Camping

I'm living by myself but I'm not alone. An individual, alien to this whole scenario, might gaze upon my south-eastern Oregon camp ground and assume they'd chanced upon the inhabitants of an apartment building recently having spewed its residents onto high desert, only to then perish into remnantless nothingness. But i guess we are the remnant - a mass so traumatized by the day's catastrophe that a silly looking man wearing a forest service badge, whose threads-in-hues-of-green are shaded by his exaggerated brim, conned us all into paying to live outside and reside in a slightly less comfortable state than normal. How else, aside from the coercion of a traumatized body of homeless groups, could money be persuaded from its pockets in order that I might have my walls replaced with porous canopies and dirt carpet?

The rock face I scampered up today surely housed a thousand cougars. They, of course, would have taken up residence there in anticipation of my coming - the family across the frigid DeSchuttes, through which I had just swam, meant nothing and would most certainly not see it when the mass of teeth and tails emerged as a cooperative feline battalion in order to scare me off their cliff - initiating the chase that would grant them so much joy, while killing me so thoroughly. Funny what one experience with three cats will do to a man. But I'm happy for the sun.

I hope the great star doesn't mind my spectatorship (it shouldn't, its up in my business all the time) but I watched it chase its mistress again tonight. I'm jealous of the sun in fact, this night more than most, because its gone to lay with its lover. The slow crawl that the sun, in its waking, employs to leave its bed and abandon a night's passion so it can perfrom its eternal duty infects the populations of its rocky recipient and they too, at least the one's who've done it right, resist the rising and the leaving like moths drug to darkness. But noon approaches and the first flirtations emerge from Horizon's sheets and whisper charms inappropriate and sublimely sensual past the billion-head audience below to their blazing target aloft. The noon Sun pauses.

Like a school girl has murmrued secrets in her palms and thrown them to the Sun before disappearing around brick corners, the great star halts in dazed attraction, and the world beneath burns until Sun recovers its stop. But now it won't wait, it can't wait, it rages against he duties that hold it. The afternoon's weather is violent; thunderstorms descend upon the planet, plains dry and crack and explode in flame; the singing of the muse drives the sun to madness' gulf and on that edge the world waits. Finally though, the woman who so tightly holds Sun's leash shows herself. Her fingers are cirrus - crisp, fragile, and they reach out offering to take the sun's frustration as soon as Sky agrees to allow him into bed. Lady Horizon splashes perfume upon herself and the tides turn and run, noses in the occean air, that they might receive seduction as it wafts. Dusk which sits always aloft befalls Earth's watching eyes again and finally Sun's wrath is foregone. Instead of storm and flame, he drapes lavendar where the blue of his sorrow has sat the day's length, and he smears peach into his masterpiece with the sliding, weaving motion only a composer of the skiy's shining and a stellar lover's fingers can achieve. A painting he presents his beloved. The rage of morning red has left and the cool calm of a deepend violet and entrenching charcoal allows the world to simmer to its slumber. Like a radiant drip from a faucet poised just above the world's edge, the sun take his mistress to his lips and delivers the first kiss in a night of countless others, insisting in its passing that onlookers do the same. The couple falls into Horizon's bed, and so the last drop drips.

I suppose we the homeless mass do not pay in a moment of incoherent misjudgement, but only offer recompense for lessons we steal from peeping at such affairs as this one.