The moon drops one or two feathers into the field.
The dark wheat listens.
Be still.
Now.
There they are, the moon's young, trying
Their wings.
Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow
Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone
Wholly, into the air.
I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe
Or move.
I listen.
The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,
And I lean toward mine.
James Wright
I'm up at Mammoth Mountain, checking out the fall colors and recovering from the past few weeks. I don't know -- I'm feeling drained in a way I haven't in the past which I guess is to be expected. Up here in the mountains, the air is clear and biting cold. It rained in sheets yesterday, all day, yet I lifted my face to the water in gratitude. Rainbows arched over cloudy skies, and the cottonwoods' leaves are yellow coins, hanging on.
I lay on my bed for many hours yesterday. Flat on my back, staring at the ceiling when I wasn't playing Solitaire on my phone or carrying on on Facebook. I felt beyond drained. Spent. All used up. I felt filled with sorrow and sadness and loss and loneliness later that night. I thought about my friends who spend days and weeks and months in hospitals with their children. I remembered the many days I spent in hospitals during the early years of Sophie's life and don't remember how I did it. My body bears the memory in muscle and sinew, brain synapse. I think of Sophie's brain and kindling, the cascade of spark. I think of doctors in earnest boxes and those that believe so earnestly in them. Again, sorrow and sadness and loss and loneliness. I don't believe in the divine but am grateful for the divine comedy. Every thought spins another and the other is a gentle admonition that it's not that bad. There's perspective. There's Aleppo. There's my cousin in Mississippi who lost her beloved teenaged stepdaughter in a car accident on Tuesday morning. There's the very fact that I can lie on a bed for five hours staring at the ceiling, let sorrow and sadness and loss and loneliness wash over me, the bed a boat bobbing.
Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature this morning, and I am glad. I'm glad because his poetry and song has shaped my adult life. Even as my mind doesn't understand, my body -- muscle and sinew, bone, mouth, tongue -- does, and I am alive. I got up and out of the boat and swam to shore.
Though you might hear laughing, spinning, swinging madly through the sun It's not aimed at anyone It's just escaping on the run And but for the sky there are no fences facing And if you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme To your tambourine in time It's just a ragged clown behind I wouldn't pay it any mind It's just a shadow you're seeing that he's chasing Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves Let me forget about today until tomorrow
