Shimmera-tone forests & one thousand miles from Here to your Front Door: on westvirginia, pt. 2

All summer I made friends with the creatures nearby --- they flowed through the fields and under the tent walls, or padded through the door, grinning through their many teeth, looking for seeds, suet, sugar; muttering and humming, opening the breadbox, happiest when there was milk and music. But once in the night I heard a sound outside the door, the canvas bulged slightly ---something was pressing inward at eye level. I watched, trembling, sure I had heard the click of claws, the smack of lips outside my gauzy house --- I imagined the red eyes, the broad tongue, the enormous lap. Would it be friendly too? Fear defeated me. And yet,not in faith and not in madness but with the courage I thought my dream deserved, I stepped outside. It was gone. Then I whirled at the sound of some shambling tonnage. Did I see a black haunch slipping back through the trees? Did I see the moonlight shining on it? Did I actually reach out my arms toward it, toward paradise falling, like the fading of the dearest, wildest hope --- the dark heart of the story that is all the reason for its telling?

-Mary Oliver, the chance to love everything.

The days are not longer here, they are the same. But the night comes quickly and the moon hangs low til morningtime. Mossytopped rocks and a hundred and 65 thousand leaves falling on the hour. 29 days ago, I walked into the woods, and some of me hasn't come back. He rests under treetop ceilings and with burbling stream radioes pounding in his ear. waiting for me to return and lead him on, or lead him home, or waiting for some green eyed someone to show him where the forest turns from tall trees to open meadows and where winding rivers cross these sometime broken doors. 65 pound packs and thunderstorms stopping on a crook in the arm of the MiddleFork River nine miles from the edge of the Cranberry Wilderness. 

5 miles in and my eyeglasses all covered in steam and drops of water from six miles high, fallen through and off of oak leaves and sycamore trees and white pine needles and brown brow hairs. Glenn took a blue tarpaulin from his blue backpack and the world turned from wet and open to wet and closed, the flowers in the corners of my eyes and the rocks in front of my feet disappearing for some manmade sheet of plastic strands and metal eyelets on every corner. Did I hear your name in the rustle of the poison leaves, or are you still at the end of some wellworn path somewhere nowhere near here? Are you drops of water down my leg and flicking off the heel of these blistering shoes? Have you heard that we walk alone, or are you in some nowhere place where the sun comes up and stays overhead for days and days and days and then for one more day? 

Now the world has changed, the trees are peaches and apples and tomatoes and one hundred million different shades of the same colors. All ripe for eyes to pick and hearts to eat, wide open skies for dessert and a thousand miles of black road turning grey under turning wheels for time and we're all just looking for the right way to say goodbye. From above, every single one running into each other, bouncing off and slowing down, then speeding for open spaces to find one hundred million have already come by and found the words to say goodbye. How many have crossed your paths and how many more will come to your door? 

"there are no more. you are the last and you will climb these footpaths only one time."

You should see the air here. A thousand new clouds below your feet and houses peeking through the breaks. All of them, all of us, running up these mountain cliffs and hurling their selves to the sky. Will you bring rain or will you bring shade or will you brighten the sky, magnify a thousand sun beams, come close and return to the ground from which you came, for watering flowers and seeping under the cracks in these concrete foundations?

"ask me 'oh are you alright?'

chase stomachaches and feel uptight.

fall over you and onto the floor.

they ask again and pick me up."

That Ghost, when there is no one else to sing to you sing to yourself