Garnets Fell From Our Fingers

Garnets fell from our fingers.

Dark red, glinting, as big as your thumbnail. 

Uncut, unsmooth.

Jagged.

The very droplets of mountain blood,

Seemed to us,

Lying scattered

In the ice cold pool at the base of those falls.

Our hands were blue with the scooping up

of the gems. 

 

Garnet Falls. 

 

We camped there on many a midsummer night.   

Fire flies and bats flickered and flit above our heads;

Smoke rose from forbidden cigarettes.

Wicked giggling whispers flew like luna moths

behind furtive wanderings into the forest.

One, then the other, would stumble away

From the fire lit circle muttering

Something about a quick errand in the dark;

But really just an excuse for a stolen kiss.

Or two.

Or more. 

 

Sometimes a fox would pierce the whoosh of the falls with a bark.

And an answer echoed back

From down in the rill where the water went. 

 

Our flashlights pecked

The summit of the falls,

Water cascading down glazing our upraised faces

Bearing little clots of sparkling petrified mountain blood;

Fractured quartzite crystals lined our jeans pockets.

 

With fire and beer wound down

Into small amber embers

We nodded.

We slept dreamless

Innocent and loose,

Sometimes alone, sometimes in the arms of another,

Splayed out on the stone strewn ground

Like angels fallen from a great height. 

 

We awoke,

Wet and shivering and chigger bit,

To the droning machines grooming

the greens and fairways of the course.

_{The Garnet Falls succumbed to the expansive development of the golf course and was bulldozed to make way for a new, more challenging fairway.  A corrugated metal conduit juts from the side of a mud hill where it once was, giving silent testament to the magic that lay beneath. 
I am so glad I remember…I know where the magic is buried.}