Today I drove into town
beneath a bowl-full of exhausted clouds 
left behind from the recent storm.

I imagined my truck was a canoe,
drifting lazily along the asphalt river
that winds along the sides of
and in between the brown, soggy hills.

The current took me up and down, left and right,
through tunnels of trees reaching
out and over the water, hoping to warm
their naked limbs in the event the sun
decided to be social today.

After a series of switchbacks, 
the trees pulled away from the banks 
like the curtains on a stage,
revealing hills that had melted down into
rolling meadows where they formed a valley

filled with horse and cattle ranches,
and the occasional house-sized boulders that 
act as headstones for long-dead mountains
that had been devoured slowly 
by millennia of hungry rain and famished wind.

As I floated along, my little stream grew 
wider and faster as other small tributaries
emptied into it, and other adventure seekers
steered their Toyota canoes and Chevy rafts
onto the smooth, black river.

Eventually, my canoe floated its way  
into a vast lake that dissolved into 
a buzzing mountain town as quickly as it takes 
for a Ford F-150 to come to a complete stop 
at traffic light.