Terry and I climb a different hill today,
a narrow trail
weaving among wildflowers
where we search for an old water intake,
finding rusty pipe but no collection box.
Mountain plumbing is constant crisis
as storms re-engineer the landscape
while three hundred houses wait to wash.
Terry, you should know, operated
the water system for years and years
in our old hippie town.

Moving on,
we walk around the former reservoir
that collapsed in the winter of ’82.
Now that was a crisis.
I say I used to come to this hilltop
every day at sunset with my dog
to meet a woman and her dog.
Terry says thirty or forty years ago
he used to come to this hilltop
every solstice to drop acid with his buddies.
“When was the last time you took LSD?” I ask.
“Last week,” Terry says.

Terry, you should know, is seventy-two
with cardiac plumbing that has
weathered a few storms.
He says the trips are milder now, sweeter,
like spring-water from the little glen
on the hill above his cabin,
gurgles out slowly
but worth the wait,
at the end of that trail
only you and I know.