I wrenched down a swinging 20-foot limb from our dead maple yesterday, a heavy beast which crashed and splintered and drove two branches a foot into the ground, and then I broke it apart with an ax that I sharpened and resharpened, and I hoisted its pieces and hauled them to a brush pile.
Every day I’m trying to match the body to the mind. Read, write, bend, lift, walk, listen, take in, look closely, make connections. I’m working harder in the gym. I’m working harder in my reading. I have carried in me a kind of magic realism since I was child, an unspoken belief that if I can set things just right (and there is always a ‘just right’), then everything will work out and bad things will keep away from my body and my home and from those I love.
I know that is an illusion. I know it. Of course, I know it. I have the evidence for it being a fantasy, and the adult recognition of the actual machinery of the world, but it will not be banished.
Movement is everything. The word is everything. Or so I say.
Later, I’ll clean and lift weights and begin a poem and write to a friend and sit for dinner with my wife and play with the dogs and read, again and again and walk down the road under this blue vault I love so much.
