And There, I Look and Remember

I took a priest's word once.  At the edge of a jungle, beautiful and dark, I had been standing and wondering which paths to take and which to abandon, how to navigate the dark and dreadful in order to walk in the light and majesty of this wild.  The priest walked passed me and stopped, turning back.  May I direct you, he asked, I see what god had seen for lifetimes and my ways are good.  I'll divide, for you, the light from the dark and let you live in the jungle.  But you have to follow me, to trust the sight god gave me.

He was kind and his eyes were soft, not the hard glance of extortionists and liars.  He was ready to give me some of his own good.

Beyond Crooked Man's Gulch

He walks to nowhere sometimes.  Just beyond the crooked man's gulch and the bend in the gravel where the street lights stop, he goes to weigh the world.  His parents could not say why, why their son has often stopped to hold a weight not largely his own, and sigh at its breadth and beauty.   He enlists the night to help him.  A certain emptiness is required to access the weight and while he speculates often about the desert one must cross to reach the prairie he agrees that the evacuation seems natural.  As the roads go from highway to lit pavement to gravel and dark dirt he unfastens the adornments of his day and sets them lightly to the roadside.  In the cold he shudders, he lifts trees from the ditch, he inverts them and stores them in his chest.  He senses these lungs become the same temperature as the skin on his bare arms and knows they've rooted well. If all this around him were forest trails to a lake where god was standing in wait, this may be a baptism.

Over Virginia

Yesterday I spent the evening jetting across the sky at forty thousand feet, in that space where the hallmark, anvil-shaped cells of meteorlogical fundamentals blast into the higher strata of atmosphere. They ascended from the cloud floor as a series of towers, the lot of them stretching hundreds of miles to the east.  The sun burned them orange and their folds and crevasses seemed permanent and unyielding.  One passed beneath us, eerily close, and I had no instinct for it, no lessons from the ancient plains or sevannas.  Smiling, I regarded them perilous, in the same league as dark bergs looming in the sea.