Someone’s hung wind chimes on a low branch, the chord tossed slowly by wind. Once more the ghosthouse inside me, opening its doors. Once more the town laid within an ancient lake bed, its mountains burning, and the wash of smoke in the pines above the wide creek, the clear water over red stones, and the brothers skipping rocks for a few hours in silence. And I am still who I was but more careful, more trustworthy, maybe, stunned by the ease of my desire, then, to change everyone around me. I once thought, The town is mine, the whole month is mine, when there was only a rain of chimes in the morning. Just water, flowing down from spring snowpack. The stand of ponderosas, their bursts of needles soft and wholly black against the end of evening. The same town The same people, older now, the same old proposals — I am no different from them. Once more the smell of woods, the vanishing space between cottonwoods. To claim freedom in the first half of life is not the same as claiming it later. Land and light, the clearest glass creekflow, the bare task of being here, and these sharpblack swallow-shapes sailing out from the banks in eerie nets of clouds — They are temporary, and private. Like smoke, I slip into the footprints of those who have come to this water to be alone, nacre spreading through cold and shallow currents, a toppled tree, a pool formed for swimming, and despite the drought, an air smelling fresh with deep trees, not even burnt, my empty hands held up by streaming water, wrists made beautiful by water. Shore of my days, have I not been pulled from each disaster? Have I not been lucky enough.
……
Another day here, the boys seem restless, their pockets packed with striped stones. An old man on the path says, It rained so hard in the mornings there was foam on the ground. This was years ago. And the man I once thought I loved most I can feel only fondness for, having backed away from my own obsession enough to see — we share a sense of having lived through it. We are small and built of the finest spindrift tissue, vessels flowing with fragile blood, a hint of rust, and, ruthless disease so far sparing us, lucky not to take leave of life just yet, to be able to rove through days clockwise, less enraged — Goodbye to him, to that wild bewilderment and rage, to letters, calculations, tricks. Becoming mist when we were once rain. And if this change is not any simpler, it is, at least, right now, true. I do not wish to go back. I still want to be more than what I have been. Geography, the accident of my birth, the accident of these sleek reeds rises up from the water — the pines seem lifted by night — and what I have now may be the most I ever have, my parents alive, a man I love deeply, a new family, a body that can still run the silk bolt of trails through these woods, a way to inhabit the cooling night air, my legs, my arms, my steadfast love of mornings, the hush of summer, the elaborate charts of hours and weather, this creek at nightfall, the shuffling leaves, the lunar grass, the smoke, the stones changed by each current, even at night, water streaming toward flutes of reeds, tinted with gold — And the clear flecks of rain against the windshield, someone on the radio speaking of rain, and a faint white ash falling on wind.
