Ghost Ship

I took a walk today.

My destination was not important. I had no destination. I had no reason. I walked out my door to check the mail, and then I just kept walking. I left the house unlocked, the television running, and a half-eaten sandwich on a plate on the table. I didn’t take my wallet or my phone, didn’t put on a coat or shave. I raptured from life like a sailor is whisked from a ghost ship, gone without evidence.

I passed by beds of flowers whose names and types I’ve never known, and holly bushes and long spreading hardwoods on fire with autumn. I peered into the spaces between the wall rocks and reached my hand where the spider webs stick to the moss. Prayer flags fluttered, pink flamingoes and ceramic mobiles. And I kept walking.

There were two identical cats on a small, low hedgetop, one with a bright red harness, and one without. They barely raised their heads as I passed, two old sisters having whiskered conversation while their limbs warmed from cold fish flesh to burnt sandalwood. The water appeared on the horizon, stuck full of thick-masted sailing vessels, a harbor of octopuses and six-gill sharks that sucked in gloom sediments down where even the light fears to reach it’s snack-food fingers. I did not pause at the crosswalk. I kept walking.

Like sumi-e brushstrokes, the children were flecked on the hillside. Their movements wavered them in my eyesight, watercolored them in streaks with no terminus. The sidewalk widened and I turned away from the gathering crowd, the clamor of speech and the stench of logos. Conversation has a direction. Doorways, burnished orange carpeting, and folding sandwich boards were silent hawkers, beckoning with music, scent, baubles for trinkets. I had no wallet or money, and so the sin had no firm anchor. It hissed at me with deep roasted coffee and household solutions, my own future betterment played out in there in the glib words and the shiny packaging. I kept walking.

I stared up two thousand wooden steps, the towering construction ladder that stretched from ground to bridgetop. Songbirds were dashed lines in serration, hung like fat fruit around me. Beyond, the white, blue mountains and promises. The shadows, the crows followed close. The things I see out of the corner of my eye, followed at a safe distance. I kept walking.

When I reached the water….

I stepped my foot out over it and made my way to the other side. I looked down on the faces of mud fish and the leftbehind treasures of junks and houseboats as my feet brushed the cold brusque of whitecaps. The wind swallowed the breaking bows of kayaks and the whoop call of tugs. Beyond, underneath a curtain of kelp, wavering in the lowlight, the pink stabs of ginger blossoms, the low, hollow stalks of snake-wheat leaned against the marble columns of forgotten civilizations, stretched to worry letter-worn cornices and crumbled cherubs.

I paused. To the East, with one step, I would be in Montana, cradled in the open sky. Another step would put me in Wisconsin or Cleveland. Another would take me to the edge of the Adirondacks, at the fringes of tribal lands. One more would place me at the doorstep of a little cabin in Maine, there where oil-drenched cormorants explode from the dock depths, and eagles scoop silver shimmer-prey from distant beaches.

And then the wolves would walk with me, muscles and haunches, snout exhalation through shaded, golden woods. I would strip off each article of clothing in turn, shoes, socks, shirt, pants, underwear, and then tooth, nail and skin.

I would never look back, were I to keep walking.

When I reached the water, it was all laid out before me in an arc of connection, and all laid behind me on thin, tenacious tendrils, tugging at the Sundance fleshhooks. This is the nature of the soul. And so, I turned back home.

I took a walk today. And this was a gift to myself, and as a gift, telling and transparent. That such a thing I would define as a gift, the simple spontaneity that others do without thinking, the small pleasures that break free and spiral quickly, split the carapace with a cedar sword and free-fall towards the copper-basin of the late-season sun.

This is what it means, all of it. And this is what I should be made of as well.