Stepping Out of the Light

Fog swaddles the trunks and so delineates, from a vast of green, the silhouette of each pine on the slope. Maybe it’s like that, only all along it was obscured by what — rush, distraction? Fog. A pine. Querying grosbeak. Something shifts. You find yourself in another world you weren’t looking for where what you see is that you have always been the wolves at the door. Left ajar, gaping, your own door. And you burst in as the Mangler, you gouge out your right eye which hath offended. And you burst in as the Great Liar gorging on your own flesh and as Won’t Let Go who shreds your tendons, gnaws your femur. You can’t stop bursting in, coming upon yourself alone, vulnerable, in the privacy of your dying, bending to pick up with a tissue a crushed spider from the bedroom floor, half-sensing in your solar plexus the forces of that which cannot yet be sussed, discovering yourself once again already to have been inside something like an equation with a remainder, a deodand, a reminder of the impossibility of reconcilement — to what? Once again. Forgive yourself, they say, but after you forgive what you have lived, what is left? You can’t set aside the jigger of  the present from the steady pour of hours or even differentiate trails of ants scurrying through some massive subterranean network from the shredded remains of a galaxy backlit by star glow. Time to close the door you think but your face is changed, so many crow’s feet. You must be on to the next stage in which you begin to recognize your mortal body, that nexus of your various holds on the world, as repository of every- thing you didn’t know you took in, human and not, all of it charged and reactant which accounts for the trembling in your hands as now you discern the body of your body — like a still, hanging bell that catches and concentrates each ghostly, ambient reverberation.