On Wildwood's Edge

Imagine that you have filled a bucket, a wooden bucket, scratched and marked from its frequent uses. You have carried it and filled it with what you could find, dropped into it what you could from your hidden places. The bucket is filled with bits of you – good wishes, pretty smiles, dreams of flowers, sweet memories, and sweat squeezed out by the muscle and bone heat made through your reaching for the ‘might be’s’.

Let all of these offerings gel together, marry their tastes and scents, sparkle in the electricity of potential. Pour the bucket out onto the salt-baked earth at your feet – that circle of earth within your view and purview, your realm of impermanent dominion. Then wait.

Wait because you are spent, because the cause of your pouring out must await its effect. All expectations from the realm of ‘might’ now must suspend and the rule of ‘is’ will enact its certain truths.

In talking to yourself, ask about what you placed in that bucket. Was that all you could find? All that you could spare? Did you hold something back for yourself because you had to or because you were afraid to stand on this baked earth with a bucket and a body now filled with nothing but nothing?

Withholding is itself a cause. Giving, for its part, brings no sure thing. Every precedent ends in its own emptying out and the eventual growth of trees (or not) is well beyond the reach of even your most eager, most extended finger tips.

That fact is an inflexible part of what is.

July 16, 2010

Returning at Night

I could feel you, your sniffing along corners, behind chairs, coming alone this time. I lay flat in a closet, dark-hidden, waiting, ears wide and mouth shut. Just rafters and floorboards between us- the simple structure of a stick-frame house. I held, biting my fingers.

Then came your stairway ascent, the smell of Marlboro and Channel, the sound of your pause. Just a moment, your stalking, followed by your exit - an exit announced in your ripped-throat exhale, the percussive thud of your each step landing, stopping, resuming, diminishing. I opened my door to yellow dimness- the press of silence poured in.

What had you touched? What had you taken? Would you be back? Were you close by now? The house shook in its emptiness, chilled in its quietness. I calculated. Reckoning with your nighttime returns, my remnants shrank to half. Withstood your taking of whatever you wanted as I had since first you started your night hunts. This night confirmed my smallness. I knew I was not ready to face your gray skin and sour breath- or the orange glow of your half-burned cigarette.

May 13, 2010