One Foot Over the Edge

Sometimes I wish I had said no, had turned away from the shimmering imperative to follow the call, to say yes. Those are the dark days, the ones where energy hides out under some rock, and my tired bones just want to lie down and sink into the earth. Those days come more often now that can't move as fast. Until the dragon catches up to me though, I'll keep throwing one foot over the yawning chasm of what I don't know and hope that some support extends from the unknowable to catch my weight and give me a place to stand so I can swing the next foot forward, again over emptiness that somehow becomes something, even when no one seems to care where it is that I walk. Certainly no one reads what I write. So I just keep moving, placing one foot in front of the other, trusting that my weight will be held, until it isn't.

When the Waters Recede in Tucson

            It is Sunday night in our little mesquite bosque. I grab a Key lime soda from the fridge and find a chair on the porch next to Megan. We can hear the highway up the hill behind the house, but the light of the setting sun and the breeze off the mountains – a breeze still carrying the chill of last night’s snow – honeys the light, quiets the drone of traffic.

No gauzy film, billboard, corporate-sponsored dreamscape, or media hype could capture this subtle shift of the season, this last, cool, goodbye kiss of springtime that spills over and through us as we sip drinks and make small talk.

            The last of the snow runoff is withdrawing back to the high country. Clear water still runs over the sand at the foot of the mountains, but has disappeared just today here in the valley. I followed it upstream as the mouth of our winter creek retreated, growing silent, its piece said, overtaken by the thirsty sand.

            Shadows lengthen. Trees have gone opaque with blossom and leaf in this last week. I watch my wife read, study her crossed legs, and wonder how many times I will see her again in a light like this, a breeze like this, my shoes wet with the last drops of a vanishing desert river. Once more? Twice? Not more than a few, if any.

            The shadows overtake the light, and the sounds of the highway come down to us, no longer held at bay by the breeze. She gets up. It is too dark to read, and friends are coming over. I sit and listen for the sounds of coyotes, somewhere.