Spiritual Plumbing

 

Spiritual Plumbing

Terry and I climb a narrow trail 
in search of an old water intake. 
We find rusty pipe but no collection box. 
Mountain plumbing is constant crisis 
as storms re-engineer the landscape 
while three hundred houses wait to wash.
Terry, you should know, operated 
the water system for years and years
in our old hippie town. 

Moving on, we walk around the once-reservoir
that collapsed in the winter of ’82.
Now that was a crisis. 
I say I used to come to this hilltop 
every day at sunset with my dog
to meet a woman with her dog
to witness, to feel in our flesh 
the cool, the color, the end of the day. 
Terry says thirty or forty years ago, solstice, 
he used to come to this hilltop to drop acid 
with his merry prankster buddies.
“When was the last time you took LSD?” I ask.
“Last week,” Terry says.

Terry, you should know, is seventy-two
with cardiac plumbing that has 
weathered a few storms. 
He says the trips are milder now, sweeter, 
like spring-water from the glen on the hill 
above his cabin, gurgles out slowly 
but worth the wait at the end of that trail 
where only coyotes go.

…..

First published in  The Summerset Review 
Thank you editor Erin Murphy
Photo by melanie (mathey)

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