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Dear Gina,
October 15, 2006    File under: America

I should have called you, asked you to talk me around, tell me where to go.

This morning, hotel-tired, I slid into the rental car, went searching for coffee and then wound out Speedway to Gates Pass, where I went the last time I was here, with another friend, who's in LA these days. I rolled down the windows to catch the morning air, cool, not nearly as dry as Denver's can be, enjoying the slight moisture, the mottle of clouds high in the clean desert air. As I curved up then down the pass and started making my way across the desert park, I thought of how much you like to drive and how I thought you crazy wanting to drive from Tucson to Denver in one shot, how you wanted to keep on going east, though there was nothing much between you and Omaha. But now, here in the desert, I feel something I've not felt for some time, a kind of quiet peace watching the road unfold, the light play across the Tucsons, paint the desert floor. Is this why you drive? For a kind of quiet in which what noise hides of you from yourself can emerge again, so the long taproots can descend in search of what deep water will ease the bloom?

***

I'm reminded first of a song from Verbena's Souls for Sale, a truly brilliant album nearly a decade old and sadly nearly forgotten. In "The Desert," Scott Bondy sings:

I'm in love with the size of the desert
Never seen it but I'd love to kiss a cactus.
Got my hands on a piece of the good earth,
Both my hands up inside of a new world.

***

Last I was here, I heard on NPR that folk artist Howard Finster had died. I remembered going to his garden in Summerville, Georgia, one Sunday, to see the work but also in the hope that I'd see him, as he used to stop by after church and talk to the visitors. Sure enough, he showed, and he started telling us about the coming nuclear war, about how the banks would collapse, how the world economy would collapse. He told us to put our money in the hills, in the mountains, in caves, to make our own banks so we'd have something when the world came crashing down.

I don't know who he thought would honor such tender, but I kept listening, enjoying his excess, and I wrote a poem no one wanted.

***

It's cooler today, and I'm not thinking so far away.

Sunday morning's easy here, and I'm already ready to return.

Posted by Jake Adam York at October 15, 2006 12:10 PM



COMMENTS

YES.

Posted by: Gina Franco at October 15, 2006 4:35 PM