BREAKING TEMPO / AND WITH YOUR SPIRIT

This poem appeared earlier this year in Medusa's Kitchen.  It is part fiction, part remembrance.  Baxter is E.R. Baxter III, my best friend back in Niagara Falls, NY.   He is a poet, novelist, and a wonderful essayist with more than a few books in print.  His Niagara Digressions is a lovely collection of essays.

BREAKING TEMPO / AND WITH YOUR SPIRIT

There is a slight rise just at the edge

Of the wood where the trees seemed

To have decided they would go no further

Than this.  A rise pushing up with

Visible boulders and short grass.

When I used to go there it seemed

Very important to get right to the brow

Of the place.  There one was even with 

The tops of the trees and could look down

To the ice-edged creek that named the place,

The Baxter Run the people called it.

Baxter had had a farm not too far

From the rise and the stream was a quick

One, moving over rock, heading for the lake

With a couple of deep holes

Where dark fish dwelt, sun fish,

Perch, crappie and bullheads.  Raccoons,

Foxes and raptor birds liked to come here.

I decided to come here for the same

Reason these creatures did,

To know the place.

A place to put my heart and to know it

In my blood and feel it in my bones.

A place where, no matter who came there

They could never find it as I had.

In the silver of summer, if it were quiet

I could hear the lake water lapping

Just at the edge of sound.

A place where I could image old Baxter

Getting up from his kitchen table, lighting

A cigarette, putting on his coat and boots

And making is way to the barn

Where the few head of cattle he kept

Waited for him. Their lowing in the night

Air just above the waves.

He too would walk by the Run.

He too would see the same water

Curl around the edge of the farm,

Past the cabbage field and into

The hardwoods to the rise.

Some evenings I could hear him talking to the cattle,

His voice deep and resonant, a caring.

Then I was the fox and the raccoon,

Then I was the darkened wing headed

Into the woods to find where the night was safe.

Now I wake from deep sleep

In a bed on the other end of evening 

And I am on that rise above Baxter’s run.

I wish for a moon.  I get one.

If I want to see the water rushing

Just beneath the thin ice, I am able

To do so.  If I wish this place 

To become forever, it does so and I become

The place, the rain, the snow,

The wildflowers of Summer,

The insect orchestra.

The tendrils of each day breaks

And there will never be anything

Greater than this peace.