Walking Through Books

It is when I stop that I think of you. When the watch I never put on my wrist puts both of its hands over its groin, I know that these are my best walking hours of the day. The morning's are usually cooler, but they are bent over with the tax of walking enough, drinking enough, or eating enough pan bread or cans of spinach so that I do not walk directly on my stomach, seeing nothing else except my feet, and searching for a market for a fix. All of the day's hurry and urgent wanting is spent by early evening. The teenager has become an adult. He is nervous, cranky too perhaps. Still the calm of having met the days miles lets all urgency slip away. Legs and arms are still moving, only now I am a clock on the mantel just keeping time while carelessly watching the room. In an hour or two I will be under trees, or in a crease of a field thinking about your separate world I passed through when leaves were a million hints of red, or when I was walking toward you in snow under a gause covered sun toward you as you smile out words. Now I wait for the air to get thick with changing light, milk being removed from coffee. When it is dark I am safer, and yet not.
The tall hard grasses no longer concern the tender backs of my legs as I sit against a backpack that wants nothing more than to lie down. I chew flat a blade of brown green grass just the way my grandfather does in the locket I carry sewn inside my shirt. I wonder if your angry lover has returned, or was it your red dog with one short leg that wouldn't bend, did he ever come home ashamed of his leaving? Do you still smell morning soaked with the oil of a thousand thousand black beans jawed into powder and scent, and is that old rusted lantern with red glass still waving through the window of your barn like a home-sick boy leaning over the railing on the back of a train? So many lives have been opened to me, so many separate books. I am given double spaced pages to read when I meet you, all the words that you say, and don't. Your beautiful cast of characters spill out from behind your bright curtain to shake my hand at dinner over warm baskets of bread, and sterling flatware you always use. We drive to Rock City to eat rich food among boulders that are sitting just the way God left them. We dangle our beer bottles from two fingers over a city where lights are coming up to me for the first time. It is ladies night, still I am asked to stay. Even though I smell like old leaves in damp grass I am handed a second cold green bottle and shrimp beside a fire that hears everything we say. In another car you tell me about a friend who rode a horse across America because his father pulled the wings off his back when he was little. I see myself riding hard, but with a new forgiveness.
Early morning finds another town. My journal is on the table with vintage seedbeads from Tombstone holding down my words under buffalo skin and thousands of miles of patinia. I tell you the story of young Alex Dunn telling me through his mother Anne that if anything matters in all that I carry or decorate for the walk it is that journal that I will pull from my pack a million times. It will be morning soon. The heart of the she-bear is freshly buried under a tree in the back yard. I smile at Alex as I begin to sew the heavy leather, knowing the boy is tenderly wise and is always watching. Alex hangs boyishly from his Huck Finn rope ladder his mother rigged from an old beam in their kitchen like it is the most normal thing in the world. I love that completely. She honors him with her listening. I smile at him until his cheeks are red as I cut thread from my needle. I put down the knife I use instead of sizzors when I see some of the bear's blood still stains my wrist.