last sunday draft 1

That’s the thing with the middle of nowhere. We were out, way out, far north and south and east and west of anything other than a casino in a tent. A quick left off a long road onto a path to tankers, land not mapped roads for oil, south of monuments, east of the res, no power lines, but there were homes, four walls with roofs and dogs and cars in the driveways and older cars, parts of cars, stoves and debris, even remnants of the last house, out there in the desert. But for now it’s just dirt trails to tankers, no maps, but he remembers where he went and we climb and wind up a big pile of New Mexican dirt, we rise and rise and suddenly off the map, of the road to the right and left, God. The proof that something divine exists, the proof that if you’d just get out of your own pansy fucking way, stop following each and everyday the road that’s paved, if you’d follow an aside, a path to something you just might find what you didn’t know you were looking for, what you never knew your life needed before you departed, if you just trusted and followed, went along with something that wasn’t sold to you, something that was not even in your gut,
You’d find a moment in time that was beyond your wildest dreams, and probably better than your Sunday plans anyway. So there we were, Neal Fallon screaming some clutch songs, bellowing Baltimore on some desert back road under a flag it never once acknowledged. And off to each side was a canyon grander than the grandest one in that Arizona parking lot. Rocks, hundreds of feet below teetered high up on narrow earth like Greek ruins piled in Athens. Not just a metaphor, on the edge of a cliff, rocks round; long and broken like sandstone concrete pillars.
Smooth rocks from oceans far gone scattered across the mesa that stopped and fell through formations defining spectacle, the sublime. Notions of the sublime, conversations, debates all stood in awe through the shrubs of a desert forest and across vast canyons that emptied smoothly into plains for miles to d’chay.
Hours of awe on the canyons edge, scouring roads snapping souls of indains gone by, maybe a cowboy too, into flashcard files, dust blown trails marking our path to families of Indians out in their yards, as much electricity as teeth and literacy, but pick up trucks, old and working on, each day, sure it’s not just a special Sunday after deed, new trucks pass by on roads to nowhere, no Indians but Spaniards, the modern day Marlboro man, no smokes just beer. Dusk cam down on the arroyo and we returned to south in which we cam, in which so many came, in which those early generations of Spaniards came, long before the white man, long after some Indians passed by, no predicated with ancient, only to land north and never be seen again,