Past the narrows to Upper Canandaigua, I was drowning.
Water flooded my mind
praying for a story of recovery to be written on its surface.
Behind me the water lilies lifted their heads. My truck’s lights flooded
the understory as I drove through Leolyn Woods, illuminating the pet cemetery. The graves
of horses who fell into Lake Cassadaga during the first ice harvest. I gave myself
to the idea of ghosts, like a bellrope in the wind searching for a hand.
The land spiraled in the dry air.
At Inspiration Stump, the medium called out – SPIRIT.
I am ready, I thought, to know things after death. & she asked,
May I come to you, shaking,
gambling with the knucklebones of wolves.
Somewhere there was cawing … cawing … cawing.
A skulk of foxes & their cleverness went into hiding beneath the sway of ferns.
I said, go ahead, & I said, yes.
She spilled out of her cloak to an audience applause, spreading
her black hairs, her palms milking into a watery tent that the
wind rippled through & said, Your Pap-pap wants you to clean his
rifle. & it was here, that my spine
was encouraged to remember wings. But my heart, instead, filled
up with the black sail of earth & I felt nothing.
A gunshot cracked in the distance.
Now, I walk the Gerry rodeo grounds, colored blue by spring.
Months after Lilydale, I’m still wiping ectoplasm from my faith.
& suddenly, my grandfather appears behind me: a flood
of pipe smoke & hooves chipping the cracked earth. He comes
out of his mother’s sinews & into me.
Unlike my body, trapped behind seeing & wanting
the past to be now,
but better, he speaks beyond language & even sound. He has no
unfinished business. He follows me toward the stables, taking a
few steps into the violent center of dusk. Offers no wisdom on
peace or justice, no Echota blessing, just grabs the rough-hewn
fabric of the future & pulls himself
out of this world on fire.