More Notes on Shape (from roundscape back to flat earth)
Posted: November 9th, 2018, 8:55 pm
A heatwave came on and I headed north from roundscape, from its curvaceous valleys of fire toward higher ground where you might catch trout with a shovel in a snowmelt stream if you knew the right canyon, and spreading out far and wide beside those canyons, the great bright dry lake playa planes and their worlds outside of worlds . . . I had to leave curvacious space behind and go back to my flat earth beginnings, deep into the blank sheet land of mirage. I knew I'd end up there.
........I crested a rise, and spent asphalt slipped toward a blinding flat. For a brief minute I thought it might disappear into blinding silts near the bottom, and I might see stunning things in the long haze of desert heat, maybe an old oak masterpiece from a San Francisco bar, its ornate, carved art being hauled across the desert to some boom town in boom rock hills at the height of a craze.
........Salty grime filled the cab. A hazy, gentle pain of a hundred six degrees. Smoke whiskey sounds of Dwight Yoakam crackled on the FM band, and slopes on the horizon tapered to a single vanishing point. Tired of engine drone I turned off beside a road sign shredded by shootin' irons-- "A*ST*N 1*9 MI."-- where I saw one more thin etching stretching into the void, and I should go out and scour the bluffs, follow their contours. Prospecting never ends. I hadn't quite worked it out, hadn't found a place to stop running.
........Vista seemed wide open when I was younger, but then a few roads closed. In time I might run out of desert, the last ridge, so I'd turn inward for outward. The boundless desert was an impression I caught in a glance on a road to Vegas, but I found limits as I went out, so boundless had to return to the eye. Some roads hit fences, and some hit boulders on ridges with nothing but star terrains beyond, where the rock flies solo, a spinning lump of silica and iron with only a fickle silver moon in tow, and she can't decide when to rise or set, stay or leave, like a range bum, or a gambler up against flash, alone in a crowd of stars.
........Back to my flat earth beginnings . . . and somewhere along the bright shore I might find an abandoned shack, where reality and imagination crossed a rattlesnake porch and went through the same door to come in from the sun, eat lunch and hash out their differences before retreating again into heatwaves that can't tell them apart. And out on the bright plane a car would flow, shape-shifting. Or did it really move? It's steering wheel vibrates, though no other sign of motion. It would flow toward that which never existed, like an old ship sailing toward a drop-off at the edge of a flat earth sea, coming to rest almost where it started, as things do in that space.
........I crested a rise, and spent asphalt slipped toward a blinding flat. For a brief minute I thought it might disappear into blinding silts near the bottom, and I might see stunning things in the long haze of desert heat, maybe an old oak masterpiece from a San Francisco bar, its ornate, carved art being hauled across the desert to some boom town in boom rock hills at the height of a craze.
........Salty grime filled the cab. A hazy, gentle pain of a hundred six degrees. Smoke whiskey sounds of Dwight Yoakam crackled on the FM band, and slopes on the horizon tapered to a single vanishing point. Tired of engine drone I turned off beside a road sign shredded by shootin' irons-- "A*ST*N 1*9 MI."-- where I saw one more thin etching stretching into the void, and I should go out and scour the bluffs, follow their contours. Prospecting never ends. I hadn't quite worked it out, hadn't found a place to stop running.
........Vista seemed wide open when I was younger, but then a few roads closed. In time I might run out of desert, the last ridge, so I'd turn inward for outward. The boundless desert was an impression I caught in a glance on a road to Vegas, but I found limits as I went out, so boundless had to return to the eye. Some roads hit fences, and some hit boulders on ridges with nothing but star terrains beyond, where the rock flies solo, a spinning lump of silica and iron with only a fickle silver moon in tow, and she can't decide when to rise or set, stay or leave, like a range bum, or a gambler up against flash, alone in a crowd of stars.
........Back to my flat earth beginnings . . . and somewhere along the bright shore I might find an abandoned shack, where reality and imagination crossed a rattlesnake porch and went through the same door to come in from the sun, eat lunch and hash out their differences before retreating again into heatwaves that can't tell them apart. And out on the bright plane a car would flow, shape-shifting. Or did it really move? It's steering wheel vibrates, though no other sign of motion. It would flow toward that which never existed, like an old ship sailing toward a drop-off at the edge of a flat earth sea, coming to rest almost where it started, as things do in that space.