All kinds
of growth poking up out of the rot, here in this Ponderosa Pine forest
at the edge of the the little city of Prescott. Lots of trees verily
verily tall. The wind keeps blowing but only touches the tops of the
trees ~ and sings its song ~
To me.
What's so important about me? Nothing. And everything. A remnant of Walt Whitman's song to democracy.
Lordy
Lordy, thank-you for getting me out here ~ out here where I don't
belong. Ask the deer. They'll tell you I don't belong here. Ask the
ranger. He'll tell you the same.
I didn't know what I was
doing, but You, oh Lordy Lordy Lord Jehovah, got me out here anyway ~
camoflauged away from the highway, which sings its motorola song down
below my own true-blue knob of silent granite outcrop, behind which I
have pitched my tent, here on the mountain side that I share with the
birds and the deer, the rotting logs, pine needles & pine cones
& all these tall tall trees.
Which reminds me of Diane, the
forest goddess from Portland, Maine. Thinking about her, the mountain chill no longer bothers me. Suddenly, I like it!
A
soft lump of gooey play-doe in the bottom of my belly is all thats left of
the hard brick of jealousy that once long ago reigned in my chest ~
over the flesh & blood woman who is now the idolized goddess who
rules deep in the night ~ especially here in the forest when the wind
has stopped blowing and the quietude is topless & bottomless. It's
a slice of the pie of the mystical reality of reality that I am now a
slave to the etheral goddess ~
Diane!
She, a
newly-arrived PFC in the U.S. Army, took me jogging thru the
snow-flake-ed woods at Fort Ben Harrison, Indiana, in the frost-bitten
January of '81. I was hung-over. I couldn't keep up. And my 30-year-old
wang-dang froze off.
Diane!
She was 28 years old, long legged, long haired, and long over-due and I don't mean pregnant. She was way ahead of everybody else & nutty as a
fruitcake. T'was I who was her chosen slaughter.
Two
years later, up on the Presidio Military Post in Monterey, California, disenchanted
with barracks life & unwilling to put up with other women, Sp5
Diane pitched her tent in a woody grove of the military post up there on a hill. She actually knew how to live
in solitude while in the U.S. Army. When I finally caught up to her, she
told me of how a deer with whom she lived in this patch of pine trees would eat
out of her hand.
Diane!
Please, sagacious reader, forgive my digression. Let's see. Where were we?
