summer_jackel

I may just succeed in this little project: 2 more months to go! What a year to write it in, too.

Anyway, August was heavy.

Sketches of a Life in August

Moments come which stop everything. Like this sunset, they arrive unannounced, and even when they are anticipated, one cannot prepare for them. Mostly they strike with a carnivore’s efficiency and give no warning or recourse.

I was driving, and heavy purple rainclouds made a solid fence all around me at perhaps a distance of a mile, the bulk of a freak, brief August storm. But they were not yet here; this place was clear and sunny, weirdly still, blue sky above with all that deep purple surrounding. Here, for just a minute or so, the setting sun washed dry fields in neon salmon, rimmed oak leaves and the tough old trunks in molten gold.

I stopped the car; you have to. As if I could have driven. I tried as hard as I could to experience and absorb the vision, all that overwhelming color, my beautiful understated tawny and hard green California fields gone, just for a moment, psychedelic and unreal.

Moments, these brief pangs of sorrow or of beauty so acute as to stun, as to stop us: they say, you are always in the process of dying, but that moment, when it comes, is often swift. Endings are, like joy, like becoming, imminent. They are the emergent property of every passing moment, that which reminds us, once in a while, that we are not yet dead and had perforce better open our eyes now and then.

The sublime has no meaning but itself. It is all there is, and it is enough. Revel in your deaths, and in these brief, hard shocks of beauty.

***

I needed the mountain.
Mountains are bigger, rising like granite spines
bones of the Earth, with water running through them
perfectly clear freshets
all lush with moss and wildflowers growing ‘round.

Walking here,
there is no room in me for sorrow anymore
the mountains overpower, too big
filling all, claiming all, spilling over
filling all the tender places,
all the wounded places
with weathered granite, clear water.

***

(Feathers/Fish)

Were I to court you, I would
gift you with a flicker’s feather and a parrot feather
and a shard of granite stone. I would
pull a tuft of long fur from my dog’s coat
and braid it, give it to you, to tack to your wall,
or place in a small box, or beneath your mattress;
or to discard it if you chose.
I would find, if I could
if I was serious, if I was certain
if I really knew I meant it
a hawk’s feather discarded in the long grass, or an owl’s.

And if I did this,
would you see me, I wonder
granite-colored, Earth-colored, algae-colored
at home in my watery element
fleet-moving, wary, fins white-rimmed, of red and hidden throat.
Would you offer me a shining lure, a silken line
and draw me upwards
hold me in your hand
all flashing colors and immediacy?
Would you take me then, to sustain you,
claim all that was offered, all I have to give,
or touch me briefly with wet hands
and, wounded, pierced, release me?

***

(Song for Pryderi/There will be water)

There will be water
Water will come from the sky, washing this forest of fern and rivulets
As I sit in a bath of blood-warm water, saturating moisture
My eyes running down, howling.
This winter, there will be water, and the rains will come to the forest again.
Already I can hear their steady, quiet licking,
I see the deep and running streams, feel the grey skies, the cold.
Even now, with the cricket chiming outside my window, so sweetly
this summer ends.

There will be water, and I will walk out
on that gray morning, so full of tiny motions
I will step forward calmly, onto the cold moist earth
to be supplanted and engulfed by its perfection
to ask for cleansing
For annihilation, for release.
And Pryderi will not lope silver beside me any more
And I will never touch him again, rub my face in his hand-deep mane; he will be gone.
There will be water from the sky, and an older, sadder stranger will walk out into the green and living forest,
a tall blue collie loping at her heels, a dog I do not know.

*

The mountain is big, too big
to talk about
I gave my words to the mountain,
and it returned my silence.