The Allowable Forest

Some times, the nothing I need to say relaxes into the celibacy of departure . . . 

You remind me of the lake ahead of dawn, before fisherman and laundry and the trampolined notes of machines and voices. How clear and beautiful is the reflection of stillness! Yet below the surface, entire ecosystems convulse and retract. I remember sitting at the end of dock, waiting. Lake mist for breakfast. Infinite ripples for dessert. What is unsaid is carried further and further from here.

The formality of writing is undertaken in reverence to what is. In a certain light, it is all deeply virtuous and spiritual. Yet in my dream, we tend a flame that devours everything, and then write about it. And it isn't the flame or its tending that provokes, it is the “we.” I sweep up the ashes only to collect more scraggly firewood on the edges of the allowable forest.

It will consume me. In so many ways, it already has. Perhaps I prefer death, or rather, that place from which only death returns. Because no matter how many times I visit the lake or remember who I am or sear my steps through a the piney woods or treat the wounds of the burned, I AM HERE.

writing  / tending  / listening