Angles morts

Four directions, four elements.  Four ways, you discover, that you’ve been hiding from yourself.  Blind spots are dead angles in French.  Where have you been dead?

To the East, where a field of red flowers should grow to brighten and enliven, there is only barren earth.  Nothing can be felt here.

To the South, where lightening should strike and restore balance, numbing grey mist has covered the land.  Nothing can be known here.

To the West, where rivers should meet lakes, a dam has been built.  Nothing can connect here.

To the North, where a circle of stones should mark territory, there is only gravel scattered by careless visitors.  Nothing can be held here.

At the center of it all, you seek the source.  The deep well holding the secrets hiding in those four corners.  Instead you find a river, wild and strong, currents that can only be felt not seen, the water looks safe from the banks.  You follow it upstream, a long walk.

You find its source seven generations’ away from where you stand now.  A treacherous climb to the top of a mountain both beautiful and brutal.   As you return, you follow its path to you.

You are the end.  You are the cliff over which the river will fall and cease to be a river at all.    

Innocence

Ribs up, breath held for years at a time. Brief exhales with lightening bugs on summer nights. Forever believing, I am always only what you see.

None of us saw the viper lying in wait.  Lulled into thoughts of safety by the stillness of boats and steadiness of the ground painted on the picture above the coach.

Do you know who I am?

Tidal wave, volcano, whirlpool, tornado, hailstorm.

Thick drops fall from fingertips, you think it’s blood.  It sizzles and burns, no veins have been opened, you see it is lava.  Structures shift, fractured, and the lava follows its trail to you.

Grey and fragile ghosts, only ashes remain of you.

Soft mist, caressing breeze, delicate snowfall.

I am no longer what you saw, I am everything you could not.

Wanderer

Brief, tiny memories - the kind that prove that the space between moments is infinitely divisible. Because those were all that remained, it was easy to believe you were both more and less than you actually were.  Larger than life, certainly stronger, and still too smooth to be real.  Like one of the stones you collected and polished.  Ridges and indentations show how and where something has been and you had neither, just like those stones.  A ghost of something once real, maybe.

Grief and heartache and wounds without names create folklore out of failures, misfires, and accidents.

What if you were just passing through?

Your walk was brisk, you had places to go.  Your hunt is never over - there is always something to kill, you just have to know the seasons and you know them very well.  The remains of a crisp, tart apple in your hand, you turned to the west and tossed the core.  You saw blazing reds and oranges paint a fire in the sky as the core hit the rich dirt - it was a sunset, time and direction told you that.  You continued on your way, you had places to go.   The colors stayed.  Their heat bled into the earth as they faded. You didn’t think about the apple core or what happened to it.  Why would you?  Your boot prints in the ground might have led to responsibility and accountability but you knew to walk the land just before the rain.  You knew how to become a ghost even then.

What if you were never meant to stay because you never did?

The apple tree that grew out of that place does not remember you, just the memory of a wish.  Stories abound of how it came to be there, none of them true.  They are all more and less grand than is real, like your ghost.