Inches apart
the right side of your right arm
rubbed my left.
Our legs dangled over the cliff
overlooking the river
curving northward into a painter’s backdrop
the ground dry and sharp-twigged, noisy, footfalls crunching over
volcanic black rock
dotted with unexpected tiny wildflowers.
Sage-scented wind reddened our faces,
blew gusts of longing
uplifts of vulnerability
gentle caresses of awkwardness.
Tell me a story, I asked. Even amidst wordless, breathless beauty, the kind of beauty that makes believers out of skeptics, I want words.
You told a tale of an ancient old woman who doesn’t belong to her tribe. She ambles along the riverbank finding all she needs, accompanied by circling and diving birds, the crops she gathers before inevitably having to move on. That, you said, is what the hunter gatherers had to do: move on when there was nothing left to harvest. A peaceful outcast, your nomadic old woman who moved when the people to whom she should have belonged moved.
My story was of the drowsy sun wrapping itself over and over in wind and clouds, the weight of it pulling her down over the rocky river bank across from us. The sun, wrapped in blankets of clouds, sinking steadily into an otherworldly slumber. That, I said, is what everyone thinks the sun does every night. But She doesn’t.
In your story, an old woman at the river’s edge, not among but alongside her people.
In my story, a feminized, tired Sun.
Arriving after early romances, the practice ones we cut our teeth on, fully knowing they will end. . .
After the definitive romances, the “for real” ones that were supposed to last a lifetime, that wore our teeth down with the gnawing and gnashing of unplanned endings and the sheer relentlessness of aging . . .
This off-time romance begins in the stories of weary outcasts, moving on when the land has been picked dry and barren, hardened from the accumulation of yawping human need and misuse. A harsh landscape yet filled with the tiny bursts of surprise: the purple of broadleaf lupine, yellow bitterbrush, dusty white bigseed bisquitroot, larkspur blues, pink flox, and gray fuzz of the fiddleneck tarweed. This is the color palette of the tender-footed, tired, riverbank dwellers, our skin and dreams and yearnings once hothouse moist, Eden-lush, our need and consummation planted firmly in verdant, abundant soil over which we leapt in sure-footed strides.
Oh, but the desert still blooms.