Floating Holiday

My contribution to this year's Susurrus.

Explication by appointment only

Last night the wind poured me home I was outside wandering

through my onions and believing outlandish things

chasing elk down mountain roads in rickety little cars

halfway to the moon on a bluff chipped right out of two

continental faults NPR barely audible outside the limits

of two cities somewhere beyond imagining out in the wilds

between two rivers trying to remember what it was I was doing

last night the river sank me in the salty ground the radio faltered

while I was still while I was moving forces of nature in my hands

it all moves quickly I run the trail and get postured by little things

I need to stop and see the red headed grosbeak pecking at a grass crown

a turtle in the road the white shining plastic along the riverbank

we live in the world it’s all there and then some

last night the wind shivered me in my tracks on the edge of town

I was inside careful putting whatever it was away

we sit there drinking wine and talking shit

just like those distant relatives, those names we know

and don’t know, mitochondrial grandmother,

distant bottleneck of characteristics, knowing it all

not even the University of California can remake

the golden bear last seen stitched into place

overhead, ghost of a past it doesn’t pay to recall,

in which barbed wire commits crimes against nature,

and the wolf becomes the dark within;

last night the wind seized me and made me talk,

there was nothing to say:

camping just downstream from the biggest stump

in the history of stumps, a black chunk of wood older than

all revolutions put together,

watching the elk run through camp as if delighted

to have long horns and legs, great silver water

splashing about them as they run down the lagoon

dodging rednecks and country music and bulldozers

and the free market and the one percent and Hornaday sporting ammunition

and asphalt and peckernecks with Pappy’s old gun

sighting across time as if nothing mattered anymore,

if it ever did,

I got sent home prematurely by recalcitrant wind

against traffic in contempt of traffic and patterns and where

everybody wants to go and the sickening concrete

and the time and the negotiations

one makes the flowers one steps on whether accidentally

or for complex psychological reasons, the pretty little flowers

underfoot and the problems we can’t solve

the fish who are spending their entire lives waiting for a certain

amount of water to appear, and wash them away

because the urge to destroy is a creative urge

and so is the urge to keep moving.

#NPR #elk #riverbank