Yellow moon. Near the old feeder ponds, a deer spooks, thumping the ground as it bounds away, circling us to come up behind. At three a.m. one yawns walking but then is rushed by the familiar, the intensified clarity. Killdeer cry their plaintive cries. And stars - certain stars - are remembering they are stars and we support them with wishes and gazes.
Where are we? Clouds the color of ash move in from the North and light is interrupted accordingly. Conifers stay rooted to the same patch of soil all their lives, part of why my father cried when moving them. No wind nor even a breeze, so what rises, rises in place, and one perceives - in a sense - their location by smell. Spring is movement as winter was but the birds sing earlier.
The dog is waiting for me when I return, coming back through the village, shuttered houses, porch lights, unrequited dreams. The dim world is not brightened thusly. I know Worthington mostly in terms of its brooks and rivers, no one of which has escaped my attention, and I locate myself accordingly. Lovingly? An owl passed overhead, going back to its piney bower, silent so likely fed, briefly flashing in streams of moonlight.
Skeins of ice deck shallow puddles but the pond is thawed now, the beavers at work, their plashes and thwacks reverberating through the forest the closer I get. Old stories are nice, the ones that endure, because they too reverberate, and we know ourselves in the echoes. So much of what I do passes for effort and grief - still - and yet I stumble on, often happily. It is a marvelous world in which to learn the ways of Christ, the roadside maples dying to be our teachers, the daffodils repeating the same lesson year after year for the benefit of those who give attention. Halfway out I come back, same as always, home.
No comments:
Post a Comment