Illumination

A scrawl of smoke to the west travels outside the forest at night. Sitting next to the fireplace, I listen for small noises. The sounds that I know best are the whisk of a homemade broom across a dusty floor, the whisper of a chilly wind through the tops of tall trees, the susurrus of Southern rivers.
*
These are not ordinary playing cards. Soon you will be expected to speak their disappeared language. To parse words from faces and numbers, from three colors, or four. To talk about the spy's incomplete mission, the village of subterranean ninjas, the soldier's tattered coat: a dark and somber shell with its wool lining shrugging loose from buttonholes. The varmint in the garden.
*
The horses' hooves have trampled the high meadow grass. They will be here soon. We plunge toward the future without a clue, dribbling a hapless trail of words behind us, a glossolalia of fear and retreat, as he closes the distance between our slow caravan and his fast stallion. When he arrives, it is a day of silences. The crickets, too, seem puzzled.
*
He has to spend all his time managing this place. Some of his answers have satisfied our need for a perfect story. Still, he mesmerizes us with his telling. It despises the brassy sun and loves dark, damp places, crevices of secret richness and loamy wealth. Me, I'm a moss kind of person, so I listen good.
*
Milkweed grows in places where it is not always wanted. You could call this a home or a shack. The vines are all you can see from the road. Still, it has some running water, and a place to hide out when funnel clouds tear through the lonesome pastures.
*
I also sought a beloved meeting place in the village. For years he lived alone in sparsely furnished rooms. But he comes out to be with us whenever the sun shines directly on the longleaf pines. Once, he brought us a fistful of mica and a few slippery pumpkin seeds. This was during the time of the abandoned marigolds. Unexpectedly possessed by some urgent instinct, I suddenly felt a new connection with everything alive and breathing. Walking through the sleeping house, I saw that ferns grew everywhere there.
*
Some of us liked to play a game. The sky was slowly darkening, and I heard my pounding heart in the blood of my listening ears: tiny books made from old newspapers, powder horns full of the sift of ancient narratives. I tried to write them down but couldn't.
*
Every year I think it may not happen. While the light is still new in the morning, the ceremony in the old garden begins. It is the keeper of our mysteries. The unexpected colors clash and then blend.
*
I only wish I could stop. It's never enough. Somehow I always leave things out: the ship in the bottle, the branches of winter blooms, the pestle and mortar I found in my great-aunt's attic, still dusty with someone's private work.
*
Behind him was his other world. When would he have had time to build this bridge? When we are trapped in the world of a story, a gathering of imaginary friends reminds us that we should not say a word.
*
Today, he smiled at me for the first time: a scent of citrus, like a freshly sliced lemon.
*
The shamans arrive, and then the young detectives, washing away the colors of everything that slowed me down. The power lines above my head spit and sizzle with electricity and solutions, alchemy and healing. Maybe just one more day, here. You know the way that light can make you dizzy, its voice a secret you used to know the name of.
*
Our mother was once a dancer, before the time we live in now. She showed us the shadow side of the quiet cove. But the knees of the swampland's cypress trees had their own brilliant ideas.
*
We made our wishes on Mars and Venus, and the next morning, before any other light could greet us, we woke up floating. These woods, he said, are yours. What is said is not always what is heard.
--lks November 2009