Awakening

Awakening

Awakening

Along a steep descent into the green
Valley below, I walked through knots of lean
Pines. On trampled saplings of scrub oak
Cool shadows wrapped my steps in a dark cloak
Of twisted boughs and overhanging leaf
That whispered crepitations of old grief.
But acid footfalls on sharp, fractured stone
Assured me I do not grieve alone,
That in the murky, scented tenebrae
Nearby choirs of tiny thrushes pray
Their anonymous antiphonals,
And Abert's squirrels shout out coarse warning calls.
Gray, slippery shadow trembles and cascades,
Revealing glimpses of somnambulant shades,
Pale vapors of familiarity
From oubliettes of churning memory.
I thought I saw my father up ahead,
Wounded by sorrow that spares not even the dead.
He died from lack of all for which he wished.
He looked out past me, into rising mist,
And soon thin vapors filled the empty air,
And swallowed him as if he'd not been there.
I was reminded of my numb surprise
When warmth fled him, and I pressed shut his eyes,
Those dim, unseeing orbs unwilling to stay
Shuttered from the light of that last day.
It took three tries for me to shut his eyes
To gray Fate and this world's unkind assize.
As I trod through sheer veins of transiting fog,
I heard the solo song of a croaking frog.
Narrow beams of penetrating light
Filtered through the canopy, and bright
Flashes shone on mountain jays in flight.
Suddenly an odor, pungent, strong,
Muffled the sweet choruses of thrush song.
A sudden bass of humming bees arose,
And droplets from the trees stained my clothes
As I walked through deep, violet beams
Of filtered sun that burned up my daydreams
And brought me back to birds and dancing bees
In the green needles of ponderosa pine trees.
The odor in that breeze was of the earth,
A little like the scent of afterbirth
When, from arched legs of bloodsoaked motherhood,
A lump of flesh emerges in warm blood.
Below my path, by an outcrop of rock,
I saw a tree toward which I began to walk.
It was an ancient ruin of hollows and scars,
A sturdy wreck of many seasons' wars.
Near its base were torn up roots. Around
A hollow in the trunk there wound
A thick entanglement of branches bent
As if they were defensive armament,
A rugged, battered ring of battlement
Wrapped with twisted lines of crenellations
Over broken bands of mossy embrasures.
In the trill of a chickadee's sharp call,
A scent of something strongly animal
Hung over that old tree, something like meat,
Something carnal, mixed with a hint of peat.
I dropped to my knees and looked inside the tree,
Where the floor was covered with leaf debris.
I licked one hand and rubbed it on the floor
Inside the tree, then withdrew it, black with spoor,
The scattered specks of coarse, fallen hair
From the sleeping hulk of a black bear.
Could this have been the bear we met higher up
When we walked on broken stone at the mesa's top?
This den was old, and lined with leaf and hairs,
Dark spoor of several Winters' sleeping bears.
I wonder if, in their deep sleep, they raced
Through dark skies where The Great Hunter chased
Them past The Royal Lady's starlit throne,
In the circle where the Lode Star shone.
I thought once more of father, dead, and all
His sweetest dreams changed into bitter gall.
And now I walked behind him, on my path
Which too must skirt loss, even unto death.
Each Spring amid dark, blooming irises,
Lean bears will step into the fertile breeze,
And dig their roots and grubs with grunts and growls,
And in these living woods, unlock their bowels.
My father, in the Winter's frigid grip,
Lay abed and slept as his life slipped
Away like wax that from a taper drips,
Until only mute dark seals eyes and lips.
Each Spring, as I diminish, from its den
The bear awakens, emerges once again,
To wander the green forests free of fear,
To fatten up and mate for one more year,
Then go to ground as winter snow draws near.
And I, much like the lumbering bear, will follow
Life's signs, until I sleep in death's dark hollow.

(Published in The Hypertexts and The New Lyre)