Spill the Wine

By Tricia Cook

Inspired by War’s Spill the Wine, and an afternoon alone at the crags

 

Drinking the air in June tastes like a deep glass of something rich and ruddy. 

Filling my lungs slowly, I take in the sweet butterscotch fragrance of warmed ponderosa. It makes my mouth water. The sun caresses my face and it is warm enough to strip down to my bare and rosy. Lazy spring sun has melted the chilly white quilts that had wrapped themselves around the callous sandstone and metamorphic slabs. Warm air against exposed skin feels like something new. 

I am lying before the hall of tall mountain kings, naked to the world. In one hand is a bottle of wine, in the other a glass. I pour a little of the nectar and raise the ruby glass to my lips and drink. The sun is hot against my feline-stretched back. It feels like fire roaring. Like flames. I set down the bottle of wine and spill a little onto the tall grass. 

Vermilion on verdigris. 

Far off in this great expanse of turquoise sky thunder bangs its gongs.  

Clouds dissolve into chaos. As gathering winds whip, aspen shake their rain sticks and I rise to dance with them. It is a crazy dance, unrehearsed, but it is a new summer day and I have drunk a little wine. 

Beyond this sweeping embrace of rock wall, I see another at his own crazy leaping jig. 

I lay back down in the tall grass below this ancient slab. In this framed and stilled moment I am stretched as a canvas, in repose, in the tall grass before the hall of tall mountain kings, as warmed and tranquilized as a lizard on a rock. I am a lizard canvas. I take another sip of wine and spill a little down my narrow chin, onto the tall grass. 

Vermillion on verdigris. 

I want to paint this moment with a few smooth and kaleidoscopic sentences. I can see words circling above my head like dragonflies. Standing on tippytoe, I grab them out of the fiery air and begin to finger-paint the swirling breezes. The picture is made of one long word formed from a thousand dancing letters. 

Reaching out with slender arms and legs, lengthening my entire body, my long thin tongue uncurls swiftly and wraps around a dragonfly. It tastes like alphabet soup. 

I am content in my lizard self as rain begins to run cool fingers down my heated back. The raindrops feel like scales. There is a song that has been on the tip of my consciousness all day long, and it floats down to me now through charged currents: 

Take the wine, dig that girl. Spill the wine, dig that girl. Spill the wine… take that girl. 

I whisper into the whispering air, “No more war.”