Amtrak 1

Changing scenery, always something new, from white frosty pea green (sea foam) shrubbery as former coral cousins—desert tundra replacing teeming seabed, to red, orange and yellows of brilliantly painted earth like the blood of Orpheus sprayed across the land dotted by juniper, cedar and pinone crowned on the edges by black and blue sleeping whales with iridescent white snowy dorsal fins peeking at the carnage.

The sun coats the land in a blanket of warmth, dressing the old guard yellowed weeds that wave ambiently in a gentler breeze than the chill predicts.

Sky blue knows many precedents but here the term might have been coined, on the wide-open plains of unfolding countless untold mythologies of the scrub.

Train tracks and stretches of highway crack the hard egg of a parched veneer and here and there flowers on black discs speed on past the goddesses, gods, fairies, nymphs and satyrs occupying their glass spaces as statues Michelangelo would proudly sculpt.

Everywhere, wires slice and snake on supporting crosses, the crosses bearing the pains of Mermerus to all of us, the sorrow of Orpheus, channeled energy of Zeus, crosses crisscrossing and zigzagging through our destinations.

An upturned laundry basket no longer holding anything but the empty promise of toting, a broken down retriever limping to that perfect dumping spot, landfills’ little cousins show with the sporadic discarded tire and rows of forty-year old refrigerators keeping only shadows cold now behind shut doors; and the vista changes again….

Mountainous terrain brings trees in to choke the view and threaten the sanctity of pleasant visions in heads of the entities in the glass.

Humongous rocks loom overhead, balancing precariously on the eroding slopes of future doom that run red in gorges cut into the rolling countryside.

Who are the myriad of spirits standing guard above on the hilltop?

What stories do they have to tell, what tales would shake our foundations, tall tales of the natives that once roamed free here?

And the scenery changes again…