"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculite patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."


- Courmac McCarthy
The Road

It'll Soon Snow

The sun burned a cold white as it did all day from behind a layering of clouded sky that forced its rays upward as if to request attention to be painted. Yet, the Hudson River School and its Bierstadts would have required brushes divine to paint this solemn sky majestic. It was anything but, and I was everything but warm.

Unshielded from all four sides, I stood atop the Tenth Street Bridge hoping the numbness that already found my feet would overlook that I had hands and a nose. From this vantage, the upstream ripples were whitecaps on the Pacific viewed from a seven-seat Island Air commuter. This bridge railing–the hand of someone past held with fingers and knuckles just as white.

A barge would beneath pass to give scale to the waves and remind me this was just a river and I had a dinner to prepare. Besides, I could see clearly now that the trees have lost their camouflage. And I have some time since time seems to have slowed its pace, as it might when one flirts with love.

The crows swim the blue sky like an oil slick finding its way to the delta. They caw in place of song, scattering their lesser feathered friends from atop treetops and telephone wires. Most of the leaves are down and brown and brittle and settled densely in piles where breezes had come to rest. Red and grey squirrels rustle the piles, making noise resembling the frantic shakes of a rain stick, hoping their searches might produce enough stores to outlast the death of winter.

If you listen with your right ear to the cold earth, you'll smell sage, pine, earthworm. You'll feel the pinch against your cheek of orphaned acorn caps and white pine needles that have come to lay far from whence they grew. You'll spy with your left eye open, a London Plane tree crooked and arthritic and grey and bone white, set aglow in the late November sun.

With your left ear you'll hear the friction between rubber and concrete and the whine of break dust, the egoistic chatter between women with no jobs and five show dogs, the incessant questioning of youngsters with handfulls and pantsfulls of dried leaves, the half-barks and whimpers of dogs meeting and smelling each other for the first time, but no crows. For now, the crows are away.

Train

The muted whistle of distant summer trains makes belief that I knew life at the turn of the century. Seemingly untouched by the magic wand of progress, its tracks still shine like oil soaked platinum. Years and wars are to it as palms would shrug ocean wrath.

Always present, the tracks mark, as track marks, soft landscapes hidden from view.

The majestic passing of its cars is half-enchantment, half-vacuum, and I am nervous for my lack of current pace and fragile momentum. I am nervous despite the polka-dotted ladybug topping my thumb, as warm air spits up dust and small stones and draws me forward.

Pater-ism

The waterfall sound of mid-Autumn gusts, past the fragile weightless paper leaves, peaks and falls as light ignites the vibrant hues that so effortlessly muster our burdened spirit.

It is time for a reminder.

A circle-song that never ends is now repeating its chorus and reciting its vows with hope to always return again.

We have legs, too.

Traffic stops atop a bridge of unseen trusses. The jersey barriers give scarcely a hint of the surrounding hills, like the peak approach climb of a rollercoaster would with only sky as its backdrop.

I am stopped with it, halfway across. No escaping. This concrete structure was designed for cars, and I am one, seated forward as part of this two-row movie theater with nothing playing.

Two spastic finches whip themselves over and through and over the structure with unbelievable agility. They seemed to be preparing something to cradle us, as if they were the only two who knew our impending collective fate.

The weather is perfectly Autumn. What few clouds exist, to accessorize the pure cyan sky, are seated far too high up to appreciate the brittle air that passes across my bearded face at the pace and direction of those frantic birds.

I listen to public radio; my daily routine of exchanging worries with the world's. I don't have a girl, but North Korea surely has The Bomb. It's goddamned pledge month, but before the truncated news segments have a chance to be interrupted by self-deprivating spats from their DJs, I nimbly switch to music worthy of premature deafness and dream of open road and open sky.

For these wheels to move, sixty sets need to spin in succession - a metal millipede and its symbol for freedom, waning.

Campfire

I drift away from the present as the second death of wood burns new life into my weighted conscious. My eyes lose focus on anything present as flames lick the logs whose bark lost its footing two seasons past, and I receive a much-needed respite from counting heartbeats.

I've reached the age where having history outweighs blind discussion of plans for time not yet arrived and it makes me want to cry. My hair smells of burnt wood tonight, and I want to shed tears for years past and childhood gone and for the fear of Sir Isaac Newton's plain six words.

But I have my indigo ink and I have my pages graced with all that inspires and all that is mundane. Those still blank will patiently wait for me to live through this winter to seek their healing and the passing of a year particularly not known for joy.

Those summer evenings
riding in cars
windows down
eyes sealed:
Sun through stands of trees
would be a mirrorball
upon the backs of my resting lids
red and black
red then black
then red.

Dense chlorine air
would soften my breathing
while a reminder of the sun
would leave my skin tight
still hot.

If one could recall darkness in utero
skinny-dipping would be the perfect reunion.

God Bless America!

Memento Mori, Mr. Forty-three

A phonograph skips incessantly
at the crest of the final chorus.

No one present to lift the needle
the sounds become a rhythm__

A perpetual motion dance.

But songs must end
even those terrible (and stuck in your head).

Restart the record
to realize happiness understands only things transient.

True hope cannot exist without endings.

Ed Schreiber

Tackle football in Schreiber’s backyard comes to me upon the back of this chilled wind. Overheated under a double layer of overworn sweats. Gardening gloves used so not to compromise grip. Always rummaging under his grapevine for a long punt. Teams never chosen by the greenest.


We hated our loved friends and siblings as opponents. And when dinner was ready for one, we’d all disperse.


“Hey guys! Let’s play again tomorrow!”


Soon some kids from the other neighborhood came to play. Greggie broke his leg backwards and Schreiber’s backyard became a field free from ruts. Schreiber became a retired biology teacher one year later.

How To Chop Wood

Before you can create a flame from the magic dance between dried kindling, you must first master the match. But before that, you must know wood: how to gather it, how to dry it, how to chop it. There is much to learn before proclaiming self-sufficiency, according to any naturalist you might stumble upon under some ancient tree.

Last thanksgiving brought snow and wet cold. You may have forgotten this altogether, having modernity and central heating on your side at Grandma So-and-So’s, while you participated in the annual banality of stuffing yourself as though you too were a turkey. College football on the tele. Aunt Martha on the front davenport with her wine spritzers and trivial woe. Uncle Jerry’s kids quoting Monty Python as though Life of Brian just was about to arrive to the theaters and they were graced with advanced screening passes. Life on holiday just as you would expect it to be. Since all necessity has been handed to you without effort or consequence, food and warmth are as commonplace as the electric carving knife your father annually operates with such pride.

This may be what you know about November’s gathering, and if that is all, you are lucky. Last Thanksgiving we were in Maryland, deep into a white-blanketed forest and privy only to the hollow cracking echoes of shotguns. It was the start of buck season, and if not for the early winter freeze to keep our bird unspoiled outside, venison would have found itself on our menu as well.

If you rent a state cabin well into Autumn, but still don the sleeping bag your mother bought for you decades ago before your first troop outing, be sure to check the box labeled ‘modern’ rather than ‘rustic’ at the ranger’s office. Rustic will leave you with snow drifts inside; they will teach you where each draft swept from to bite you everywhere left bare by the bag designed for a prepubescent version of you.

We found ourselves shacked up in such a shell of a building, built on the backs of Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps. It would stay standing for another three-quarter century, but never with a belly of warmth when its absence is also felt out-of-doors.

To fight off the numbness present in each finger, I learned how to chop wood with a fury to defy the brilliance of one-hundred thousand matches.

The Park Service had enough pity to supply all that you need: the chopping stump, hand ax, wedge, and sledge. I got to work promptly after dad threw out his back again. “Be careful!” ma says. “You don’t want to end up like uncle Jerry with a hatchet in your kneecap, now do you?!” “You’re right ma.” was my reply and yet my thoughts lacked caution, just as the cold was indifferent to which part of my body it was attacking. You couldn’t feel an ax’s blade with such a chill anyhow.

Later that night, we burnt every last log and splinter while dreaming of anything but stuffing and canned cranberry sauce. Come daylight and not nearly warm enough for snowmelt, we were all huddled together and shivering in unison.

Next time, check the box labeled ‘modern’. Electricity can be nice.