#9

Would I these words were woods, thick and pathless. My ardour less stern than solitude. All the prose withdrawn by nature, the herding in and about the land. All those forgotten births, abandoned footprints from the weeds. At dusk, at dawn, at the time of flaming stars. Vesitigia.

I walked, as a child, to the empty river bed, past a snarl of ragged branches, slope of prodigal green, the wall of needles ten feet deep. The furrow, strewn with trash, the broken bottles of ancient fugitives, teenage boys run off from the hearth to drown. I waited whole days there on blankets with books, watched blankly for hours the clouds. Jerked off, when the wind teased, in thin strings that glistened upon garbage and dirt. I told stories to the birds and the beetles.

All that sufficed to fill the days with presence, still not enough for my yearning for more than breezes. The night there full of strangers imagined in black, unshorn faces hiding secrets near the trees. Their argot written in whispers, whole poems left naked in the dark. The wandering that I never could do. Through fingers fresh with earth as they bent and broke over boulders the arch of their desire. There I could never be a child, always an orphan too old. Too close, the wound. And all my longing swallowed with the sun. I locked doors, hid under bedclothes, heard the rustle of leaves through windows, and dreamt of men in masks come to murder me with thunder.