God whispers...
He breathes golden sunlight across the desert and with a
touch of fragrant sage welcomes my rebirth from over the horizon of Creation. I've
ridden through the night, my headlight caressing rocky cliffs and teasing that
playful and dangerous lover, mountain road - the waving arms of the pines conducting
symphonies of wind in the sky and in my wake. There is a moment when the heart
becomes a piston and pounds nothing but forward. There is no time but the
moment, and no sin but straying from the light breaking through that perfect crack
in the smug window of minutes and hours until struggles must cease. Other lights
reach out, oncoming, amber eyes savoring the darkness and mingling their beams
on the asphalt. A rolling Shiva silhouette holds out gloved hands as riders
pass, our speed in crossing doubled, the intimate distance a touch in this single
dark moment that could be terrible chaos, a perfect contented breeze or the end
of all things with a flick of the wrist. We passed in the night...
And God whispers...
and I remember Him...
White lines don't really mean what they say - it's nothing
all that personal - just rules for the cages, painted by a nameless mercenary
monkey searching for some kind of blood to warm his heart, but they're only
guidelines for two wheels and a soul to know the road from the ground and the
sky. Those lines travel everywhere without any backtalk at all.
There's no noise on the road in the desert at midday , only a gentle earthquake to ride,
endless pulsing explosions making ribbons burn as I chase the sun. If we caught
it, this soulful machine and I, we'd set it rolling across the sky again,
because somewhere, coloring the road outside the lines, are other riders who hunt
it as well. And if we each lift a hand from the grips to touch it, we will
happily fail and find that we are holding nothing but one another. Leather
binds in a way that the beautiful naked suits, safe from the pavement, will
never understand. He whispers that He loves them too, but their windows are sealed.
His breath touches only their eyes.
Because God whispers...
He sighs softly and sets the table of dusk with coyote blues
sung sandpaper sweet, spiced with soil and oil and a splash of soft saguaro
laid gently across a pale linen sky, alight with the cool candles of memory and
gratitude. He strokes my graying head with fading sunlight and scars and as we
pass ninety asks if He can borrow my soul back for just this moment. Who am I
to argue?
A town's windows and streets blink mutely into the marshalling
night, skewered by the two-lane stabbing through and listening closely to a
quiet that settles them deeper into the dirt with every shadow that licks them
- every broken-feathered heart that cries out that it could fly too, if
only... The road shrugs its shoulders as
we both decide that water and fuel can wait - this place feels too colorless to
feed it our time. We leave it hungry and dine instead on wind and road and the
flashing faces of phosphorescing signs - perfect in their geometry and their order
and their surety that rules is rules.
But the wind and the rain
refuse to believe that, as our tongues touch and I taste again the warm black
of night and she the green in my spirit that throttles up as it grows. The tang
of her laughter and the wet leather and the comforting red sunburns crisscrossing
under the mesh of my gloves carry the Voices of desert, farmland and forest,
sunrise to sunset over my headlight and in my mirrors.
And I hear her smile as God whispers...
