Road's end

At first I rode aimlessly around town, then at last came upon the intriguing and lovely Gasoline Alley. Naturally I took it, enjoying its 10 foot hollyhocks and weathered shacks. It was a wonderful distraction but unfortunately, very short. However, in another few blocks and I found myself near the cemetery, a place I'd been meaning to visit ever since we moved here four years ago. I generally feel peaceful in graveyards. It's one of the few places outside the fray. So in I went.

I recognized some of the names. Stodick has a park named after them, the Ruthenstroths a particular part of the valley but I was drawn to a lonely looking white picketed grave in the back corner. It turned out to be the resting place of a boy who died when he was fifty days old. I'm guessing that his parents have since left the valley because the paint was curled, pealing and half gone. I sat nearby and watched the clouds turn from dark gray to pale lavender and finally got centered. After a while I took out my notebook and finished a poem I've been working on for months called "Presence of Mind". It's part of a longer piece that's really perplexing me so making progress was a huge relief.

By this time, the Pine Nut mountains in the east were ghost white beneath a purple sky. Before I left, I strolled around a bit and read some of the tombstones. The saddest was a tiny little grave from the beginning of last century. It was piled with rocks the size of small fruits and measured from the tips of my fingers to the curve of my elbow. It had a cheap aluminum marker the size of a postcard; a pauper's grave. The individual letters were slotted in rather than engraved. The first two, U and n, had fallen out. I looked among the rocks but couldn't find them. The marker simply said "_ _ known Baby Boy".

This evening the clouds were an astounding shade of tangerine. Even the dirt reflected their glow.