[ the sierra nevadas outside death valley, california ]

I dreamt of JR and me driving in his former green Subaru Outback through the magnificent craggy mountain range that winds south into Death Valley. At the road's highest point, we pulled onto a sharp outcropping of rock and knelt at its tip, admiring the plummeting brown cliffs, the cloudless blue sky, and the fresh breeze against our faces. And then I stuffed a scribbled dark pink index card into his left hand and vaulted into the abyss, embracing the sky and tumbling with it in arcs through the warm desert air. As he hollered at me, my parachute blossomed and carried me beyond sight and knowledge.

"Don't look for me," the note began. But to claim that I dreamt this would be a lie.

If I had an abyss to leap into, could I do it while turning my back on the life I've already lost?

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

Explaining subversion in Hart Crane's "Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge," Harold Bloom pointed out to us that in seeing God's need of a new myth, Crane offered us a modern human invention. Shocking, no? Leave it to Bloom to kick your romanticized ideas out the door and leave a poem's latent power luminous before you.

This verse has haunted me, taunting me in my want of my own myth. Has thrill-seeking been an unknowing hunt for that myth? Four solstices ago, I embraced a myth that seemed more real than any reality I had ever known, only to have it run through my fingers like water. Will I find another in the adrenaline-saturated desert air?