Before the night fell the grasses swayed. All life was somber and still. A cricket bleeted alone as crickets always do, this one, too early to sing, waiting for night as the orange sun disappeared behind the mountain.
The water of the lake was smooth, not a ripple, grasses grew out of there too. Tall grasses sticking up like trees with thick stems and the brown, very brown, dark brown almost browner than the trunks of the trees on the shore stalks, as I said, stood perfectly still.
What happens when the stopping begins. Eyes wide open we seek movement. The poets always sing of themselves in the whisps of winds and sways of leaves, but when selves disappear the remaining former proof lives on, soulless, unknowing, lost.
Too much silence can kill a man says huxley. But huxley doesn’t know anything. He cuts corn down when seasons of corn cutting come. He rushes out to strip the land and comes home a richer man for a season, the good season, in between the times of waiting and loneliness.
The poets are always looking for friends in nature. Somehow they know how to relate. Sunshine becomes God and moon the almighty mother. Loneliness doesn’t grip them. They don’t need the flesh and blood of their soul sisters or their brothers. We all fall down.
And stories, expanding in underwater silence, our talents bubbles bursting upon the water’s skin. If we could tell our stories, let our stories come up and be as real to each other as they are to our all too often unknowing selves, then we could breathe.
But breath is but another dream, another wasted thought to the drowning man, his story and his being watching the round orb of the sun blur and decrease. Eyes on deck. Keep watching says you, but the poet knows that even the underworld is there for him to relate to. Even then.
The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite 