I wrote this after my stepdad passed, during a cross-country road trip my friend Annette asked me to take with her. It was not an easy journey, but a memorable one. The RV kept breaking down, like something unseen was trying to hold us in New Mexico. The trip that was supposed to take seven days took over twenty.

We followed Route 66, but the road felt like a threshold, the inspiration of the American Southwest, and vivid dreams.

In Grants, New Mexico, something in the sky opened to my heart while high winds held us static. The air carried the smell of gas stations and fry bread, and beneath it, something older. The dust and volcanic soil spoke to me like something was watching. That’s where I gathered my first bundles of big sagebrush, Artemisia tridentata, growing wild in the high desert. It was medicine to my soul and held a presence and scent I’d carry with me some nine years later.

We were near the Continental Divide, where waters choose their direction, and I could feel my life doing the same. It was 2018, and I was searching, not just for love, but for the place inside myself where love could manifest from a broader horizon. I didn’t know yet that I had already found myself deeply, that I had already begun hearing the voice inside that would cast a new voice to my writing.

Standing there, in that dry and foreign landscape, I felt something unexplainable. It was as if my future family existed somewhere beyond sight, searching for me in spirit the same way I was longing for them.

The journey was unbridled, uncertain, and sacred in a way that my little red book couldn’t contain.

At this time, I had begun drawing hands, and I did not know they would become the medium to connect my writing in the coming years. Back then, I was shy about my writing, as I had been slowly adding to composition books for about fifteen years, writing under the name Trailerpoet, and never sharing it on any medium since it was deeply personal.

Continental Divide

Flowing from my chest, the past
highways and heartaches
These spirits graced frost-burdened fields,
Granite pulpits born from crystalline forests
Once anchoring the sea
All lost structure again at 58 mph
Lines of delicate shades traced the pavement
Sans pain; nature was silent.

In the slow dance of the land of fire and ice
You were undiscovered in the wild of my heart,
The altitude of an eagle expanded a vision of hope,
and abandoned signatures of feathers on the curbside,
Blurred by mirage and the catalyst of time.

Beyond the topography, you were the ether.
The vernal equinox had abandoned the soil; others turned and left to drought.
When would you water me across this continental divide?

Be the hands that touch the curves of my inner landscape,
Painted Desert,
So my future selves can be reminded of a love
That no canyon can separate.

Copyright © 2026 Phillip Saunders. All rights reserved.
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