Taos Time

Got Taos on the mind, like some old lover that won't let me forget, singing some desert serenade, urging me to fall in love again.

On May 13 of 2002, I sat in my pretty, little, black Neon, smoking a cigarette, staring out into the weirdness that is Taos, and wrote this short poem. My 2000 Neon was my writing studio, my personal space, my little Frogger, hopping across roads to deliver pizzas (until R drove it over a hill and put a hole in the floorboard...it still ran, but it was tainted by a man's harsh handling, scarred by a unconsciousness that didn't understand that by loaning my little car, I was entrusting him with a piece of me.)

                                                 

Taos

Wildlife in the yard—

A black and white magpie,

Three red-breasted sparrows,

And a big wolf dog

Wandering by.

Wildness in mountain time 

Where nothing is quite right.

Peculiar smallness-

A place where free spirits still walk

Half-dressed down the street.

Magpies walk,

Wolf dogs talk

And music from the heart

Resonates with the sunshine

In time to the wind chimes

That hum with the breeze.

-K.A.Bennett 2002

Taos was my muse, as it seems to be with so many people, and although I lived a lonely life there, my creativity blossomed in words and in paint, in photographs and in ideas, and maybe that was the gift the Mountain gave to me. As I read of Taos now, and see photographs of latilla fences and old adobes, I think of how much I miss her, that old town that I drove around delivering pizzas into the night, dodging dogs chasing me and biting at the tires of my car, trying to decipher houses without addresses and streets without signs (they have those now!). What an adventure the Taos days were, and had R been the person then that he has become today, perhaps we could have stayed and the Mountain would not have laughed us out of her shadow.

Maybe it isn't too late. Or maybe it is. Is there an adobe in my future yet? 

I miss the sage like I could never imagine. Lately it consumes me...my longing for the open sky and the scraggly sagebrush that is my soul mate. The closed minds that surround me in this right wing town beg me to recall a different time, and a different mind, a younger me, someone free, not bound and constrained by the conformity all around, and by the system I live in. I want to be free again. I hear the desert calling again. It is almost time to go back home again. The sage is singing and the wind whispers my name.