Southwest 3

He looked up at the ruins in the wide crevice and deep overhang of the canyon sandstone wall. Dark windows stared out at him like the empty eyes of the man he saw that crisp fall night. He remembered it as well as he remembered that petroglyph he saw an hour back. Not the antelope. He wasn't running anywhere. Just sitting in this canyon staring at some ruins. But the lightning zig-zag re-creation of a snake. He wasn't thinking of snakes either. The first lightning of the season would bring them out and the first lightning of the season was yet to come. He was thinking of that sudden bolt in a late September night. And a man shot through with something close to lightning lying on the cool New England ground.

~Son Rivers 2006