High Drive's your best bet for viewing the sunrise In the winter months in old Spokane. The bluffs Stretch out below you with pines receding down To the railroad tracks and Hangman Creek, the highway That goes past pieces of my past, Spangle and Plaza and the rolling Palouse hills. This morning I look at the sky above those hills With changing colors that announce the coming sunrise And foretell a mostly blue-sky day though past, Well past, the point of freezing, when winter's bluffs In the seasonal poker game go down the highway With all your cash pocketed in the goose down. The truth is I'm feeling just a bit down With the winter blues and I wish I could wander the hills All the way to the border and find a hidden highway To make my crossing under the warming sunrise To where we'd have our house up on some bluffs Overlooking the Gulf of Mexico and boats sailing past. I wish I could seize ahold of our separate past And make it connect from here all the way down To the eternal verities where God or the universe bluffs Us into thinking there's gold hidden in the hills When in fact it's beaming down from sunrise to sunrise And it's under our wheels as we flee, paving the highway. What I really want is to be driving down that highway With you riding shotgun, pulling our trailer of the past Towards the new and long-awaited golden sunrise Of the mysterious future but filled up and weighed down With the fullness of our beautiful present, the hills Of Eastern Washington colliding with heaven's bluffs Where you and I will accept the morning's bluffs As the sky becomes an orange highway With coffee-colored clouds above the green hills Of the coming spring and the present zooming past. We'll drive that golden road all the way down To Pullman and beyond to an as yet unknown sunrise And I'll hold your sunrise hand as we recall these bluffs, The arrowleaf balsam down along the winding highway, Creating our own new past from these memories of the hills.

Screenshot for the sake of the integrity of the line breaks on the small screens:

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jopomojo.substack.com/subscribe