we are leaving the second of two bars in a town that sits between mountains and desert.

Madge, a sharp 91 year old, comes to us from across the road and says we may as well have a drink if we're just standing outside, admiring her bar. we tell her we're heading back to our little town for the night with drinks all finished. she tells us a dozen times she needed to own a bar like she needed a hole in the head. but here we are. she looks at our little rental truck, ten me, and asks, 'is this your outfit?' and I cannot imagine any other way I will ever refer to a car again. she never left her town or good but has been all over the place, she says. Madge says she saved her bar before all its charm could be sold to californians 30 years ago. she says she owns two ranches, one here one in another small town where we're staying, and I get a pang of yearning with a deep knowing to hold it steady. she warns us one dozen times too to be very careful driving back, to watch for elk and deer. there aren't as many as there used to be, but they'll still ruin your night. sawtooths in the back, salmon river toward the front, and the sky pink with a solitary elk making way across the valley are held in the last moments of the day outside the truck window. the elk stays still as I watch her a while while she watches me. she and I get stuck in this watching of each other, and we're the only things left living. our outfit carries on and she heads to where she must need to go.

prepared mind

I’m right in a nomansland between sleep and another plane of consciousness, but certainly in a bed that is not mine. The desert at night is restless and the earth that makes it a living animal. If you never step in the same river twice, you look into the face of a familiar stranger every time the wind blows in the desert. Here, sound is a trickster. I can’t tell if it’s near or far when I hear Coyote clear his throat and declare into the night, “There’s no turning back now, kid. There’s no telling what could happen — so go on anyway and you may as well do it now. Good fortune and happenstance favor a mind that’s paying attention, so go get it while you can!”

However, my dreams yip louder and an insecure, in-concrete, timid childish subconsciousness all at once comes up for air to the surface of my being. I wake enough to move at 4am so I decide to brush the tequila and other bad tastes of remorse out of my mouth. Disappointed, feeling small, stupid and panicky at an opportunity passed by.

Walking slow and quiet from my bed to the outhouse, my eyes find waxing Moon hung over endless Stars and the desert Mountain and their shadows cast from borrowed light. Toothbrush in my mouth and weight in my chest I feel the landscape gazing at me in return. Mountain begins to speak. Mountain speaks with a sound clear as the night without haste or command; “Nothing is ever really lost. Not a bit of Dirt that gets moved by the Wind, not a life, not a wish, or any part of this night. We remember everything. It’s all still here and the continuation is there waiting.“

I return to the bed lighter and sleepless. Eventually morning Sun is carried in through the window by Wind and Time and they join together to meet on the body that is mine.