The sun started in the canyon

It passed over the green peaks, spilling down and filling up the valley. Laguna’s disparities and eccentricities began to wake up. Nina had fallen back to sleep, in the fallen apartment, behind me.

A few hours before, the soup kitchen had me talking politics with the stalwarts of Laguna politics, the delegates of the rich. They spoke of the “homeless problem” and what to do with them. There must be balance, they said. We can neither lose the tourists nor the allure of a beachtown scrubbed of sadness. This is how we govern an artificial paradise.

Nina tended to everyone: serving bowls of soup, smiling, connected, moving with grace through her new-est family.

And from there, as the sun fell off, we floated to Cat the Buick. And scaled over cliff, down to the beach. Shoes off. All but our skibbies. Into the dark waves, under the moonlight. And we were cleaned by something in the cold unknown swirling beneath us.

I read her poetry as we dried on rocks. Between whiskey and cigarettes, she munched the gift of New Mexico green chile popcorn. And our skin dried almost as fast as if we were playing George and Nancy back in the Land of Enchantment.

A hidden staircase came into view past the next hill. We climbed and spilled over into the street where her husband had seen her, where they lived and loved. Where a bittersweet facade of memory suspended the confusion and grief that called me to her, my muse, to honor the unexplainable fusion of our yin and yang spirits. And so we went further back in time.