On The Bus:  Spring Comes to Point Leap

 The season when the rain makes the road a silver ribbon, and the water flooding the culverts reflects the burdened sky and you think youre seeing snow. Dusk stretches ductile into the dark of Night, the Breath of the World has given up its honed density for a sensual invitation to Space, and Rising.

 The wee shrubs begin to bud; tight, sweet scales of Spring fish flexing into the birds of Summer, slowly unfolding in the new heat that invokes the blood in everything to rise. Amid the Hickories I pick my way, hooves trodding last years leaves and empty shells. Standing on the fallen catwalk the wind finds me everywhere, and amid this magnificent Presence of the hills beyond and the sky above and the lake below, and the good, sweet air all around, I sense beneath my breastbone, the nest of my belly, some great and silent Conjunction.

 Metal chest hidden under torn pages of bark, cache of the Cartesian Wandering. Left creekbed china potshard for handpoured lead that had its irresistible force met with some immovable object. Left a little of my light behind between the trees, a signal flare to anyone out there beyond the pale that might still remember me. They say this stream runs for miles underground; drop that Porkpie down and find it four counties over. But for now theres the Hawk, the Cairn Grotto, and the sweet-talking Peepers who reserve their Hosannas for the space of three paces, happy, however, to sing witness to this Idyll as it is their own.

  I fly the flag of no Nation that would confine itself to a line in the sand of a war, scratched by a man on a map. Ungovernable. The trees bud and the creek rushes.

 Eve of May and the sky is deep electric blue. Someone kindled a Last Fire with fruitwood and you can smell the burnt sugar of newsprint they used. A series of hot, bright days, our spirits stretch out through our skins, the ache is welcome, and sweet. The blush of blood is on every succulent bud, the hills reborn in their gentle green. The bats are out, as low into the Last Light two geese, bound in tacit contract, fly over my head and I can hear the air hissing in displacement beneath their wings.  I sit outside at night and listen to the peepers in the creek, watch the stars, yet unobscured by leaves. The dark is wide and welcoming.

  There is a promontory at the end of a hogsback path through piney wood, past sacred stones and pools of blue-black water, where the wind blows you clean through at the cleft in the legs of Becoming, incantations of air and water, and a tree brought low at the edge of the descent, taking the weight. There is a hidden, winding stream, deep with rain and snowmelt in the Spring, its goatpath ascensions laughing in Trout Lily and Saxifrage, the Womb Stone around the bow where the light shines on broad, bright green blades and it sounds of the Chord of the Night before the Beginning.  There is a field, split by a tributary, where once there were a People, and their Spirits still circle the Traveller who approaches with reverence, and skin-listening.

 . Into the teeming Machine I go, without the ceremony of cigarettes or the blessing of breakfast or the elixir of tea, and they introduce some strange magick into my veins that rappels me down into senselessness and forgetting and send some ocular apparatus into me, to measure the health of my disease. Afterward, emerged from the unnatural university, we paddle across the lake and into dense capillaries where the Great Blue Heron rises sudden and slow from trees among the tussocks and you gladly follow after, where the fiddleheads congregate in intricate sylph kingdoms, vernix furred, unfurling their feathers of fronds. I am great at getting us forward, but possess no skill to steer.

 Long moments of Light, clouds like new lambs, the sky spring periwinkle blue. Wild mustard butters the fallow fields. A string of pearl days to offset our recent run on citrine, raindrops fat and soft until the Tesla transmissions begin, original electricity, the retort near and immediate.

 Rain rippling on the pond, brief spires of water and the endless concentric reverberations. The aperture of earth opens to accept the Blessing, a baptism for bud and bloom and leaf, with the roots receiving their fresh measure.

  I arrived here in the heart of winter, when all had receded into the least it needed to endure the grief of Demeter. It is something to imprint upon that emptiness, and witness it filled.