to dare
A dog barks in the distance. Then movement far above. Wingspans, black and powerful, four crows, one landing in the tallest fir on the slide down to the river and three who fly on. The signal’s been given. Pause. The dogs stand alert. My heart goes quiet, my mind blank. Me, gone. Among the trees in a flash, the moment becomes still life, found poem, reunion.
I’ve been thrashing myself for saying the same thing over and over in my writing like I’m riding some eternal loop. How many ways can I say that I’m not going to write about old stories anymore, that I’m living for the life I have left from here on out, that the stair steps to heaven have been folded up and stowed in a bunkhouse behind some broken down boxes that I still need to haul to the dump where they likely won’t get recycled and I don’t want that to be true but it probably is.
It’s not that I don’t have stories to tell, ones of betrayal (or was that just the story I was telling myself), ones of loyalty (but was it that or a practical matter, the ease of a compartment that felt secure and known), ones of exhaustion (but those tales succeed only at being exhausting), of blind trust and silent fury (and what was the lesson there?)…A big sigh leaves a cumulus hovering over the flashing red neon of WHO CARES?
What I’m fit to do now is submit those journals and drawings and songs to the library of the wind, ash that might settle onto some ground where the soil needs amending, where the particles of yesteryear can do some good. You can’t do that! I hear the seventeen-year-old in me say. That’s how you’ve made it this far! And I have to remove her from the driver’s seat (she often ignores the exits) and replace her with the sensible one who knows full well that you can’t argue with crazy and it wasn’t the writing that got us through. It was luck. Fate. A story much bigger than we are, all of those selvings that keep hanging around. All their stories, imaginings, adaptations, rants, lamentations, fairy tales, unsent letters, remembered dreams, scribbles in the margins, half-assed promises, pious prayers, slumped worries, starred entries…they will do us no good now.
What we need to know is all around us. Pay attention, says the crow, that big-winged creature who silhouettes the sky. It’s all dream and flight and landings and hold on and one for the money, two for the show, and watching from the heights where the seeing is everything.
