Jornada del Muerte

 

I feel the mountains to the North in my chest, as if they breathe for me.

 

The sere air, infused faintly with stubborn sage, soothes my insides, purifies me as I begin my journey.

 

I feel the sun resting on my skin in order to hold itself up, like a great, burning hen trying to hatch me into her nuclear explosion of light.  Muted and sorted by extremes, the flora, the scrabbled rocks, the anthills appear intermittent on the old sea bottom as if carelessly strewn there by desiccated Israelites, jettisoning their last earthly belongings before the face of their lonesome God.

 

I walk several steps forward, shake a few red ants off my feet and imagine how long I would last in the heat with just the salt seawater in my body.  If I kept walking to the mountain I would slow after two hours, start to shuffle after five, and perhaps collapse around the seventh or eighth.  Heat stroke, the hypothermia of the high desert night would lead me, like the old Israelites to see God’s radiant face.

 

Blessed Job would bring me a gourd of cool water and pour it down my leathered throat creating silvery rain on the place where I left the world.

 

 

Abbie Conant

Taos , NM

26. July, 2011