Finding The Space In The Heart

I first saw it in the sixties, driving a Volkswagen camper with a fierce gay poet and a lovely but dangerous girl with a husky voice, we came down from Canada on the dry east side of the ranges. Grand Coulee, Blue Mountains, lava flow caves, the Alvord desert—pronghorn ranges— and the glittering obsidian-paved dirt track toward Vya, seldom-seen roads late September and thick frost at dawn; then follow a canyon and suddenly open to silvery flats that curved over the edge O, ah! The awareness of emptiness brings forth a heart of compassion! We followed the rim of the playa to a bar where the roads end and over a pass into Pyramid Lake from the Smoke Creek side, by the ranches of wizards who follow the tipi path. The next day we reached San Francisco in a time when it seemed the world might head a new way. And again, in the seventies, back from Montana, I recklessly pulled off the highway took a dirt track onto the flats, got stuck—scared the kids—slept the night, and the next day sucked free and went on. Fifteen years passed. In the eighties With my lover I went where the roads end. Walked the hills for a day, looked out where it all drops away, discovered a path of carved stone inscriptions tucked into the sagebrush "Stomp out greed" "The best things in life are not things" words placed by an old desert sage. Faint shorelines seen high on these slopes, long gone Lake Lahontan, cutthroat trout spirit in silt— Columbian Mammoth bones four hundred feet up on the wave-etched beach ledge; curly-horned desert sheep outlines pecked into the rock, and turned the truck onto the playa heading for know-not, bone-gray dust boiling and billowing, mile after mile, trackless and featureless, let the car coast to a halt on the crazed cracked flat hard face where winter snow spirals, and summer sun bakes like a kiln. Off nowhere, to be or not be, all equal, far reaches, no bounds. Sound swallowed away no waters, no mountains, no bush no grass and because no grass no shade but your shadow. No flatness because no not-flatness. No loss, no gain. So— nothing in the way! —the ground is the sky the sky is the ground, no place between, just wind-whip breeze, tent-mouth leeward, time being here. We meet heart to heart, leg hard-twined to leg, with a kiss that goes to the bone. Dawn sun comes straight in the eye. The tooth of a far peak called King Lear. Now in the nineties desert night —my lover's my wife— old friends, old trucks, drawn around; great arcs of kids on bikes out there in darkness no lights—just planet Venus glinting by the calyx crescent moon, and tasting grasshoppers roasted in a pan. They all somehow swarm down here— sons and daughters in the circle eating grasshoppers grimacing, singing sūtras for the insects in the wilderness, —the wideness, the foolish loving spaces full of heart. Walking on walking, under foot earth turns Streams and mountains never stay the same. The space goes on. But the wet black brush tip drawn to a point, lifts away. Marin-an 1956—Kitkitdizze 1996