Onto Sedona

"Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the Persians hold the sea holy?" – Melville, from Moby Dick









Day 2


Toil of the traveler begins near first light, a few stretches as warm up, then out a strange
   door, as if a new ship to sea
and out along the backroads of Oak Village, the other side of the auditoriumnal ring
   of red rocks that make Sedona;
city, as always, no matter how far you get into the breast of this country, sea shore, or desert,
   will always play out by roads;
the thoroughfare that slices through the heart of the shopping malls, big trucks, wheels
   as high as my own hips,
straddle the roundabouts needing to get to some country roads with far more fervor
   than the driver of Prius;
into the backwaters of the city, long dry buildings as senior centers and held by clean
   clipped lawns, a cafe and Tarot shop
as every other side channel city.  You pass slowly at a traveler's pace. The red rock cliffs
    stand as if a wall of perfect bricks.
The city inside of you is the boy trapped inside the classroom, looking out a barricade
    of windows imagining departing ships.