pigeon

the spring creek turning right angles of perfect icy green

We could start with the bats. The bats could be what the world started with, or the first sentience to perceive it and in the perception initiate its creation.

They’re sleeping now, or feigning sleep. Little faces upside down, eyes scrunched shut, trembling in the limestone dark.

Cael & I stumbled dumbfooted into the cave while exploring, and were enchanted by their otherworldly somnolence, these quivering living stalactites. We backed out as discreetly as we could.

Near the opening of the cave was the source of an anonymous little creek, born of an unassuming, unsung spring, a mere leak in the sponge of the earth, cold, clear, crisp, invisible to maps and lore.

It was somewhere near Three Creeks Conservation Area, south of Columbia; this tiny tributary must have flowed into Turkey, Bass, or Bonne Femme en route to the Missouri — but I don’t know which one and I don’t know exactly where and even if I did know I wouldn’t tell anyone.

The bats are entitled to their secrets and this one I would keep with them alone.

As we learn from Piers Anthony’s Tarot books, all water throughout the deck flows from the hem of the gown of the High Priestess. I would be content to believe that all the water in my life has flowed from this narrow shallow channel, flanked by wheat-hued weeds, rust-colored roots, wildflowers clicking with cicadas, overarched by vulture-studded summer sky.

We waded through it; it waded through us.

It was cold, so cold, numb-your-calves cold! And green, pale green, illuminated from within. The grasses and rushes on either side of its modest banks rose above our heads as we were sunk down in it, making our way towards the cave, there to discover the sleeping bats.

Serpentine, it bent and zigzagged, cutting with abandon through the glade; many of its curves were practically right angles. Why? Only the ultimate pattern knows; all we individual pixels can do is blink, astonished, baking under the sun, thrilling in the water fresh from underground. We live in the borders. We are edge dwellers. Between atmosphere and earth, youth and age, understanding and mystery, this tenuous thin layer of wriggling, squirming, striving —

I think I’m going to leave us there, for now —

I can’t deconstruct this one; this one’s a gem, an emerald. A single, high, clear love note, flutelike, echoing down the ages, across the stages of my memory.

Come with me later, after the expedition. Clamber back in Cael’s beat-up Caprice, turn the radio on, amble back towards town, let’s go get a pizza, shiver in the AC, anticipate the reward for our hard day’s play, song on the jukebox, booth to ourselves, red plastic nubbly cup of soda, touch our sunburn and watch it turn white, talk in laughing reverie about the bats again, say we’ll have to go back there sometime! But we never do.

We never do.