fiddler up the trail. I heard her again in late January when the roads first turned to mud after a wet pacific storm ate away the bottom of the snowpack. Back then, we were all in our houses playing fiddles, guitars, mandolins, banjos, listening to the snow drip through our roofs into pots and tin cups. It was then that the rabbit man told me she was dancing in the mud, playing, barefoot, heading for the canyon. I knew this and felt her pull me, she was wearing green silk this time, and I was pressed to my window feeling the cold against my nose and lips. I heard all their prayers kneeling in front of fires, playing for her, playing for their own ears so they could know how mired they were. And the fiddler, my fiddler, skirted the kissy lips mountain they call Two Peaks and went off with the purple tendrils of cloud lurking over the desert, looking for something to cling to, anything. I'm not ready to give up the mire, the depth, the slog. It is too early to be sprightly, to be bright. That time is coming, and I will be with it, I will dance to that song. But still I want to mourn and I want to lay down in deep snow, die properly, peacefully, the wind kicking through the trees teasing me. I came home this winter, to die with my eyes open. I came to be buried in that snow and I am not ready to be revealed.