Don Your Boots

Don your boots. Switch from clear liquors to brown ones. Sniff the changed wind. Gather all that is left of the summer fruit and gorge yourself on it. Yes, eat all of it, all of it, all at once, let the juice ruin your face and your collar. Take all that is rotting, stick it in a trash bag and put it out to the curb. Better yet, bury it into the lawn. Cover up everything that was over exposed (longer sleeves, shorter tongues) prepare the cave for hibernation, for barrenness. Fear the arrival of sleep-death season, furtively yearn for the resurrection beyond it. Burn fires. Lots of fires. Hyperventilate in the last warm rays of sun. Purge what you can to make room for the hoard. Seek out the harvest, squirrel it away in cans, in cellars, in caches under the oak trees. Give grace to the pains of the year, soon they will no longer matter. Draw conclusions. Assume that the changing mood has to do with planetary shifts, universal realignments. Give nominal order to the chaos or let it rip you open and devour any lingering delusions of control. Make the last efforts. Time fleeting. The Fall. The fall, we live through year after year. Minor adagios on a major theme. The first sip of the nightcap is strongest, each coming glass more palatable. Until it is all gone. Until the bottle is empty. We are falling, not down the rabbit hole, but out of a dream.

You arrive to a deafening silence, your body too small on its own to fill the familiar house.  You think sarcophagus as the overweight beetles slap into the lamp where you sit and listen for the waves through the quiet of the forest.  The sound of an airplane in the distance, but you imagine tsunami rushing towards you, engulfing this small precipice of land where it all began and you think it appropriate that this is where it should all go back to the water. In anticipation you consume the fruits of the sea, acclimating to the salinity that’s inevitably coming.  You wander the rooms to make sure that no one is there.  There is no one there, just objects in waiting, heavy with memory and resistant to change.

Limbs stretching away from the center, fluid moving through the joints, gradual warming, radiating, body heat filling spaces. Little care for the details, those can be fixed later, mostly the concern is with the liquid filled sack. Is it the eye today, the bladder, the vein or the heart? Skin the largest one, the cell the smallest of all. Return to these always, insulate your ear from the outside noise with something louder from the headphones, muffle or better yet fill the emptiness, build a barrier like the walls of a cell, the consciousness a fabricated container. As long as there is sound on the inside the outside can be selectively ignored. We return to the body now more than ever as our attention is insidiously pulled outward by our access to information, our access to each other. The focus is being pulled out onto all of the external surfaces, whether self-imposed or that of surrounding space, how to arrange them to be most comfortable, most successful. We return to the body to listen. What does it have to tell us, not as a creature but as a system to which we relate?  Each element its own cosmos, with its own set of rules, its own self awareness. Not one that looks like us, but something beyond imagination. Something to which we give attention, interpret the language thereof, give its own mythology if we like. Something with which we have history and our own story intertwined, an environment, a being.

All you have is a fragment. Again you try to build out these sentences but your mind doesn’t want to work like that, it doesn’t want to bend that way, it’s tired, the thoughts you had earlier have dissipated, and all you have left is a trace of a cloud.  You scry the absences trying to recreate the beauty of that image, but all you can manage is a metaphor of trying to stuff a squid into a three-piece suit, you struggle to make words come together but the tentacles keep spilling out.