Roaming
O trees of life, O when are you wintering? We are not unified. We have no instincts like those of migratory birds. Useless, and late, we force ourselves, suddenly, onto the wind, and fall down to an indifferent lake. We realize flowering and fading together. And somewhere lions still roam. Never knowing, as long as they have their splendor, of any weakness.
--Rainier Maria Rilke, “Duino Elegies”
Last night I found one of my journals from a few years ago & in it
I’d drawn fantastical creatures such as a lion with flamingo legs &
trident ears & I’d written about a woman on safari who’d been
mauled by a tiger & about how my father hadn’t forgiven me for
leaving Kentucky because he thought that place was magical &
he’d lived there his whole life & he loved the horses lolling in
lime-green fields not far from ancient coal pockets & he wondered
why would anyone ever leave it. When I moved to the foothills of
the Rockies I knew I was home, with the clean dry clear air &
violet clouds spooling around the mountains with melted-metal
lakes, but then with Covid, with everyone holed up, all the wild
animals, the bears & elk & mountain lions, came down from the
peaks like foul fairies to prey on us humans. Years ago when I
lived in Manhattan I went to a gathering & a poet read from her
work & she rhapsodized about the wild animals in the Rockies &
she imagined all of them leaving the mountains to magic the humans
into stone, immediately, irreversibly, beastily. Then I read Rilke &
he moved the lions into my head & I pondered our decay & that of
the wildest of beasts, our decline as tawdrily random & destructive
as attack, neglect, disease & how even sheltering trees break &
stones erode & I wondered about melancholy Rilke and how he
blossomed and withered and measured the distance from his heart
to his body & I knew my daily flourishings and perishings flew
past me & I could never go back back back & gnaw through the lines
of time to return to my salad days & anyway the point, at least
to me, is that there’s an indifference in nature that is heartbreaking.
As a teenager in Kentucky I once saw a rabid squirrel by a beech or
was it an oak or a maple but anyway most of the trees there gave me
such awful allergies I wanted to pull out my sinuses & clean out my
head with boiling water but that was nothing compared to what else
surrounded me, cancers, heart attacks, suicides, the South being
forever gothic, & a young woman in her twenties, a lovely thing,
got run over & killed by a cement truck & cement trucks have to
keep moving, I mean the barrel part not the wheels, & a few months
later the woman’s mother was found dead on her daughter’s grave.
Nowadays I tumble rocks in little barrels that work like the ones
in cement trucks & I found these rocks on a beach in Puget Sound,
the stones already smooth & therefore so much better for tumbling
than the schist of New York or the granite of the Rockies or the
limestone of Kentucky, which is filled with fossils of monsters like
centipedes the size of winter squash, & I cherish my magical
stone-control & as a child in Kentucky I lived in magic
because I didn’t yet know of my frailty & when my father died
last year I cried & cried & was not surprised at my suppression
breaking & someone at the wake told me that I’m in my prime &
sometimes I think my prime is behind me, but the writing in my
journal has not faded one bit & I half expect a lion to leap out of it.