Paper Truth Poem by Andrew Dabar

70 West
Enter Grand Junction
I see your flannelgraph mountains
Your Book Cliffs
Your Grand Mesa
Your Two Rivers
Your dinosaur canyons and fossils
Your brilliant bullshit theories
How something the size of a six story building can go missing in a day
Immortalized in bedrock
Petrified
How?
By what force of nature?
Why?
Walking my dog at Lunch Loop Trail
Two misfits without a bike to ride
Otherwise might have never noticed
All the colors of a rainbow in the scree
A promise:
Never again will God flood the earth
So
With the desert sun scorching my hair
Blueberry wheat beer on my breath
I'm dizzy in the heat of this knowledge
A reminder
That
The greatest stories
The truest stories
Are the simplest ones
The paper and felt figurines still sticking to the flannelgraph hills of my childhood memories
Adam, Abraham, Noah, Christ
The Great Deluge
The Water of Life
Baptism
Reminds me to pull a squashed paper bowl from my pack
A sweet little puppy
Utterly reliant upon me
(Scary)
Laps some Evian with an eager rhythm
And I find myself loving him with all of my heart
There I stand
A sweaty sinner
Praising the Creator
Of all creatures great and small
As
Raindrops splash from sloppy whiskers
Rolling downhill
Cutting
Sculpting
Minuscule canyons in the sand
I hover over the scene
Tall as a deity
Imago Dei
Watching
Wanting to save the ants
____________
Andrew Dabar

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