WeatherManSam

All day I pulled lamb’s quarters and smartweed in thick handfuls from the strawberries, fruits small, rotting, pecked by birds, home to slugs now, their bodies hugging the berry and the earth like a warm blanket beneath the leaves, the day long clouded, a late rain kissing everything after the cold front having long said goodbye, every bird turning to the feeders, sunflowers warm in their bellies, and myself holding a cup of cocoa, cooling, while somewhere in the far corner the blackberries are awake, eyes white as snow.

Low tide, the long day behind us, all evening stretched wide as the horizon across Battery Creek, and then, somewhere, the ocean, we sat sifting for shark teeth, feet buried, not touching, not knowing what to look for, knowing all we had, together, the soft crunch of trowel in sand, passing the bucket seasick with its handle, some grains overboard, forgotten, before being poured into the colander, washed in the water dark from storms, the thick smell of peat at our backs, old creeks draining to estuary, these brackish waters of our lives, hours let go like salt in the wind, a kind of communion, the wind pushing through the sea ox-eye thickets, little suns dancing in our hands.

Rain beading the glass all night, speaks in cryptograms as we do to each other, each other’s ciphers, our whole lives leading to this puzzle, as still as the storm buffeting the coast, as sure as star maps knowing the stars shine somewhere, but not here. I want to trace the rain, palms open, let it read our long lines and tell us our fortune instead, possible as it may or may not have been, while we dance as cranes on the wet deck, careless, my footprint pressing into yours, filling, pressing again, our chest-beats in concert.

Thirty feet from the edge I put my hands in this water and listen to the same muffled roar, glimpse the bands of mist rising from the canyon below, the same way this small pool of water I have cupped within my fingers sounds as the current flows toward the inevitable. And it is late spring, and old leaves from winter are still leaving the forest floor, marching with caution to the creek's bank where they wait for a breath of wind, or a gentle push to guide them, not to me- toward something larger farther along down.

Some miles out in the wilderness we found Johnson cemetery, the August air cutting our lungs like the chiseling of head stones would have it's carver's hands a century ago. Our camping trip waited to bloom like web caterpillars hugging the understory treetops, and I remembered the neighbor's child crying a song he made for them when his parents burned those nests out of the lower limbs of their pecan (only he could see a butterfly waiting) We cooled ourselves in the shallow river, but as we sat watching a wild boar feel it's way along the opposite brush, I felt a tiny army of seed ticks rising up my briar torn legs, as my friend's eyes did with a fear he's known before, watching his cousin die from Rocky Mountain fever. Later, they still didn't know how he pulled through, though it seemed some small push at the end saved him. Perhaps as it did me, years ago, leaning over a cliff a little too far, the soft wind whispering back, "Not yet".

Miles are longer, when your knees say so. The desire to catapult young-hearted rock to rock gone, your consequences considering mind hesitant at finding the way across the creek, when home is closer. But any old trail will still do, even as the wide paths close with darkness with each end of day. And the moon, never enough, waits with the rest of us for morning to come.

I took the old railroad grade leading down to where the sun disappears beneath tall pines; crossed the stream on a fallen oak, pushed back the brush guarding the entrance to the abandoned iron mill and sat on a granite stone, admiring the piles of slag and broken bricks that litter the base of the remaining walls, the stone structure weathered like an old book. I have been here before, shovel in hand, ready to stake claim to these mine cart wheels, or the long rusted rail lines once used to transport iron ore across the rotted bridge. But with each visit I am greeted with more undiscovered country, turning history over and over in the palm of my hand.

Under a glaring moon by a fire that leapt in bursts like moves from a long forgotten dance, we sat watching the trees sway in their own memories, as the leaves spun and flipped before making one last arch toward that glass lake, the need to send out a ripple, a howl, like the coyotes on some far bank, their playground yelping like kids, an echo sent down this canyon, where closed caverns still hold some music of their own.

In the dark you can still hear waves in a seashell, and all across the world the current goes on and on, oblivious to the highway of your life, where redundancy bleeds the black asphalt in stripes of yellow or white. And from a distance the stars, and the great moon are like wounds that never seem to heal, those eyes beating down with a persistence sharp, but not burning, a hate that slowly fades as the sun breaks the horizon, and in his customary gesture strips the darkness from us in long silhouettes that set out running like wild stallions across the landscape.