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Life Before Smartphones
-at Cosumnes River Ranch, Amador County
Today, we wade in a docile swimming hole
while rapids reprimand higher land.
My ankle scrapes a metamorphic rock
on an embankment. The cut is innocuous,
no more subtle than a membrane of gunk
beneath a cuticle. Grazing cattle mistake
our transience as nostalgic before foraging
the miner’s lettuce around us. At dusk,
we crack Dungeness crab legs with our teeth
next to the fire. Unforgiving fumes swing
off a waxed, sawdust log onto a ring of stones
torn by heat. Only an obsidian boulder can brave
every swing in temperature the valley
gratifies to itself. Before the injury, you say
we will never see the water as it is now,
for a river’s flow is not infinite or remorseful
as we want, but still cosmic. On our cot,
I digress by imitating the twang
my maternal grandmother forsook in Oklahoma
before migrating west, and in jest, you question
how panoptic the pinnacles on each hill are
when we can’t distinguish them from darkness.
Tomorrow, I contort a bloated beach towel
around your foot's wound, and exhume the smartphone
we shut off at arrival. The SUV’s all-wheel-drive
lulls you out of consciousness until we reach
an empty pasture. Each call to dispatch is a stupor,
pinging my innermost stations as the tourniquet
incubates your ankle less and less. When cell service
is returned at the entry gate, a rancher interrogates
your fingernails for the first time. I can’t help
but curse the spectacle, because when daylight ends,
we are only tormented by the silence.
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