My Geography

I love the mountain forests. They are pretty, comfortable, a break from the flat expanses of our coast. But still somehow foreign. I’d dare to say alien, but we are too close to Roswell to use that metaphor without any irony.

When we drive down out of the mountains, an internal syncopation with the trees falls silent. The high desert unfolds around me, and I feel a new rhythm, pulsing in harmony with something inside me. I glance back at the mountains in the distance. Past the tumbleweeds and dry grass to the mesas and ridges and peaks. I look forward to the rolling desert. 

The green and blue I see in the distance are illusions. Those are shadow colors playing through the brittle brown valleys. Seussian yucca flowers dried upon their stalks dance along the edges of the road, bent like Kokopelli the trickster, blowing their pipes. A song to lead me home.