A Question
A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth.
--Robert Frost
Another drive, 1 a.m., from downtown Riverside (I taught a writing workshop at the library there tonight) through the Badlands past the Morongo Casino flashing "Stone Temple Pilots" on its marquee and the flow downward past windmills unto desert. I've left my friend and former boyfriend Jeff's house. We spend a lot of time together and work on myriad books and anthologies and poetry projects, I know it looks weird to outsiders, who wonder what the hell, but as a longtime single mother, with just one child, I'm now, in response to the inevitable empty nest syndrome, and an overworking writer and college professor who's gone through a wrenching mother-daughter separation during the past few years, my whole world turned upside down and still in the aftershocks though the earth is settling and slightly less trembling. I need all the escape hatches I can get, and poetry and books seem to be a good answer and a wellspring of creative comfort that smooths me easily into their fluidity.
Jeff, coming off a divorce, I think, feels the same. We met formally at a book event almost 2 years ago. We're about the same age, come from very similar small, dismal towns - Fontana and Rialto, next door to one another, and share "religion infused" childhoods of the rather "new age" stripe, 70's Maranatha and "love your brother" long-hair and Jesus sandals style. We are also both parents to daughters, and to daughters the same age. And so, we've fallen into a casual routine, the past year, of working together on books and going to poetry readings all over southern Cal. Another dorky poetry reading - well, that's one less moment for regrets, lame and goofy as it seems. I've learned to not judge myself for doing things that 10 years ago I would've scorned. That is, rendering anguish into aesthetically-beautiful words, and not, instead, hiding on some faraway mountain-top, a big and ridiculous middle finger pointed skyward until, after miles of hiking, I'd relax, and drop.
And so, tonight, after another literary adventure with some amazing writers that's perked my spirits up, although it has involved such a long and tiring 2 hour round trip drive tonight, I see a quick jut of falling star, a very bright one, above the Badlands, before I enter their craggy up and round and windiness. Upon release, 2,000 feet higher than when I started and in the opening at the mouth canyon of San Timoteo, where, along I-60, a lush of early California beauty still resides - to the left, thick green riparian trees subsisting on creek water; to the right, lush grove oases, ancient and wise - and I see lightning, thin slits of it, and very high in the sky, southward, way, way out on the open desert, towards the Anza Borrego, or Salton Sea, or maybe even almost to Mexico.
In Palm Desert, Cook Street Exit, near the new, elegant-built, upper-end Cal State and UCRiverside satellite campuses, I stop at an AM/PM, it's almost 2 am and the only other people in the store are a carload of shirtless tough guys, rushing in for the last few 12 packs of the night and browsing through the chips and snacks. I buy cheezits and pretzels, for no other reason than that I'm wide awake, and a humid hot breeze is pushing up from the south, the antitheses of west-tradewinds cooled evening coastal valley I left behind, on the other side of the mountains. Every re-entry to this desert is another birth, and I wonder if the lightning and sweet bless of rain will enter our zone tonight, or if the giant storm will stay closer to its mouth, the womb entry of California's Gulf. I've seen more advertisements for other local casinos' upcoming concerts - Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Spotlight 29. I don't need 70's re-hash shows, or muzak from the 80's. All I want is the relief of cool, sweet rain, falling from the sky and soothing me.
At home, it's the usual. My roommate is up, reading Allan Watts. He's taken to staying up all night during the summer, sleeping in late, and I can't say I blame him. I was hoping he'd be asleep, because then, the loneliness of our friendship, which involves some degree of anger and the sad presence of invisibility, the outcome of a series of misunderstandings and hurt feelings resulting from the jags and disrepairs of binary star systems when they live too close and fall out of orbit and into whack; because then, I could pretend I was the only star in this orbit and not stagger in the off-glare of my beloved, and estranged, friend. He is someone I've hiked the deserts with and visited waterfalls with for more than a year, someone I love desperately and even pathetically, and who I've pissed off and hurt and disappointed more than acres of thunderheads and rage about. Trying to secret myself off to special desert spots with him and imagine that love can conquer all has become inverted, and now, I am conquered by love and the pain that love can cause. We are at a truce, which accentuates my stomach-ache, and the feelings that can no longer freely be expressed, and pass between us like the flow of Deep Creek at the bottom of an ancient-carved canyon, separating mountains and desert, the perfect place to run around naked and soak in hot springs and dip into river. A safety zone, a love planet, cosmic.
But tonight is a long way from my beloved. I'm a stopped-up, stagnant pool abandoned by the water's barely flow. Creek at low, late summer, always a blistering and unloving world. I haven't even been to Deep Creek for over a year, and it used to be a constantly visited exodus of pilgrimage after pilgrimage. I close my door, my isolation sharpened more than if I were really alone, in this odd being ignored. My daughter, 20, is long asleep; she works at a doctor's office and routinely amazes me in her ability to get herself up, early, off to work, and pay her own bills. I'm her mom, and when she's home, I always feel in my own accord, but she's her own life, and spends her down time with her boyfriend, or on the phone with her boyfriend.
I lie awake for another few hours, contemplating falling stars, the sound of wet but wetless wind in my small palms, the dogs a little restless too, Shasta has anxiety attacks at the sound of distant thunder even I can't hear, and she's panting a little too hard. The body scar of sunrise, on my heels, the desert is a lonely hell, but also whispering a love song, if without the cool reprieve of rain, the relief of birth, the exit of rainclouds so angrily hedging at my side. This is the desert, and it's going to be hot for another month. Labor Day Weekend is upon us, and it is time to visit the coast. Waves are predictable, and they never fail us, and this time of summer, the water will be lovingly warm, and my back will be positioned firmly against the shadow mountains that, for once, envelope me in their happy-face, rain-sucking sides, ocean-ward, and protect me from the desert's glare. And like Robert Frost, I will not only try to avoid fire, but especially ice.
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