the blueshift journal

(Leaving Asheville, NC, again)

 

I would like to say the wind doesn’t move through me,

that I don’t respond to such things. That I don’t stare at a field

of flowers or pole beans or even the ubiquitous corn. That

I don’t feel the flatness of land with relief and want to run

and run and run across it the way I want to cry in the woods,

to cry without stopping because I can’t imagine how someone

might escape through them. Because I know I am descended

from those who couldn’t escape. Every place sets my teeth

on edge. I take it all in like needles like air whipped up

my nostrils as it rounds the corner of a brick building,

like a thumb in my mouth and honey from the jar

on the end of it. The righteous and the wrong. All

of it enters “the way bells enter” the waiting ear on a

Sunday morning, or the birds that wake me when I am

sleeping by the window or the moan of the neighbors

or my own. How can you strike the balance when you can’t

separate yourself from anything or anyone – I am not safe

any place, and no place can save me. Just look what the mountains

have done to me. Exactly what the city did – and then some.