Saturday, July 08, 2006

Three Rivers Petroglyph Site

On the way to nearby White Sands and Three Rivers last weekend for a two day holiday... train headed south, me north.

Beyond the mesquite tree: solstice snake coiled in endless spiral.



I can imagine the adobe home here... nice spot.


Just when the poem was getting meaningful, I switched directions. I remember pointing this out in much gentler terms to the young poet this morning as if I were speaking to myself. The splash of bright color in the desert offers its red silk as a screen for its needle bed like a brain or heart. Memory resides in dna along arroyos in the sun and dislodges only during flash floods.

I remember motorcycles and wearing a helmut. I remember Crenshaw Boulevard. I remember handing numbers and coins to hands and mouths that wanted everything and nothing. I remember how sometimes fiction makes memory possible, when the confession room makes small gifts feel pushed to the limits. The cleared space with cottonwood remnants either a ruin or a restoration. Why only two choices? Teeth come and go, come and go. The first of the spadefoot toads arrived two nights ago like the promise of the underworld needing the one we live in as much as we need the surfacing. This separation of twos, true or false, is the problem with this line of thinking. Sometimes I forget that childbirth is human, yet I protest when the young poets erase a line of their own hoping for a better one.

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