When I caught up with him he was weeping. He'd fallen onto his shins, sat back on his heels, and rested his arms, palms up, on his thighs. His back had buckled and curled his head downward to look at the grass. He sobbed and held tightly to his smile in the cavern of his closed fists. There would be other works, of course. Soon the revelation of finality would pass away and he'd pick up his pen and get to building the newest skeleton of his thoughts. But there was a completion in him for which he was only now learning the proper gratitude. I got to my knees too, rested my hand between his shoulder blades and felt my eyes welling. Years now, it had been, since he started up this trail. And it'd led here. We faced the back pond. That lunar stone smiled on it and lit our faces. These are the lucid intervals which dismiss the day to day fog sleeping on our eyes. Its not so uncommon we find ourselves in tears with the world so cearly outstretched before us. It is the place holder for what the rest of nature might say in our place.
Through my jeans at the knees I could feel the dew invading. It was the antennae of the earth reaching to sense and study our commotion. It would soak us and take its measure and in the end leave us to offer our thanks. I squeezed the thick cords of muscle on the back of his neck and kissed his head just above the ear. His hair smelled like the oak of our cabin and I imagined, in an important way, that mine smelt the same. It felt like a knighting, the blade of the cosmos on our shoulder, awarding us brotherhood.
Our hands are always crusted with the weightless dust of writing. We chisel and chop sentences from ourselves and throw most of them away. We fail so often its hard to recognize when we succeed for we are suspicious of our own pride, not out of humility so much as something like cowardice.
Is it alive and conscious, the crippled leaf that looks up and names the tree it fell from? Certainly it understands more than me, more than the two of us. We wander blindly looking for its branches, the arms of the life-force we suspect is suspended above us, like us enough that we could grow from it and fall but more ancient and massive than the thin-skinned existence composed by our frail veins. We have glimpsed it here, on our knees near the back pond. On a table a hundred feet behind us rests a creation of our own and we feel its meaning in the creaking baritone of a tract of old growth moaning in the hollows of our chests.
Tomorrow he'll wake up on the far side of an idea.
Through my jeans at the knees I could feel the dew invading. It was the antennae of the earth reaching to sense and study our commotion. It would soak us and take its measure and in the end leave us to offer our thanks. I squeezed the thick cords of muscle on the back of his neck and kissed his head just above the ear. His hair smelled like the oak of our cabin and I imagined, in an important way, that mine smelt the same. It felt like a knighting, the blade of the cosmos on our shoulder, awarding us brotherhood.
Our hands are always crusted with the weightless dust of writing. We chisel and chop sentences from ourselves and throw most of them away. We fail so often its hard to recognize when we succeed for we are suspicious of our own pride, not out of humility so much as something like cowardice.
Is it alive and conscious, the crippled leaf that looks up and names the tree it fell from? Certainly it understands more than me, more than the two of us. We wander blindly looking for its branches, the arms of the life-force we suspect is suspended above us, like us enough that we could grow from it and fall but more ancient and massive than the thin-skinned existence composed by our frail veins. We have glimpsed it here, on our knees near the back pond. On a table a hundred feet behind us rests a creation of our own and we feel its meaning in the creaking baritone of a tract of old growth moaning in the hollows of our chests.
Tomorrow he'll wake up on the far side of an idea.
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