Valles Caldera

The road to Jemez stretches like a yawn,

it’s lazy and it goes on forever.

It reminds me of a weighted blanket,

the one I bury myself in when the anxiety gnaws.

I pull it up to my chin and wait for the calm

that’s just out of reach past that switchback.

Still, it’s the best day I’ve had in years.

Omega Bridge is where I take a deep breath,

I meditate on the drone of tires on asphalt, and

I find the courage to kick the covers off.

Topside, the bridge is nothing to write home about,

then you wind your way down and look back and

you see the beauty in the journey and

the beauty in the thing itself.

Its steel arch looms large and it’s the last vestiges

of life as we know it we’ll see for a spell.

As we begin to ascend a half eaten volcano

we see miles and miles of burn scar,

fallen pines like spent matchsticks

scattered across a patchwork quilt of fresh snow and

buttressed against a sky so blue

I can almost feel the wings hatching from my back,

pushing me to soar off into some shiny new possibility,

the one that always beckons on the horizon,

the one I’ve been too scared to explore on my own,

but you’re here and China Doll is lilting soft on the radio.

I find a comforting sort of refuge in your stoicism,

it feels safe to explore the dozen ways this world broke me.

Somehow you can see it all over the cracks in my heart,

mapped out by the gold ink that pulses through me,

it fills in the gaping wounds like a fine piece of kintsugi.

The Ponderosa pines

(the ones that are still standing)

are forged from the oxygenated blood of the earth.

Red dirt stains everything leading up to the caldera,

save for a lone patch of aspens standing guard of the abyss,

their delicate branches gleaming white and

embraced by a sprawling forest of red and green,

planished by fire like everything else around here,

including me.

If you’re brooding and picking at yesterday’s pains,

you might not notice the caldera

until you’re smack in the middle of it

and you’re left wondering how you missed it,

a volcanic crater that exploded a million years ago.

The same eternal fire that ran me out of Colorado

is now splayed out at my feet and covered in ice,

thirteen miles wide with a storied past.

The ancient Pueblos, the ranch hands, and me

we all stood at her rim and took something from her:

the obsidian, created in one spectacular flash,

the ash-rich topsoil, robbed and ruined over generations,

the sacred silence that moves within me and without me

reminding me how big and how small I am.

Today, she placed solace benevolently at my feet

just as my mental squalls were about to

devour me and the mountains where we stood,

leaving one more unexplainable chasm within a chasm.

For the caldera and me, the peace was hard-earned.

I can see the scars all around me and inside me,

some more healed than others

and each with a yarn you’d never believe,

a triumphant story of nature and pure gumption.