Zion

Falling in Love with Places

I fell in love with Tucson today. That means I’m now in a quintuple with three cities: Walla Walla (Eastern Washington), Greater Zion (Southern Utah), and Tucson (Arizona). I may be in love with all of Southern Arizona. We’ll see how the relationship develops over time.

Here’s how it happened! Actually, I don’t really know how it happened. My love for places tends to emerge after I’ve been somewhere for a little while. It’s like simmering cinnamon, vanilla, orange peels, and other stuff on the stove. You forget about the concoction, then suddenly the sweet perfume permeates your body. You can’t say which component you’re responding to because it’s not one thing. It’s all the things together.

That’s how it happened in Utah. I was downtown and Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” came on the radio. I looked around and saw all the quaint little shops like MoFACo, which has since closed down, and the pawn shop that’s really a gun store but also has nice T-shirts and beaded keychains. The sun was bouncing off the Mormon pioneer-era bricks, accentuating their texture and calling attention to the fact that each one was made by hand.

I fell, hard. It didn’t matter that this wasn’t my history or that folks there didn’t really want me in that place, as a poet or as a human being. I loved it. That was that. I’d already decided I wasn’t staying in Utah by that point, but that didn’t make my love for the place any less real or enduring. I know I complain about it and can’t live there and find it extremely problematic on a cultural level. But I do love it.

Walla Walla was different. My husband and I had been out that way once during a major snowstorm, so we didn’t see much when we were there. We made the move there from Seattle on a clear, crystalline day. As we got to the outskirts of the town—Jon rattling along in the moving van and me following close behind—there were suddenly golden fields everywhere flanked by low-slung, heavily eroded purplish mountains that seemed to encircle a whole, otherworldly place, or at least that’s how I remember it.

I fell in love with Walla Walla then and there. I began weeping and calling my friends to tell them how immersive that landscape was. I think I even made some audio recordings to document the moment.

Tucson was a simmer, no doubt about it. We’ve lived here for four months. I didn’t know if I’d ever have that “falling” feeling replete with crying, full-body chills, and that distinctive dizziness I get when falling in any sort of love, even (or especially) when I fall in love with a place.

But it happened. Some alchemy occurred between the music on the radio, the landscape, the roads winding through wildlands, the people and their graciousness and their quirkiness and their fragility and their strength, the creativity embedded in this city, the smell of the grocery store and its worn concrete floors and its awkward layout and its enchanting shoppers milling about and the chip display and the meat- and vegetarian-meat display and the slightly sad produce and the immunity shots that were on sale and the children looking for their favorite healthy sodas and …

It just happened. Like that. Lickety-split. I know for sure it’s love because I’m all the way back home now, and I still feel this way. I love you, Tucson. I really do. Oh, now I’m crying again.

Zion

Deliver me from the man who ran over a porcupine in broad daylight because of his need to thrust his way forward always forward always faster and always darker, coal smoke billowing from his tailpipe as he hits the gas hard.

Deliver me from that man who saw the porcupine struggling after his back legs were crushed, who didn’t stop, who didn’t take the porcupine to the wildlife rehab on the other side of Flying Monkey Mesa, who didn’t care because black smoke because man because manly because grrrrr because move over here I come like it or not because get off of my road and out of my town and I’ll put my foot in your ass and I’ll mow you down I mean it I mean it look at me I really mean it look at my Gadson flag and my Dixie flag can’t you see I mean business look at my neck veins little lady, pretty little lady, lady why’s there a thought in your head a little tinkling thought about love that’s so silly so outdated so childish like a school bell hey little lady listen here it’s not God’s way for you to think or tell a man what to do a big man a strong man a fast man and you damned well know it so stop thinking just stop stop it right now.

Deliver me from what the porcupine must have felt there in the road on the hot asphalt in the heat so close to the soft sage flanking the road’s shoulder. He got so close but not close enough never close enough for speed for thrill for look I killed that varment woohoo hot damn and never enough blood left in the leaking husk never enough life left in the pressured heart and never enough limp left in the body nobody will ever gather for ever.

Deliver me from those who came after and also didn’t stop. The sedans and SUVS and minivans and trucks and semis and hatchbacks and Outbacks and Elements and motorcycles and RVs.

Deliver me from every one of them. Deliver me from my neighbors. They didn’t stop. They didn’t stop. My neighbors didn’t stop. Too busy doing God’s work to do God’s work.

Deliver me from my own absence as the porcupine struggled, for coming behind too late by hours, maybe, or maybe only by minutes which is even more self-hatred to be delivered from.

Deliver me from rewriting the story so I’m there, so I take the limp, quilled creature in my arms and usher him to safety, to people who care, to angels on this earth who spend all day helping the creatures of this earth. I almost typed heart. Heart is earth. Earth is heart. Same letters. How did I never see that before? Grief brings out glimmerings, doesn’t it? This is how and why we survive grief. No glimmering, no future. No heart in earth, no earth in our hearts.

Deliver me from those who have no earth in their hearts, no heart in their earths.

Deliver me from my revisions my impossible revisions my anger that story only takes us so far into the future because it never changes the past. Our stories are cursed that way as we are cursed.

Deliver me from the cursed. Deliver me from myself as one of the cursed. Curs-ed, say it with two syllables. Say it with me. Curs-ed. Clop along to that languid beat, that dirge. The march of what we’ll all be without love and without hope.

Deliver me from revisions existing only in our minds and not actually changing what happened, what really happened. The porcupine is dead. That’s what happened. In broad daylight. Visible on open road. The driver could have slowed. The driver could have slowed. The driver could have slowed his hellbent smoke-infused take that world roll.

Deliver me from this iron-encrusted place whose heart was lost in the creek, in the canyons, up on the cliffs when … years, hours, minutes ago? How long? How long has it been? Since we came, since we named, since we shamed, since we couldn’t leave couldn’t leave couldn’t leave this place alone?

Deliver me from how long we’ve lived like this, baffled and battled and beaten and battered and branded and broken. How long must I writhe, I mean write, before I write my way out of this failing, flailing, hellish heaven on earth? A minute? An hour? A day? An eternity?

Zion—my great nephew, not the place—deliver me from this land whose name you carry in your pocket on your papers in your heart and in your genes. Yours is the real Zion. It lives inside you, little one. Never deliver me from who you are—from you, my kin, my kind, my kindred. [REDACTED] Pin me here to this tree, the only one that’s safe these days with all the fruit trees eaten bare. The family tree. My tree, our everlasting tree.

As for you, Zion—the place, not the great nephew—deliver me from you. Free me from you. Forget me. You don’t even have to forgive me. If you can’t reverse time and bring that porcupine back to life, if you can’t unwind the clocks that are all wound too tight here warping time and space and hearts and minds, then deliver me. I beseech you. Deliver me from what we’ve made you, from what you’ve become. Please deliver me.