I am leaning on a fence post somewhere south of Oakley, Kansas, where Quail Road turns from a lane and a half to a rutted gravel drive and it is all sky and coyote songs- 17,000 acres and not a drop of rain. Air conditioning busted somewhere outside of Chama, in high country where it didn’t matter, but yesterday dust filled the truck as we bounced down the four mile drive. I am filthy by this post in the moon set.

In the night there was lightning so far off it was silent-raining in Limon, or Denver maybe, but not here where the wind hums through the short grass and cactus needles, buzzes across cow bones to dry my sweat in the tent.

It is before dawn, and in the darkness that is almost light, the chalk bluffs are the ghost of Comanche horses on the horizon. Cottonwoods snake the ditch they call a river and call me out; they are lovers I cannot hold. So I stand under the steel sky picking coffee grounds from my teeth… I will not go, not leave, and the language for why is inadequate. “Immense” or “like a sea” do not form in my mouth, only “this is a beginning place.” My breath is as slow as sleeping and I will not rise for the coach whip snake on the ridge where I am an Adam before Eve. 

The skin of a prairie rattler crumbles between my fingers-even the snakes are made of dust. The corral is in pieces-disrepair and hornets’ nests. Beyond the cottonwoods and handful of Kentucky coffee trees there is only song and wind and bones and buzz and the letters I write in my head and do not pen:

“My dearest love, it is adulterous the way I feel for these hills- forgive me if I leave you, turn into a dust-devil, twist and disappear into the nothingness that is everything here.”

I am a speck, a dot, and the difference between my size and that of the black cattle that make silhouettes and the bison beyond is so immeasurably small: my tin coffee cup might as well be the bull that bellows across the plain.

It is all over before I can breathe. A thousand mile burden returns to me and the wind takes my boot prints out of the dust before I am two steps back towards the camp stove and coffee pot where I will refill my belly like every living thing must do.