Zion

We were practically strangers crammed inside your 

Volvo with all our camping gear  and lust.

Driving along the I95, blasting music from my ipod that you said you loved but, I’m not sure you did.

Washington State greeted us with rain our optimistic August day turned to grey as we made our way to Cape Disappointment. It was disappointing.

We out drove the rain the higher ground we gained in Oregon. 

The lush ocean breezes giving way to brown landscapes and heat.

Northern California came with the anticipation of the well planned out map that told us of the campsite with a lake. I could already feel the loving tongue of the lake  as it lapped off heat and dust of the Oregon Mountains. But, there was no lake. Long gone we are told. 

All we can see for miles are dried out fields and cow rumps.

How old are these maps?

Maybe it’s like that story of the lake that freezes in an instant and the ducks fly off with it stuck fast to their webbed feet carrying it away to a land we will never meet.

The long stalks of dried out grass rustle in the wind, the tops of deer ears just barely visible

bedded down for the night, bellies panting from the high mountain sun.

I slip out my old ratty copy of Leonard Cohen poems and oh so quietly stretch out in Mother nature’s messy hair and read softly to my sleeping audience.

As my voice drifts out to flow with the wind it joins me in a chorus of Hallelujah’s

 Hallelujah…

Ears twitch and my lover sighs.

Las Vegas is a blur of lights and blow dryer heat.

I couldn’t get enough of the swimming pool.

The Canyon was Grand

but it did not make me feel like I thought it would.

I guess I thought I might find some inspiration in those vast gullies.

I guess it only tells its secrets to the birds.

It was in Utah where I found that inspiration mixed up in the thousands of years of that red sandstone that painted the landscape with one solid slap leaving its handprint in the most beautiful way.

Because Utah really is beautiful

don’t let the Mormons scare you.

God really does exist here, but what he looks like to me doesn’t look the same to you.

And after he saw what we did on the hood of your car on the side of the road

He will never let us back into Zion.