i guess back home i need to be outside more. Those woods never seem to hold as much mystery as Mississippi does. Those woods back home seem threatening with snakes and boars and coyotes, all lingering around in the imagination. As with the water, all of the things i’ve seen in that water keeps me scared.
Here i have temporary pelican wings, holding me just above the gulf of reality.
Back home my wings are stumbly pecan-tree-sitting mockingbirds, easily cat-caught and otherwise plainish.
Maybe i need to go out looking for new wings in the swamp. Could tell you about my wings in the delta, but i can’t claim them yet.
A pelican sunning on his totem, ruffling, bringing me back to Old Fort Bayou and the oaks.
Drove to Ocean Springs in another pouring rain. My truck with it’s own wings through the water and puddles, never failing me and so thankful, over bridges and all of the rivers of the interstate.
The house our warm lantern. Providence out swimming, steadily working, touching all of the roots, one by one, so they might unfurl and blossom in the sun.
She is not thinking of us.
Whenever i leave and go too far it is always strange - fog, rain, holding us in another land and time, patiently guiding us back to Ocean Springs’ loving arms.
Back home in Sunset, for just a moment of time, the rain began at 2 am, after the coyotes went to sleep. Rain pouring, cold, clear. Our fall planted hopeful garden too generous. A fallow field is a sure enough sin, but what is one gone to seed? In that rain and cold and clear, gathering the lettuce, the simple rainy loving pages of the next chapter of life.
We was out in what would seem the turtle hour, but it must have been too cold for their reptilian souls, and instead it appeared we were in the sleepy spider hour, all careless webbing across a clear path.
Out steady wondering in our living dream. We have begun to go down the trail backwards and it seems a dozen more side trails exist again. A black dog follows us in the corner of our vision, lurking. Our possum gone.
The alarm jangling at 5:00 am, no raccoon in sight in the morning dark. But we hear him burrowing next to our bed.
A timid hermit crab, more timid than a turtle, steady unmoving, my phone and Lightnin Hopkins crooning, too much for him to bear.
The sky was mist to mist, land obscured to sea, the beach suddenly more yellow and red, more antique, the ocean more brown and blue, a curtain of dreamery the background. High tide at night, low tide in the morning. Sacred shearwaters keep their secrets. Nature been out here so long you can’t disrupt her patterns. She’ll eventually force her way through.