I sometimes fall into visions where the Earth
opens, and far underground, beneath the shallow dead
and the waterline, beneath any trace of life,
the world is undone, aortal and blistering,
glowing and darkening, the Hadean palpitant
center. Then, quickly, like human utterance
played backwards to clipped silence,
the world sews its wound, and all the valleys
and rivers lean again into their time-worn complexities,
flourish and die, flourish and die. Sometimes it’s best
to let the dream have its say and to snuff it to silence.
Sometimes it’s best to outpace the tenacious ghost
of the unconscious, lest it follow you through days.
What then is a simple solace? The stand of light
between the trees? Perhaps I love the oaks
no matter where I am—on this mountain,
in a city park, or near the stream
because I cannot endure the vision
of the buried body of my grandfather—a man
I could not love for his constant mantras
about the sinful and the end. His home was nearly pitch black
even on sunny days, any light a leaking toxin.
The only comfort he found was walking fields
in the pre-dawn halflight, always looking down, down,
for arrowheads and bannerstones, quartz drills,
old pipes and bottles, some evidence that he moved
and lived, that others had gone, cast off their mundane
legacies. When I was seven, he reminded me I was
going to die. His visions chased and claimed him,
buried him early. Perhaps that’s why the tallness
of oaks, their susurrus glittering
through the light, shackles me with awe,
a love I haven’t learned to name.
I did not always live so high:
Once, miles down this ridge and into the piedmont,
I had a hound that dug deep into the loam,
crazed, wide-eyed. When he had bloodied his paws
and ripped roots asunder, he found what he’d been
after: a conch shell in perfect shape, a white spiral
with pink filigree. We were hundreds of miles
from any sea. The hound now lies in a midden
in those same woods, where for years red sumac thrived
out of him, his innards and bone
brisket, the deepening caverns of his eyes.
