Anthropomorphic Geology No. 3

Bad news. That was the last beer.

I think I’ll live. I’ve lived through worse.

The wind’s coming in tonight over the desert, in through the door and over me laying here. The night loves me. Maybe, anyway, it’s always tough to tell. She just might. One desert night I spent out in the middle of a littoral gulf. I built death. I sucked in sand and diesel and blew out the end of dozens, hundreds of people who never offended me. Another sort of desert than this one, blowing in the open door, wrapped me up in the eddying and heated wind. That war was odd in that the two sides claimed the same God to be fighting for both sides. Out there, with the sand and hail and the technological might, I could believe that God was fighting with himself.

Not to say I am God, but I can empathize with his plight. I often fight great and fundamental battles with myself. When I do, however, I rarely cause more than a bloody nose or two.

One night I sat up on the rim of the Grand Mesa. The vista spread out from the basalt cap that had once been the bowl of an ancient valley. Those mountains around that high valley are gone downstream now, but the basalt, all that damn silica, is not easily eroded. Now the river valley of the old Colorado and the new Gunnison flows and buttresses the West Rim. The vista is about one hundred miles of visibility and 1.6 billion years of geological history. The storms blew in over the desert six thousand feet below me in sweeping cities of condensed moisture. The trains of the water cycle fell across the desert with grand gray and dark flourishes. Lightning reached out into the mud shale.

A year or two later, I lay on a bed far away from the Mesa. My hands traced Her skin like those clouds over the desert. Instead of graying clouds and traces of rain drops, I had skin turned copper by the nature of nautical living and fingers battered by countless arming wires. I loved Her in a very temporary way. Her skin, instead of the pale yellow of shale, was all obsidian, charcoal, and cinnamon. Her back was a gabbro silvered river valley in the moonlight. The trace of Her spine told of a sinewy stream and her so very female bulges were the graveled mounds of some ancient confluence of curious genetic rivers. Her skin sheened by sweat and heat out there where humidity is a way of life rippled like a million years of a river’s journey under my light touch. In the blue and amber light of that city, her contours and monoclines and buttresses stood out with that light tracing them. She knew we were not forever.

I wonder sometimes if the Earth has some sort of sentience we are just not able to perceive in our perception of time. When the fragile and most private skin of her is brushed by the rays of the sun or the fingertip of a river, does she shiver like that other masterpiece in city light and moist air?

I hope so. I would hate to think that this memory is mine and mine alone, fading like a vapor in my short time here on this planet.

I wonder if She still remembers me. When she lays back on whatever bed she calls her own, does she lie back and remember my touch in spite of the ring she must have on her finger by now? Whoever put that ring on her finger must have been able to love her better and more permanently than I. Does she trace the places my finger tips were, all copper on her obsidian, charcoal, and cinnamon skin?

I sort of hope so.

I’m a bastard like that.