And it was whiskey and hash and the six of us slammin' in the old bench-seat Ford pickup built for three, tops, and the girls screaming laughter slid and bounced drum-tight levi asses around our laps and gave us enormous hardons, our hands full of supple waists and side-boob action as the truck swerved here and then there, staying on the dirt road, mostly, as we crawled up out of the green river valley, up out into the brown dirt and sagebrush until we crested the hill and were on a level spot. Man-made level.
"This," announced Andy, "is the airport. Just a dirt strip carved out here on the desert, really - big enough to land about anything. But it's more than an airport," he continued as the truck accelerated rapidly to 70 on the rutted surface. "This is The Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport.'"
I didn't believe it for a second. I was a newer guy around those parts, and more than figured that the locals were just jerking my chain or blathering on some horseshit for the benefit of the girls, one of which was using her levi-clad buttocks to give my nether regions a dance, even though the bouncing and sliding had stopped. She looked over her shoulder at me and giggled, and there was going to be a terrible mess in a minute, if she didn't stop. She didn't but the truck did, sliding to a stop in a rocking cloud of dust. Andy kicked his door open and, wedging himself away from his woman, walked around to the front of the truck, I thought to take a piss. But he just stood there, facing away from the truck in the headlights with his arms spread, Christ-like.
"Turn off the fucking lights and come out here!" he yelled. I reached over and mashed the button back into the dash and we were suddenly plunged into the deepest dark of a moonless high-desert night. We raggled and squeezed our way out of the truck and joined him noisy at first, then suddenly, silent.
At this altitude the sky is India-ink black, and this far from cities, stretches bigger than God, horizon to horizon. The milky way vaulted over us, curling tendrils made of so many stars they looked like swirling smoke -- light from almost before the invention of light caught and sparked against our retinas, fired against our brains.
We'd none of us understood awe before that night. We stood there, silent, our heads thrown back on our shoulders looking up into that terrible deep. Someone got a large blanket, and we laid down there on the hard-packed brown desert, face up, floating; it was so pure and so deep and so without outside reference, it was like being weightless, and we could be face up looking into the universe and in an almost nauseating perspective switch, be suddenly face down, our backs glued to the earth, hanging over the infinite drop.
The music of the spheres was as clear as I've ever heard it, before or since.
Someone lit a joint and began passing it around; I sent my bottle of Jack around. Everyone was whispering as if they were in church. A bottle of Kaluha was handed to me. I normally despise Kaluha, but it seemed very in tune. Everyone could feel -- it -- and we were all almost afraid to breathe for fear of shattering this perfect bubble of undefined purity.
I was watching a distant star twinkle though colors, probably assisted by the grass, and a billion miles away, a girl was talking. No, not talking. Poetry. She was reciting poetry, and carefully undressing, each button and snap, levis sliding down almost noiselessly - shirt and panties neatly folded, all in a stack next to her, no wild hedonism this, no throwing clothes to the winds, just instinctively knowing as well as our ancestors have for perhaps a million years what is needed to properly speak to moments - and I found myself unbuttoning my shirt, and a glance at everyone else showed they were doing the same, and soon we were all lying under the silent, black universe, a naked, six-spoked wheel, as she continued chanting her prayer, her poetry. She finished, and we all lay in utter silence for another five or ten minutes.
It was really good grass.
Please, I asked her, please say the poem again. She said she'd only memorized it within the last day or two for an English class and didn't know what it meant, but that now she thought she did. It was Dylan Thomas. She began, low and clear....
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
The girl who had been on my lap stood, naked. I was still laying on the sandy blanket and she was 10 feet tall above me in the starlight, made of marble and rare emeralds. She stepped over me and knelt, straddling me. I whispered that I was so mellow, I didn't believe I could do anything. She shushed me and said she didn't want anything, she just needed to touch someone to hold her down before she floated away.
Knees at my ribs and feet anchoring gently under my thighs, she sighed and rocked back, eyes closed, her hands on my lower chest as she soaked in infinity in huge, soft breaths through an open mouth. And through the whole, the thread of the poetry bound us.
And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.
And as we made desultory love, almost a secondary sensory input to that terrible, gorgeous night sky, the words wound...
And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Through they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.
And I knew in that moment I was immortal, and saw clear and straight how simple it was, and I nearly wept when I understood at the last that I'd never be able to see it so clearly again.
Oh, fuck if I will ever be able to write this well. You've captured perfectly a moment such as few of us are ever blessed to experience, and when we do we try and try and then file it away under indescribable ... yet you did not file it in that cop-out folder but wrote it out. Fuck.
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