If August, with it’s no-days-off since June
work schedule, and strange dream-like boredom
is my least favorite month, then September
marks a return to the Colorado that I love.

There is a condensing and orderliness to September.
It becomes a month of preparation and canning.
Trailers and motor homes begin their great migrations
south. The back country empties during the work week.
Solitude, like a tide, seeps back in hollows and haunts.
The dust settles. The light sharpens.

September also marks the anniversary of my return to Colorado. There were a
string of places I lived between leaving Colorado as a kid and returning as a
twenty-five year old. Walla Walla, WA with it’s skittering quail and exploding
pheasants, long faced wheat fields washing up against the Blue Mountains, and
sulky bull trout being the best. Battle Ground, WA with it’s explosion of clapboard
housing on the border between vanishing dairy farms and heavily logged
mountains, long rainy winters, and blackberry vines thick as thumbs, thin as floss,
being the worst.

Of course in the end it was Tucson, AZ with it’s six lane, mile long blocks which
extended forever, spiny jumping cholla flicking up from shoe laces, rattle snake
and scorpion infested dry washes, monsoons which would sweep through like
freight trains, the smells of mesquite, rosemary, and citrus blossoming
instantaneously along Tucson’s back streets, that sent me on a b-line straight back
to Colorado and my sister’s place, where I showed up for a week long fishing
vacation and never left.

Like my own homecoming, like homecomings all across the country which will take
place in September, I wonder what it is that leads us to a place, eventually brings
us back, or makes us stay. Why, for some of us, Colorado will mark a temporary
holding, a second home, or a stop in a greater migration elsewhere. While for
others it represents a reinvention of who we always wanted to be, which of course,
is what we’ve been all along.

Money in My Pocket

I’d rather have a poem in my pocket
because you can’t sell a poem.

This poem in my pocket is like money
in the bank and a small stream,
way, way back in the mountains
with fish the size of my palm, fish
the size of my arm, fish swimming
behind the lids of my eyes
as I dream the dreamless sleep
of August. And still, I’d rather
have a poem in my pocket than a fish.

This poem in my pocket to remind me,
that when I’ve got no money
and rivers full of fish to take clients to,
who put money in my pocket,
I’ve got to put my clients on the fish.

We all need a little money in our pockets,
but I’ve got to have this poem because I know
it’s all I’ll have when the money’s gone.

August 26, 2010 Sopris Sun