We sit in the garden of the rehab center
surrounded by the legions of sage
from rain-soaked dust and shrub flakes.
I inhale to get an Earthy high.

Small islands of clouds cover the sky,
but not enough to keep the sun off
our brown, Native skin.

She says she's back to get rid of the shakes.
Her wild days of worshipping hedonism haunts
her once goddessesque body while her cracked lips
talk about LSD, about how its hard to get, that it’s okay
since it’s government-made, CIA approved, and
Tim Leary enforced. She regrets nothing. I do.

It was my last day for my first step back into the world.
I knew she was gone. Her enlarged pearls and
smoothed, onyx pebbles for pupils once caught shots
of insight that sped through the cosmos of her mind,
but that was a long time ago. I had to move on, and I
thought, if we move in opposite directions, then we'll meet again.
If we go the same direction, we'll never see each other.
And we haven't.