Monte Rio

Monte Rio

I lived for awhile at Monte Rio,

A tiny town on the Russian River;

A bar, a grocery store, and not much more;

Oh yeah, there was a movie theater,

A small, refurbished comfy Quonset hut

That stood near a quiet intersection.

Time and season are an intersection

Like when the quince bloom at Monte Rio

Beside a falling-down, abandoned hut,

Beside the smooth-flowing Russian River,

Where old growth forest remains a theater

Whose ever-changing scenes always promise more.

I’ve heard several times that less is more –

A deer is crossing the intersection

Which looks like an abandoned theater,

The ghosts of burned out buildings at Monte Rio,

The moonlit flow of the Russian River,

The silent presence of an empty hut.

A crow lands upon the roof of the hut,

The ‘caw’ of the crow, silence, nothing more;

There’s a glass-smooth silence from the river,

An angel crosses the intersection,

No cars on the bridge at Monte Rio,

Closed doors at the Quonset hut theater.

Raccoons dance on the beach, like a theater,

As a possum exits a nearby hut

Bats fly swiftly above Monte Rio

While a feral cat looks for a few more

Scraps at the town’s only intersection

Not far from the moon-filled Russian River.

There are seasonal moods of a river,

Watching them’s like watching a theater,

Or people crossing an intersection,

Or shadows on the wall of an old hut,

Shadows on the wall that won’t last for more

Than a few hours as the sun sets at Monte Rio.

At Monte Rio the Russian River

Flows for eons like an endless theater

Past the hut at the intersection of dream and time.