The road winds through the woods and the sun strobes through the tress like a dream machine. I see an old stone wall, forgotten now, from of a time when this was farmland, when the road was dirt, grooved with wagon wheels and the clippity-clop of horse hooves. My parents are talking up front, but I can’t hear them. The soundtrack in the headphones merged with the landscape fills me with an air of melancholy. This is your heart, boy; stay close, stay close to me, there are no words for what we feel.
Each stone of the old wall holds pieces of the silence, mineral soul, slumbered in the dirt until the fields are cleared and, one by one, each stone is lifted by calloused hands and stacked; reunited after an eon's journey from mountain, to earth, to the wall. The transience of boundary, stone by stone, frame by frame, plays through the woods like a silent film unspooled, in the lightning flash of the setting sun, animated, up and down, up and down. It begins to rain and the light grows dark.
The rain drops hit the windshield and fill with the red and white light of traffic. Back and forth, back and forth; what one wiper gives the other returns— never meeting— a game, each undoing what the other has done.
When we arrive at the cabin the rain is turned to snow and the ambient light of the city is gone. Here in the mountains darkness and cold are inseparable as space and time; everywhere an energy, different than the melancholy that flanked the parkway, emanates from the forest and mountains. Raw being of a childhood, an eye without body, is filled with the invisible, like an empty glass.
I lie in bed wide awake and think about the wall-- it is there right now. Different darknesses fill the room. The longer I look, certain areas grow darker, as if the darkness is soaking up more darkness. The sheets are cold. I travel the familiar path out from the sound of my breath to the edge of everything I can imagine, the stars and the planets, endless space. I fill the space as an expanding universe fills itself. A remembering forward. The other side of the wall folds back on itself, impossibly. I walk through the woods and find the body of a hawk, it’s beautiful feathers scattered around it. We are driving through Indianapolis. I am telling him about this feeling in my chest. What is it? That’s your heart, he laughs empathically. You can summon your dead like you summon an elevator— the doors open and there they are. When I arrive in his room his belly is swollen with death. He smiles: the doctor has arrived. I part the curtains, open the window, so his spirit can leave the hospital and fly away into itself, like the universe, like the stones of the wall rewinding into the dirt, into the mountain, into the cataclysm of creation, of density.
In the morning my father makes coffee. I watch him. He grinds the beans, measures the grinds, pours them in to the glass of the french press, pours the steaming hot water in, waits to push the plunger down. All these things filter through me so only memory is left, as we are pressed through this life, these lives, over and over again, becoming finer and finer, until there is nothing left and we return to the ether once and to all.
This is beautiful; thank you, Oliver. It made me think of Eliot’s “Little Gidding”:
LITTLE GIDDING
V
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others, The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration.
A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always-
A condition of complete simplicity,
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
So beautiful. Thank you for sharing this . It pulled me back to the present moment. A respite from the nonsense .🙏