October 9, 2007

Left the house early, after reprogramming dad’s phones and clocks and anything electric that had gone awry over the past year. I went to East Park, to the first water, where my independent life began. It’s the creek that drains Alder Pond, flowing through the Sullivan Street culvert, and then into the Little Cuyahoga, and it was the first wild place where I ever went alone. Jesse had taken me there once before, and I was proud to remember the way through the twisting, mayapple-accompanied path in Crine’s woods. I remember looking out for bears. Because I couldn’t see the borders of the woods, I assumed there were none. As I knelt to the water the light was low, golden, bright, earliest of morning, I think, and I moved as a figure in a painting, illuminated and portentous. I was very small. I knew this then. I went to the rock–as I did today–where the largest of all frogs held sway. I remember telling my mother about it when I came home. It was as if I had found the Northwest Passage, and though she was attentive, it was the inattentive attentiveness of mothers, and it was at that moment I got the clue that no one was going to be very much interested in what I was interested in, so silence and poetry would become the necessary way. Then to Maytree, to walk to my creek’s source at Alder Pond. Thus I had in this weekend visited all the sacred places. The ducks were visible and silent; the geese were loud and nowhere to be seen. Some hidden creature boiled the mud nearly at my feet. I sat at a picnic table in a grove and wrote a poem. The rain began then, that would be with me the whole way until a few miles from here.