Gerber - A Primer on Parallel Lives

Turning north to the edge of a hayfield, skirting its border of scrub oak and pine leaving the mysterious forest unentered a dense sandwich of years, my shoes kick up echoes and dust. Aimless motorcycle rides through canyons and vineyards with roses at the ends of the vine rows, great rolling plains and dark mountain passes, steeped in wild rosemary, with hayfields ready for cutting, or just cut, old cow dung and green cow dung, a whiff of petroleum and yeast, slowing through a block-long Main Street, passing an abandoned gas station and a bar airing out on Sunday morning, smells almost forgotten, the dark, freshly turned soil, where two workmen are digging at the edge of the road, copper smell of a crushed cat in the grass on the shoulder, and the smell of the virga, a silhouette of rain, a scent of pure promise, like the promise of our breath, falling, yet never coming to the ground. God, is that you tapping on my shutters this morning, your redheaded herald, the flicker, opening small cracks in the roof Ive spent so much to maintain, breaching the insulation of the phone lines so the rains, now come, make them bristle and pop, your language my arrogance wont let me decipher? Fog settles on my hair and glasses while I wait for traces of the view to reemerge. How little we see even on the best days, a few details, broken grass stalks along the deer trail, oaks swept eastward from the wind off the sea, a few fragments of bone and feathers, the intrigue of a life interrupted, now that the hills have wrapped themselves in clouds. Stars go on watching through this long afternoon while I breathe in the sky and am still not filled. The sun, a galaxy of blood through my eyelids; wind now a river of smoke through the long grass over the hills.

I am always returning to the edge of water, lapping at the loam of a bank under pine needles, and slapping at the bellies of dock planks. Or Im looking into one of those still, black ponds, which seems to me like a pupil of the planet, through which it watches the other stars and finally our own silent faces, gazing down to its ever-intensified heart. Our boatman tells us hes rowed this passage over three thousand times, the distance around the Earths waist, in this nine-mile stretch of river. Today an autumn wind holds us a moment in stasis against the flow as we squint through the rain toward a glint of sun a mile downstream. Three elkcow, calf, and bull trot into the pines as we approach, only to put a few boughs, like another language, between us. And what do the animals really know about our lives? It seems they look on with unclouded ambition to simply be more what they are while we go on longing for their kind of grace.

Every night for three months, the fox came to my bedroom window and, in the wildness of her call, I heard something so certain it stunned my heart with what I once was, and may yet be. To stones on the riverbed the current is a constant breeze, the wind of the Earths turning we cant feel anymore. I lift my fly through moving air for the joy of laying it down in seams and eddies where a fish might be. In the last light the deer come closer; their long shadows give them courage. I press my dogs forehead to my own and hold it till I feel her calmness seep through, till the restless equation Ive made of the world is simply the world again.