The Red Woods of October

The Red Woods of October

Red Rocking Chair

Life has a steady forward movement, marked in even hours and predictable turns of the sun and moon.  Some of this is arbitrary, and some is necessary.  My first enemy was time.

I can remember, or I think I remember, moments when time elevated me and everyone around me in a fast wind, and I could feel the adults lift their feet from the ground, pull their hands inside the cab, and let the leaves swirl around us with tornado force while we plummeted off of a cliff and into the blue space of the unknown.

"What's that?" I can remember asking about the sound of the great beast accelerating - the engines of time pushing this Earth delicate as an egg into the black arms of empty space.  We have no place to live... We have nothing to eat... They have come for the car... And the strings pull long and then, let go, before resuming so fast I can no longer see his fingers steady on the neck.

When the wind rises, so does my heart, to listen to a call I think most people have forgotten.  When the wind comes, it means...

"Are we leaving?"

And my question is met with not only silence, but derision.  Because they're trapped here, while I'm not.

Montague Road

But people, with their ribbons, will try.  They unspool from the heart, green and blue and yellow, and tie with promises around waists and wrists and too tightly around the neck.  The beginnings of my sexual education were dance steps to avoid these being cast by all around me.

When I was stagnated to the ground, and the wind wouldn't carry me away like a dandelion seed to be as light as I felt, I walked to places too far to be found, and I let the ribbons of my heart go, into the trees, or out to the wind, where no one could have them but birds.

While outwardly, I had learned to be a girl, I was living inside the shell of one; a kind of unknowable boy responsive to fear and agony.

There was nowhere on Earth more desolate than this place, we made sure of it.  The high desert autumn was dry and bright and the ground bleached white, pocked with browning leaves blowing in a bitter wind.  It was the only place I'd ever go, where it's easy to learn things like how easy it is to let love die, or roll forever into nothingness.

Forest On Fire

In isolation, there is nothing left but principle nature.  Adam once asked me, did I want to know what he'd learned, being alone for so long, as if I didn't know the answer would be this.  Not who he is, but what he is.

The nature of me is exactly this long - this longing feeling to disappear into the smoke of a force destructive enough to blot out the sun - to outlast it until the last ringing sound dies at the end of all things.

Impasse

A girl's power is a coiled fox, dangerous because it is indiscriminate in it's target.  They're unwieldy animals who do not consider risk against reward.  All pain is necessary, all costs regrettable but not enough.   In my nature is an animal who doesn't mind breaking the neck of the thing I love to free it from a trap.  It doesn't mind chewing off a limb to simply die elsewhere.  God and I have always been at an impasse.  As much as I want to be consumed by him or his crushing worlds, the movements I make inside him never fail to alienate us.

Night Terror

The only way I know how to love anything is to dedicate the tooth and claw of this animal to a boy who will never know the difference, and let every other ribbon unroll and vanish in the wind.

Aurora Gone

The girl everyone sees becomes a stand-in for the girl no one sees.  The girl no one sees bunkers down to weather this thing, and then this one, suffering them like indignities in a prison, until the voice comes like a suspicion.

The voice is low and hateful, and the hand is hard and flat.  My back to a wall, the wall opens, becomes a door, and the hand pulls me into the dark, the voice whispering to me secret things.  Things so secret, they defy expression.  All the locked closets of my childhood vanish into an unending backstage where the hand and the voice feed the fox in me.

The secrets it speaks take the shape of a salt-field, a fire in the distance, wind bone-sharp on the skin; words like blanch and scar and thresh; the tightening of the glottal muscles before crying.

These shapes become a name in the dark, and the name becomes not a person, but a promise.

Bradley.

Flatlands

I become the tallest point on the smoke-field for miles and miles, knowing I am made of copper, knowing the storm is coming.

I acquaint myself with the dirt with the timid fingers of a virgin.  The tree comes out in small movements, which I am motionless to watch.  When the dawn comes, it blooms fire, and ticks like a clock.

I think all my prayers are made growing something which will ultimately be used to destroy (like Brad, that was Brad). It has to be that way, so I can bleed, and bleed, and bleed, and bleed.