In a room in a dirty second floor apartment,
decorated with more local punk rock
flyers than seemed rational
or commensurate with defensible
taste, we divided up our tabs of
acid as Husker Du sang
about how we've got to
Keep Hanging On and time
mysteriously carried us forward by
some unknown and rarely considered
mechanism.
After the dividing ritual,
we got in the kind of
car owned by teenagers who work
car wash or record store jobs
and drove on the highway
toward Lone Pine canyon, arms
out open windows, as an immaculate
night sky quietly hummed above us
like a withheld explosion.
We chased LSD with swigs of Gatorade
and talked about aliens, sex, secret doorways
and the holy hierarchy of guitar solos.
As the sun disappeared over the hills,
It kicked in;
and the three of us wandered
deep into a forest now teeming
with consciousness; tree limbs
leaped out of the darkness and
proclaimed greetings in a solidarity of
living things, touchingly extended to us mere
human teenagers, an unexpected grace.
Our provisions were three bottles of water,
a joint and a bag of apples.
I found the skull of a small mammal
long dead and wore it like a crown,
unaware of course that
I'd just inhabited my life's most
pagan moment; the fact that we
can't perceive all of time at once
may be the greatest of the many
tender mercies extended to us.
After what could have been minutes or centuries, the golden sun came around
to kiss our skin again
and the field we ambled through
burst into a sea of purple.
Down in the vast distance
of the ancient valley below,
a train undulated across the earth like a snake.
It was a kind of holy perfection
I might never see again.
