Hawk Dust Honda in Reasonable Darkness

On secluded roads, I drift longingly. Infused with bittersweet lonesome, the kind the old bluegrass masters sang of, it’s tiny majesty that finds me. Alone, mostly. Up mountain lanes and then back down through grassy hills I roll. Floating over narrow stretches of sun speckled blacktop barely wide enough for a buggy and a car to pass each other/ I wander aimlessly for all the same reasons anyone does. I do it to lose myself. I do it so I might think and feel. If I can imagine and forget/ with the ripped up winter road all pocked beneath my wheels/ then I’m good. It’s where I seem to belong to myself the most. Which sometimes makes me think that must mean this is where I belong the most too.

Here where I live, there are endless scattered pockets of walled-in sweeping worlds/ chunks of spring prairie laid out between deep dark woods. Burning August corn fields stand forever under the beating sun until they ultimately cross paths with some random forest shade. Trees grow here on the toes of beat-up ridges that once stood so much higher than they stand today. So long has it been now since they were majestic, these Appalachians sometimes probably hate themselves/ feel so sad and pointless. But what has crumbled beneath them draws me in. Left to die in private, humbled-out hills do just that. However, if you throw even a single passing through hiker or a dad and his daughter stalking squirrels with a .410 or some lonely suicide dreamer or maybe a couple of zitty long-haired teens wandering around smoking a one-hitter listening for gobblers, then you begin to shift everything. Unknowingly, of course, but mercifully all the same, it can be anyone who passes through that resuscitates the mountain.

You don’t have to be from here or know these trails like the back of your hand or any of that hog shit. You only have to feel the land wrapping you in its gentle arms. You know, you can be saved by other people. It happens all the time. But do you understand that you can also be saved by a grouse watching you from a cluster of mountain ash, a pure untamed bird with a gut full of berries? Maybe a decider you never saw. It’s up to him, some might say, if you live or die. It’s up to the blue sky treetops and the minuscule savage trout and the wind slapping the branches into the bark of a neighbor and it sounds like the frightened dead clawing frantically inside their buried coffins.

Coyotes might eat your cat some middle of the night, it’s true. But they might also have the final say on everything happening to us every single day. No, of course I can’t prove it; it’s only a wild feather I’m pondering. But I can’t disprove it either.