A Live Quiver in Solitude

I'm in buzzes and swirls, heartbeats in my calves, congas in my ears. Stepping off the bicycle under a Uzilevsky sky of candied lines leaning red, rose, jolly rancher watermelon, and finishing west with a cotton-dipped Close Encounters mars-tinged saffron. Bending layers of velvety, rolling clouds spread east to west and lowering over the puckered camel hump of Two Peaks. Toward the gorge from which I came, there is a an eye-shaped sky hole of marine blue looking at my house. La luna, a thickening crescent with the hint of a nose sits high among shredded night clouds, leaving Venus well below in the building cloud wash. And I stand outside, listening to nothing, no sound, the houses settled, no cars, no planes, no wind, the gears not turning, the underneath at rest, the sky drifting, my feet pulling up a vibration, but not from the ground, from themselves, the soles summoning me, standing still, arms loose, a human liveliness in my skin, sore muscles figure-eighting from the exertion of the ride. I am alive in the midst of the immense quiet, energy running out through my fingertips, my teeth in pin-prick ripples, through my eyes that drop with the light toward the sage sitting without fanfare in a calm sea all around me. The ride is over, that last juniper tree on the west rim, a perfect spade, in silhouette, sits behind my eyes and reminds me of a similar tree on a hill in Boulder that always brought me back to early childhood, some knowing of loneliness, a wanting of it, to be a point on a horizon, a live quiver in solitude, something to sit under and gaze out from, nothing more. At the rim, the air rapidly cooling, I hopped among the lichens covered lava rocks until I found a wide one on the precipice, sitting above the still snow pocketed slope, above an over sized pinon where eagles sometimes perch. I looked down on the river, flowing thick in milky jade, early snowmelt swelling it up onto the matted west bank. Its roar from 700 feet below vibrating my shins and stilling my ears. I could sleep standing on that rock, on the edge of a long drop, hoping for mist to reach me. On the way to this point, riding the rutted road up and down hills, looking into the draws for snow patches, and lost horses, hidden tree thickets and bobcats, I waited for words to come, ideas, something from the parts of the New York Times I'd read earlier, from the NPR story on Hasidic rabbis molesting young students, from the week at Mabel's sitting in silence, listening to people lives, but nothing came, nothing but a sense of things bigger than myself, things that encompass all of the streams, things that leave the world quiet, the gears seized, the lone tree on the rim to suck in the last light.