de-Camp

This familiar, forgotten place recalls my childhood.  The land loses light early, the sun running up the mountains like an Incan, like a Greek.  That which is ancient beguiles me, measures the distances between myself and the world.  History is one gorgeous sigh (of relief and despair) that carries us further, downstream.  

The days passing, a drum and trumpet, the dull march of time.  Detritus slowly chokes the pool; sentiment levels everything, more evidence--your eyes already recognize--the necessity of floods...  The landscape changes, gradually.  The seasons retrieve our memories, but this blanket of leaves is not that blanket of leaves (little comfort, knit tight beneath my chin).  

And I know nothing of the winter.  Inside, until now, I have always been a furnace, a wild fire besieging some childhood map to treasures, the lines of wax crayons bleeding, blurring, and curling the page.  The bonanza, the apocalypse, the first hard freeze:  prophets get away with their predictions.  Their mirrors match the wrinkles that they wear, and everyone knows what the future is made of, the blue lips and fingers of January.  

But it is still summer now:  engine summer, a black train snaking along the river, gripping the slick, steel, rails, trailing my dreams, seeming mythical, becoming only sound.  The drum, the trumpet, the dumb singer stinging the precious sunlight with the absence of her tongue.  Time is a long view up the landscape that expands in the failing light.  There is not a day that contains it, a week, a year.  Time and its forgeries accumulate.  They cover the (valley) floor.