The Old Mule

Many Feet of Snow

This is the rainy season. Cats are out in packs, wandering aimlessly. The women at the government office look at me like I am a stranger. This whole town is caving in – no place to sleep, no place to be without noise. There is a desperate bird in the throats of teenage girls. Maybe there slips are too tight. We all need a moment in the mountains, picnicking beneath mountain laurel, swinging on the branches of tall oaks.

I used to treasure the rare find of a salamander. There was a cool wet pool down a secret trial. We would pull great orange lizards from beneath granite stones. We would hike to Raven Cliff Falls and come home with socks stained with mud. Memories like these are disappearing. Urban sounds are brash and slippery, the quick toil of city life vanquishes rural childhood myths. How will we stay healthy cramped on endless trains, standing in lines, filling out forms? Movies, movies, the sound of passing engines. Turbines heave forth…our guilt, our pockets, the parade of progress. Perpetual movement is unbecoming. Stillness beyond is bound by lonesome hollows long since forgotten. This is the rainy season.

History

Big-legged humans huddled around fires holding turkey legs. That is how I consider my deepest relatives. A people without boundary, content on a cave bed with leaves and a pile of crow bones. I see them with paint rocks, animating the hunted. And perhaps I envision them with skin around their feet, hardly human, prancing across deserts beneath a heady swirl of stars. The delicate astronomy  of not knowing the above - perfect balance unhindered by flame, in need of water.

These were honest beasts, prone to fits of illogic – rubbing sticks, pounding stones. A cloud thrashing was quite an event, the outpouring of a season’s new growth. I imagine palm trees scattered about a molten universe, dinosaurs with feet the size of a hot dog stand, strange birds with beaks and motled grey feathers.   

I am not concerned if my imagination serves me wrong. I took to the forest to redefine, to sore my muscles and leave the restless beat of home. Now I am ready to reenter, more aware, deeper felt, better defined in my history. The loss of dream I must never afford. I dream of beasts.

A New Distance

Life thrives in the Amazon, and it is Sunday in America. Churches fill, chickens are fried, cars are washed. Men in beards do laundry and women without underthings are just waking up. Delicate ecosystems rise and fall, extinctions occur, snakes rattle as coveys of lesser flycatchers alight across a vast expanse. We are advanced in our disconnect, thrilled in unknowing, separated by molecules and miles of dirt roads. How to explain the true proximity of our movements?

Fortunes move with the pluck of keys. We hover in the stratosphere, hastily taking notes, creating maps, and situating our geography. In minute streams, thousands of particles of life stroll by, wearily prescient, heavy in thought. Atoms sink under the weight of the past, present and beyond. 

Humidity

At the tip our new land, a wrapping jungle curled forth. Vines leapt through subterranean ecosystems heavy with the scents of growth. Our mules faltered amid underbrush, serpents and rain. A cliff side gave way, revealing sheltered harbors. Humid mists of toil rose from our shirts. We were back in the tropics, hungry with love – the eros of all lower climes. Natives snarled from dangling branches. Oaks extended with the girth of whales. This land, undiscovered, subequatorial, fraught with dangers un-conceived, coaxed us leeward, beyond the sea.

From our lower visage, unkempt and ill ridden, circulating growth encompassed us in womb like fervor. Paradise. I pronounced from a mosquito-frenzied bog: paradise! Our boats, long since unmoored by drunken paddlemen, set a gallant sail. The peculiar tonic of exploration muddied our reason. Inward we drifted to the edge of our energies. Then, with the lonely hum of a night’s first forest, man intruded, each head fell in rapturous escape.