Ordinary Man

I'm in my cave like office, cool while the sun beats down through the leafing trees outside. Spring has come with layers of fragrance, lilacs and apple trees, dogwoods and astors, cherry trees and weeping willows in full blossom. Where there were scars in the peeling back of the snow in February and March, there is now cushy, dewy, color-mad life. It draws me out, the perfume, the skin caressing warmth, the thickening grasses. Yesterday, on Devisadero, the shoulders of the mountains gave blue-green healing to my computer-scattered eyes. An endless Moroccan blue sky, no clouds for a hundred miles in every direction, that green against blue like food, enabling deep breaths and nourishment. I expected people up there, but they must have hidden or I may have disappeared from view, vaporizing into the rocks I used as springs, miniaturizing into the insect on the dancing astors, their central yellow suns roundbellied. There in the shadows of khaki rocks the new flowers waved out of moss. Scrub oaks started to unfurl their little leaves, rubbery like any newborn, warm to the touch. Up on the ridge, the leaves were slower, still balled, waiting for a mild night. But the wildflowers were ready, waving, jumping, jiggling, so happy to be in the world that they'd give it all now, not worry about the future. I did pass one human, and she was a flower, too, a wide-jawed blond lady in reverie, off to the side of the trail in prayer, stretching her body skyward, making a giant circle of life with her arms, looking like I do on my altar rock. I was singing to myself, a song about an ordinary man, and I lowered my voice, but I did not stop as she was ok with it, two people in prayer, on a mountain, looking at the blue, listening to the birds. And the ravens played, rascally, riding backward in the wind, beaks facing west, gliding east, cigars in their mouths. They made me laugh and they knew it. I wondered about the fiddler, wondered if she wondered about me. I saw a fiddler weeks ago, snow still melting off the rocks, a woman I'd met before, but not the fiddler in green. She may be my teacher. The fiddler I'd followed and seen out on the trail and near the river is not my teacher, though I have things to learn. She is a lover and to know her I'll need to know how to play. The song I was singing yesterday had no fiddle. It was voice and guitar. My voice felt supple and rangy. It's a sad song, a reflective longing, a cautionary tale. "Just the son of an ordinary man/living his life in a gentle rage/living day by day by day/this is who he was meant to be/like taking water from a grain of sand/seeking sin in a pious age/wanting more but can't find a way/to disregard his destiny." It's 4:09 and I may have to leave the cave again. I have levitating to do. There are dinner parties and margaritas, women in sheer spring dresses dancing to ragtag blues looking for a shoulder to lean on. It is the time of the big wakeup. It is a hard time to stay on the trail, but that's where the magic is.