Moonlit Walk to Francis
Snow and silence absorbs the beat and thread of my boots crushing the snow. I walk back to my room. The air is cold, filled with a violent wind sawing through the air, and the purity of a cold night keeping travelers indoors. Something sacred lies in the brittle leaves rattling on a small oak, their patter and dizzy rhythm. Something old.
I'm convinced trees have a secret tongue. Something in their groans and creaks. Far past the pinch of reason and civility, in the deepest, most primitive points of our nature, perhaps in the reptilian brain at the center of our skull, among the neurons coding for paranoia and survival. The dregs left from a primitive era. I no longer speak the tongue, but I feel its resonance, like the hollow body of a Stradivarius, rounded to a smooth cavern, flushed with echoes. I pause. I drink in the air, the wind. I pause.
Old creeks, a cold night, the pains and throes of a world in flux. It's ancient savagery. The violence of competition. The groans of lovemaking and hidden passions, encoded in genetics, tossed from our lips in abandonment. The moment we forget to think, we feel. We remember the tongue. The tongue speaks through us. We groan with the trees. Love is always violent.
In the tics and rattles of the prayerful night, a twig snaps, drawing my gaze into the the impenetrable darkness. It's deep and laced with fear. Nothing stirs. I walk on. The wind blows.
Before humanity could hear the sounds, trees rattled and groaned. They will rattle and groan after I die, their prayers echoing in the empty night. But the beat and thread of my footfalls would be no more, swallowed by time. I'm blessed. I'm part of this.
I'm convinced trees have a secret tongue. Something in their groans and creaks. Far past the pinch of reason and civility, in the deepest, most primitive points of our nature, perhaps in the reptilian brain at the center of our skull, among the neurons coding for paranoia and survival. The dregs left from a primitive era. I no longer speak the tongue, but I feel its resonance, like the hollow body of a Stradivarius, rounded to a smooth cavern, flushed with echoes. I pause. I drink in the air, the wind. I pause.
Old creeks, a cold night, the pains and throes of a world in flux. It's ancient savagery. The violence of competition. The groans of lovemaking and hidden passions, encoded in genetics, tossed from our lips in abandonment. The moment we forget to think, we feel. We remember the tongue. The tongue speaks through us. We groan with the trees. Love is always violent.
In the tics and rattles of the prayerful night, a twig snaps, drawing my gaze into the the impenetrable darkness. It's deep and laced with fear. Nothing stirs. I walk on. The wind blows.
Before humanity could hear the sounds, trees rattled and groaned. They will rattle and groan after I die, their prayers echoing in the empty night. But the beat and thread of my footfalls would be no more, swallowed by time. I'm blessed. I'm part of this.