Frogs glimmer over clammy pads. Summer and the slant eyed
light is green. I have passed through the tall secret
grass where a vixen lay down to pant at midday. I have slipped
through furrows carved by farming hands, and here and there
found forests of heat in the coiling wind.
Water, trees, the forestation of fungi, the rooted shimmer
of earth, all lend redolent umbrellas of shade to my senses. A river
trickles here and sometimes it walks sedately upon the sky.
I came to this hollow under the shoulders of clouds but they have fallen
away. Time has toppled over into this dale like a runner stricken
with amnesia. A cobalt splash parts the water with the unseen feet
of swimming birds. Moments lay heavy upon the gravity of breath
where myth and still life mingle into motion.
Here, frogs leap within a tableau of waves. Kingfishers dive from
an immovable sky. In the melting pool, my eyes are bats seeking
the caves of the sun, but I turn for home. Past the brushy flumes
of seeded pods, past the fecund dimples of this wood back into
the open fields, the wayward path, to return along its trodden story
until straggling time catches up to its fiction once more.
(C) Eric Ashford January 08
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