An American River
You are a famous Pet Psychic and you resent success. Your gifts don’t have a place in this society so you are made to grow through cracks in the concrete towards light by reading the paws pads of animals. Audience members bring their pets to you and you tell them what they want to hear or sometimes not. Sometimes you tell them they are very sick and want to die, or that Pippy the cat doesn’t so much enjoy your bathroom habits. You grieve and remember Atlantis while people delight and clap.
You wanted me to be in your posse and ride with you to your studio. We got into a big bus and I sat next to you; my left side pushed up against your body. You put your arms around my torso and your soft dry hands beneath my shirt held my liver in place. I remember feeling nothing but neutrality, not love, not lust, not pain nor pleasure. Simply your hands were there, as close to me as they could possibly be, underneath all the layers I felt naked. Confusing this intimacy for lust I turned myself on a dime. Then recalled you could feel everything I was feeling. So I focused again on the neutrality of your touch and stillness like a breeze barely blowing ash from a Douglas Fir in summer. We looked out the window at a river wide and full, the color of light green burgeoning with silt and rock. “It looks like the Willamette” although I knew it wasn’t. I then asked: “Is It the American River?”. You said no, this is where words lose me. The river was unspeakably torrential and magnificent. It delved down into hidden pockets burrowing a hole through time, white water transformed into calm only then to be speared by downed trees. I marveled inside at the river and in the same rhythm with you, breathing little bones inside our feet both cracking and knowing the tone of this place.
When we arrived to the venue I disembarked the bus. I stood outside on a path in grassland. You approached me and kissed me on the mouth.
“Have you always known this?”
“Yes, from the beginning.”
Then I’m on a bus scaling southern Utah’s verdant mountains, which received unseasonable amounts of rain, more than speckled and teeming with life, they buzz with the similar knowing. I arrive at a hotel and check-in. I’m here to speak to Hermes and hear him call back inside those canyon walls.
