Returns are tenuous, you wonder what lessons may remain. The parkway moves like a river, you find a parking spot down the block, everything is too easy. The rain calms the city, leaves you with plenty of air to breathe. This morning I walked along the Hudson and felt a slight ache tear at me, but now I feel no regret, no longing.
I got the presents that were mine to open.
Now I must put them to use, lest they evaporate in my hands.
Wind down country roads toward the river, thick, majestic river to which all roads lead, there’s a mountain pass near Cairo (pronounced care-o, if you know) where you shoot straight out of the foliage into an endless panorama that you could not have expected. I meander into the small hudson valley town just before the community pool closes, sign in on the printed register, swim a lap in the pool to let the 90 degree heat evaporate, summer is endless if you let it.
Just remember these truths are hard won.
Keep them, even when the steam has turned to mist in the sky beyond.
Another day ends, you are no longer so exhausted that your eyes slip off the pages you try to read. You have finished three books thus far, the first one feels a lifetime ago on a cold morning porch with a cup of coffee although you think, if you try hard enough, it was only yesterday. I write a laundry item list of things I have discovered, as though fearful I will forget them when I drive out of these woods.
The truth is I’ve only discovered that which I already knew.
It seems cruel for life to require so much time and money for us to only ever rediscover. Our therapists may disagree. I spend an hour watching the bullfrog disappear and reappear in the sludge. Later, my skin will stretch taut at surprise sunburn. I haven’t looked in a mirror in days. I turn off the scratchy radio just to test out silence. Who am I against a void? What remains when your flawed coping mechanisms are pulled from under you?
I make another fire. Take another walk. Stare at the way sunlight trickles in through a deciduous forest. The heavy cotton inside my skull begins to subside. I write another poem.
This one has a line I quite like in it.
By day three, I have stopped bringing a swimsuit to the jetty. There is no one there to care if I wear one or not. An emerald green frog sits half submerged in the sludge near the reeds,waiting for lunch. The dragonflies are delirious with sunlight. I count freckles on my shoulder in an exercise of patience.
The boom box in the cabin only finds one station on the FM band, country music with just a hint of static. A dragonfly gets caught in the spiderweb on the jetty ladder. You know you shouldn’t interfere but you cannot help it. The water smells like mulch on your skin.
I forget my phone and do not miss it.
There is no wi-fi. The phone buoys one bar across the treetops, I do not bring the laptops out of their bags for two days. Bury myself in typewritten sheets of poetry. To write again after a hiatus, they say, is an exercise in faith. I write new poems, hopeful strings of words lost in the woods. Intermittently, the old boom box finds a scratchy country station. It speaks of community colleges, fireworks outlets, repeats melodies of carefree summers and heartbreak in local dive bars. You wonder if country singers live with their head in the clouds, or if New Yorkers live with theirs in the ground.
In the book you read, a young girl drowns just off a Red Hook pier.
You carry on swimming in the forest pond and there's a word for this kind of water in your home language that can never be translated. The word contains the likeliness that there is no bottom, that woodland spirits may drag you under, that the silence of a forest is a warning cry and you dive in anyway. When you married another tongue, you relinquished your unconditional faith in the magic of language, everything became open for investigation. Words became only words.
You became determined to spend your life recapturing the intangible magic. Becoming the woodland creature come to take your readers' imagination away. You wonder if the witches they used to burn at the stakes weren't simply women who had discovered something beyond tragic gray doldrums of being some man's property. He writes to call you pretty and you think he doesn't know the half of what fire lies below.
I stir a stick through the embers, wait for the last to die down before leaving the pit, mosquitoes delirious with warm flesh in the August twilight.
It occurs to me I thought I was dying
when really I was only lost,
when really I had only tied myself to the stake
and refused to light a match.
Arrive in the late afternoon, Pennsylvania like a postcard of future foliage tours to come and the cashier at Wegmans decrying updated CDC guidelines. The host shows me round the cabin and explains how great the gun laws, you just walk right in and get your gun, but the lake is yours and the woods are yours and the silence, blissfully, is yours, so you just nod. When he leaves, you walk to the jetty and take all your clothes off, dive off the spider webbed ladder into quiet waters and when you come back up it’s as if you’ve forgotten everything that came before.
I do not pretend to come to the woods without intention, do not pretend vacation is a break without a goal. But today I spent half an hour staring at a fire, twirling marshmallows on a stick and marveling how age lets you wait a little longer, turn those white puffs around slower as they swell until they reach that perfect golden crackle, instead of setting them on fire and pretending you like em real crisp.
Some things have changed, some things have gotten better. You’d do well to remember that, when the embers die down and all that’s left to keep you company
is a mind running full speed
on empty.
You do not have the words before they come to you
They are not yours to demand out of
nothing
Today I closed and wrapped and tied
neatly with a bow, let
his soft silence be the last
sounds on my lips, see
the sun set across the Hudson,
know
that tomorrow the road lies open ahead
and everything that appears
in its wake
is mine.
