I Went Down to the River...

I went to the river, rode down the ruts, curving through the sage and juniper hills remembering where I was and who I am. A purple dust storm spread its churn just below the sun and just behind the walking volcanoes like a ruffling curtain. Aquamarine sky, the peaks quiet and far away, snow spilling from the tops but starting to peel back, retreat, and I standing on a jutting talis rock letting the wind blow through me and realizing that spring had come, and when it had I was not looking. There were snows in March and April, four storms after March 21st, and there may yet be another, but I was whirling out there, traveling, surging, forgetting, leaving my mesa home in the dust. I stopped paying attention and became again the man who walks with Mr. Frodo, searching for a way to Mt. Doom to destroy that fucking ring. My gaze fell in upon my feet and no longer out the window following the moon and the ocean sky, no longer keeping watch for the fiddler in green. I stopped seeing rabbits except in the road darting across or frozen on the side, afraid to move. The dogs were gone, I was gone. My writing room was virtually emptied and abandoned for an office in town. Coffee crept back into the routine, joining the mate, and bars again seemed the natural follow to a power hike driven more now by the need to clear the computer glare out of my eyes and the fear of losing my leanness than to visit the ravens, my brother tree and absorb the magic at the confluence of the worlds. The house got dusty and the cupboard bare, but for mustard, an old yogurt and some rice pasta. I came home to a stopped up bathroom sink and an ashy wood stove flanked by piles of old newspaper and food packaging. It occurred to me that in the mornings the house was now colder, much colder, than it had been when I inhabited it nearly full time in December, January, February into early March. This owed as much to the higher angle of the sun as it did to the draft of my absense and the lack of fires before bed and early in the morning. It became harder to write at home (as you can see by the dwindling entries the past couple of months), the big wood table almost naked, the battered laptop sitting there with its screen hanging by one hinge. It was good enough to check sports scores and my email in the morning, but not inviting to create or even spew. "Where did my muse go?" I'd say to myself on the few nights I was here before dusk or darkness. And now I hear her saying back, "Where did you go, motherfucker?" And, of course, we both know. I went exit stage left to the office and the town draws, like an allergy, like an old itch that you forgot about for a while that you have a cure for at the bottom of some plastic bin under the sink in the bathroom. Six months gone from it and yet the same people were out there, Sam and Marky and AJ, Glenny and Fast Angie and Clyde, Alyson and Candy and Janet. Like family, they'll always be there to take you in. It's like you never left. And there's some solace in it, you know, but a month with that family and it's time to hit the road again, back home. I don't know. Again, I don't know. What I do know is that I was out there in March, sitting in the melting snow, watching it swirl around me, smelling spring in the caliche. I knew it was coming, and I wanted to see and feel the turn, but I missed it. At the river tonight, birdsong filled the gorge and the wind had no bite. It blew hard from the west but it caressed and bathed instead of cutting. Winter was gone and with it the snow that had lasted since November. Even the gullies were going green. I had some hugs out there in town, some moments of knowing the love in all the noise, the sass in the world, the altered, rednosed workshop of smudged saints, but I can't stay there. My workshop is here and my work requires everything I have. "Don't be dramatic" the muse says, "you'll need that family here and there." True, true, I think, but not now even though spring has this ram ready to butt and bang and jump chasms. It is time to create and to create I need abundant life force, and to have abundant life force I need to pay attention and to feel and to show up. Here I am again.