Out here the earth feels so flat
it extends to the edge of imagination,
gently sloping upward, hours away, to meet the mountains
Deep purple, wrinkled, ancient,
the mountains are pensive, resting,
like wadded tissue paper hanging from an upside-down ceiling.
The desert is a dissertation on the color purple;
dark gray purple marks the closest mountains,
purple wrinkles on a grayed piece of purple paper under purple light,
further mountains turning a lighter shade, dissipating light rays, until they blend with a tired and sleepy dusk sky,
deep purple against pale purple against still paler purple,
under the sun a washed-out purple and burnt red of sun-baked rocks.
You've never seen such a gratuitous helping of purple:
Picasso had a blue period,
and God had a purple period out there in the still-life deserts of Arizona.
A cowboy in the desert is cracked and parched, stripped down to the bare essentials of survival.
He is trying to make it to the next town; he has not washed in weeks.
A cowboy often does not have enough water to wash himself.
The cowboy's hair takes the shape the water gives it, else impermeable.
Mountain ranges sweep in spiky lines like tufts of toussled hair across a desert scalp.
Young mountains, brown, shades of brown, and the inevitable purple --
olive brown plants sit stupidly, rooted to their birth spots, pining for legs --
layers of light brown dirt, layers of pink bown dirt, layers of dark brown dirt,
topped with a thick ribbon of tan dust, along which dusty sand vehicles race --
purple brown mountains brooding in the distance,
black brown mountains looming nearby --
A mindless tub of brown, red brown ranges, brown dirt, brown sand, brown dust, brown peaks,
brown from roads! brown from cliffs! brown from rocks! brown from signs!
brown shades forming brown slices of road snaking between checkered patches of brown!
black brown of sun-baked hundred million year old rocks!
The color of nausea, invading every sense, everything smells brown and tastes brown,
life as a sloppy bowl of brown paint, a dead color, mixture of all others, soupy and rancid, sour liquid!
Earth:
You with the patience to entomb the dinosaurs!
You who created within your bowels the fleshy goops of coal and oil blood and gas!
Smear your wrinkled brown and inevitable purple skin with a brush dipped in night's inky blackness,
from a jar on a nearby shelf!
Let your enormous Grand Canyon ass crack drink up a sea of the stuff! Drain the Colorado River and fill it with ink!
Cover your twisted piles of ankles and humongous rocky elbows and knees and yawning toothless mouths in sides of cliffs
with the thin warmthless blanket of darkness!
Slide thick tubes of fleshy, muscled night over the jagged ranges with silhouettes shaped like snapped bones!
Sorry. I got carried away there. I'll pull over at this rest stop, it'll be good to stretch my legs.
When you drive long ways you sometimes go crazy.
You get lulled to sleep, you stay awake by thinking morbid thoughts about driving on the wrong side of the road, wheels coming off, transmissions dropping out of the bottom of trucks on the middle of the freeway, the vehicle in front of you coming to a dead halt, what would happen if you pulled the e-brake at 75 mph. Would it be like hitting a patch of ice? Ooooh, ice sounds good right now. I'd love to stick my head in a freezer.
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I had a dream where we had fixed climate change.
Or maybe that was just my childhood.
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Mountains like toussled hair, sideways, swept in lines, spiky at the ends, sharp, messy, clumped together
young mountains, brown, the shades of brown
olive brown plants
light brown dirt
pink brown cliffs
purple brown mountains in the distance
black purple brown mountains looming close
red brown ranges
dark brown of dirt
light brown of sand
brown from roads,
brown from rocks
brown shades forming roads snaking between alternate shades of brown
black brown of sun-baked rocks
brown everywhere
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out here the earth feels so flat
feels like it goes on for infinity
gently sloping, way in the distance
hours away
slopes up, to meet mountains
deep purple mountains
wrinkly mountains
multi-layered, multi-leveled
mountains in the backdrop
hanging in the sky like tissue paper
the closest mountains are a dark gray purple
look like wrinkles in a dark gray piece of paper with purple shadows under purple light
the further mountains are a less deep shade of purple
sometimes your view affords overlapping views of mountain ranges
you see deep purple against pale purple next to still paler purple
the mountains that are in the sun are a washed-out purple and red
purple shadows
the clouds are stretched out across a fraction of the sky, like a blanket that's too small
small puffs weaved together
you can see some blue through the weaves
sun behind the clouds, changing even the color of the clouds
the clouds don't look purple at all
they're a pretty, unambiguous gray
bright yellow light
shafts of sun streak out from behind the clouds
it's 184 miles to los angeles