Your Own Back Yard – Michael Gillan Maxwell

Lay me down

in a field of green

Feel the wind

upon my face

Like a friend

who can’t be seen

She is not bound

by time or space

Feel the earth

beneath my feet

Smell the air

after the rain

Like a song

that can’t be heard

She is not bound

by love or pain

In sleepless dreams

she plays for me

On strings of steel

and fire and stone

Like the wind

that must blow free

She is not bound

by flesh or bone

Remember Lonesome Pine?

She was a giant Eastern White

that towered above the Cedar,

Jack Pine, Spruce and Hemlock,

and could be seen for miles.

Not too long after you passed that,

you turned off the two-lane

onto a narrow, twisting, rutted path

that was overgrown and, in places, blocked by deadfall.

Branches whipped the sides of the station wagon

as it crept along. The path sloped very sharply

as it descended towards the lake.

Eventually you came to a rustic cabin

with no electricity or running water.

Propane fueled a cook stove and powered a generator

that ran a water pump and icebox.

At night you lit kerosene lamps

and the Coleman lantern that hissed

and bathed everything in harsh white light.

The kids slept upstairs in the loft

while the adults stayed up half the night

playing cards, telling raucous stories and drinking beer.

Bears and giant spiders came to life

in the long shadows cast by flashlights

on a trip to the outhouse after dark.

Half way around the lake there was another place

known as the Preacher’s Cabin.

A green wooden rowboat tied to a rotting dock

lay submerged to the gunnels.

Brass oarlocks stuck up out of the water.

You went hunting for snapping turtles

amidst the lily pads in Beaver Bay

and fished for Perch and Blue Gills out on the lake.

Jack taught you to shoot the gun,

a double barrel 12-gauge shotgun

with a deafening blast and a recoil

that could have knocked you on your ass.

You shot at porcupines,

blew up coffee cans with M80’s

and played Capture the Flag and Kick the Can

until it was too dark to see.

It was a 20-mile drive to Kenton for supplies.

You headed back down the two lane,

flanked by deep forests of tall timber,

past scrubby outcroppings of rock, red with copper ore.

The general store was also the post office and gas station.

You read comic books, ate candy bars and drank Orange Crush.

Dad and Jack drank beer.

On the way back home, you stopped at the railroad switchyard.

A long train of freight cars loaded with freshly cut timber

sat on the tracks.

A red tailed hawk soared overhead.

Crickets sang in the dry grass of high summer.

You climbed up the ladder of a freight car to play on the logs,

jumped from car to car, all the way to the end

and made your way back again.

When you got down,

Dad and Jack coaxed a wood tick out of your skin

with a lit cigarette.

Then you went right back up to play some more.

Some nights everyone went to the dump to watch the bears.

On a walk through the woods, you stumbled on a spotted fawn

newborn, still wet with the dew of afterbirth.

When it was too hot to be up in the loft,

you fell asleep on the screened porch

to the unearthly calls of loons out on the water.

Please excuse me

while we stop what we are doing

to listen to the sound of coyotes

on this cold and moonless night.

At first it could be mistaken

for the high pitched laughter of the neighbor girls

playing volleyball in the yard

just up the road from the house,

or the giddy sound of hysterical revelers

at a party on somebody’s back deck;

but, then again, perhaps more like

some freaky version of the music of the spheres,

or the shrieking of locomotive brakes

on a runaway train

hurtling down the tracks

under a blank midnight sky.

Really – a sound so primal and so wild

it will make the hairs on your neck stand on end.

Even the dogs hasten to come in

from the dark, cutting short

their usual bedtime routine.

It started out as playful banter,

a one way monologue,

a man chattering away absently

to his two dogs

as if they were human.

But then we started to have real conversations,

the three of us,

just like colleagues might have in the workplace,

or the way chums might chat

on a fishing trip.

Since I was always outnumbered,

the conversation seemed to drift

toward the more dogly things in life.

We did our best to keep it light and breezy,

and made an honest effort

not to veer into spewing doggerel

or spouting dogma.

There was an awful lot of talk

about chasing chipmunks and squirrels

and the conversation did occasionally

get a little emotional when certain subjects came up –

like skunks,

or the neighbor’s annoying jellicle cat,

the illicit thrill of stealing French miche bread off the counter,

the benefits of sleeping 22 hours a day,

the joys of shredding paper into a thousand tiny pieces,

the disappointment of not walking down to the lake every afternoon,

and the despair of pooping and peeing on the floor in the house.

These last two points sparked quite a lively debate,

as they asserted that this was a brilliant example

of absolute cause and effect,

the latter being the result of the former.

How could I argue with that kind of logic?

Tomorrow afternoon we are going to meet for cookies

when we will discuss the ramifications

of rolling in unidentified substances in the yard

and scratching ourselves in public.

Generate memoranda

Institute multiple change initiatives

Utter sweeping declarations

Leave final ultimatums on voice mail

Stamp red sealing wax with your signet ring

Speak in loud, imperious tones

Roll heads

Kick butts

Take names

THEN

Get the Hell OUT

of that sarcophagus you call an office

Leave your gray flannel suit at the door

Walk naked amongst the common man on the street

Spray rose petals in your path

Exult in being WHO you ARE

Cease to define yourself

by WHAT you DO for money

Celebrate freedom

Liberate your soul from endless toil

Renounce all workly things

Believe, brothers and sisters …

Believe!

If Napoleon were alive today

I imagine him wearing a large bicorne hat

standing in that iconic hand-in-waistcoat gesture

reaching for his I Pod Touch to dial in the 1812 Overture

from his “Classic Works of Russian Composers” play list.

I can see Sigmund

in his cozy mahogany paneled study,

his face illuminated by the soft light of his MacBook Pro,

as he Googles the meaning

of the idiom: “Yo Mama!”

Imagine how much confusion

might have been avoided

if Christopher Columbus

had been able to MapQuest

his route to the East Indies.

It’s not too hard to envision

a little fire at the Circus Maximus

getting out of hand and turning into a cataclysmic conflagration

while Nero was preoccupied

updating his Facebook status.

I can’t help but wonder

how the tides of history

might have turned

if Genghis Khan’s relentless advance across the steppes

had been broadcast on his Twitterfeed.

It’s easy to understand

how the Pony Express

would have gone right out of business

if homesteading rights had included

unlimited text messaging.

It doesn’t take a genius to speculate

how the Declaration of Independence

might have been written using GoogleDocs.

But I’d really like to know, what would Ernest do

with a Fishfinder in Old Man and the Sea?

You know what it’s like –

you’re marched outside the gates of the fort,

rank ripped from the epaulets of your uniform,

saber broken in two over the commandant’s knee,

sent out on your pony

with only a canteen full of water

to fend for yourself

amongst the heathen savages.

We’ve all had days like this –

the last man on the parapet,

all of your other Foreign Legion comrades,

dead at their posts, their bodies

propped up against the walls, still holding their rifles,

the vast emptiness of the desert

endlessly sweeping toward every horizon.

We all know the feeling –

you pull the ripcord,

parachute fails to open

as the ground below rushes toward you.

We’ve all been there –

car screaming down a mountain road,

brakes go out, steering wheel comes away

in your hands.

We all hate when that happens –

you open the refrigerator to find

you’ve run out of beer,

and who hasn’t gone

into an important meeting, and realized

you’ve put your underwear on

inside out and backwards.

But then again, you have to admit,

we’ve all picked up the phone

the voice on the other end of the line says something about

unicorns, teddy bears, rainbows and hula dancers,

informs you that your ship has just come in,

your lease on life has been permanently renewed, and

there’s free beer tomorrow

and for all the tomorrows to follow.

When I begin to have conversations with houseplants,

take tea with relatives long dead and gone,

and see things that just aren’t there,

or maybe they are there, but just not here,

I will become the wind.

I will become a resounding gust swooshing through treetops,

black walnut, locust, maple and oak, shagbark hickory and weeping willow.

I will blow through branches and boughs

of quaking aspen and ancient, towering pines.

Sing harmony with birds as they twitter, tweet, chatter, chirp and cheep.

I will become a current of air that blows papers off your desk,

musses up your hair and jangles wind chimes on the porch;

an unseen force that marshals advancing armies of purple thunderheads;

a Blue Norther that drives bristling whitecaps

from a churning lake onto stony beaches.

I will be a velvet messenger carrying the fragrance of lilacs and lavender,

a gentle breeze to cool the brow

of a man who sits in the warm sun of late afternoon,

contemplating a piece of fuzz

as it floats in the air;

holding court amidst ferns in his garden, discussing politics and poetics

with boisterous black-eyed susans and brazen bumble bees.

A man who wonders if he really can taste layers of licorice,

plum, pepper and vanilla in his Zinfandel,

as described on the label?