I first published the below on my personal Facebook page back on December 24, 2016. I wrote it on the way from Wenatchee to our home while Marit drove.
It is, I imagine, the start of a story, as it were. In my respites I have in my mind a recurring theme of light and sound seen through a hazy summer day. A hollowed home, more transparent than real. I can see through the house’s very walls to a gorge and forest slumbering. There is no one in my world at the moment other than myself. There is no loneliness, just recognition that it merely me and the sound of sparrows outside.
I know it is of my childhood, but I also know it is something entirely different, too. Two worlds. One of this stuff, this reality all solid and firm. And another where permanence is rare and uncommon, and where a young child’s thoughts can shape the landscape as subtly as rain falling on mountains, or as cataclysmically the very mountains erupting.
In the cryless void, clear and indifferent, I hear his voice’s echoes
Somewhere in recesses lost to childhood
Under bountied boughs and dappling foliage lay gilt gleaming
A boon of treasured stories and things hidden
Folded between dogged ear pages made of earth and sky
Innocence slumbering awakes and faces softly upward
Billowed clouds brush stroked over robin egg blues
Dipping and diving and darting and dodging tree limbs and shadows
Once boy now sparrow, flies ladenless of all his someday future selfs
He flutters up till resting on old man oak’s extended finger
Looking outward onto a land ladled from nursery rhymed sutras
What song shall he sing as accompaniment to a grand melody
But to which is he one solitary note
