You cannot eat or sweat enough to keep you sane, these humid, still, sepulchral summer eves. You find yourself wandering out into the field behind the house, standing for hours, staring into an indeterminate distant space. The hills and sky are there, but you do not see them. Not properly. Instead, a something eats away inside your mind, inside that heart or soul that lesser poets talk about. Inside sunsets and the days. Inside the moon and mad paths leading to the woods.
Somewhere near the garden, drums sound strange and tiny, and birds chirp pointed chirping punctuations. Relentless torture smells like burning on still air. You sweat profusely, shirt sticking to your chest, but you do not notice. Neither can you see black curling margins growing all around the world–night falling at the corners of your vision, speaking seriously of mudpuppies or blooms pre fruit.
People press you for answers where there are none, and the rage shakes the trees around you while you stand perfectly still. Because only stillness saves you now, keeping you from shattering like ice plucked off the bucket and held sideways till it slips. Like the hard ground rushing to meet it, rushing to meet you, even though the summer blazes and the ice is all inside. Your feet splay. You try to listen. Try so hard. To listen.
Around you, pine cones fall from the Giant Redwoods and those Atlas Pines, sounding like blunt bombs as they strike pavement, cars, and whatever else may stand between them/ between you and the comfortable oblivion of stopping. You may go in and eat a bite or drink a sip in time. The hours pass, and in the end it makes no difference whether you went in or stood. You end in the same place.
Why can you not recover? Why can you not improve? Why can you not stop and just enjoy the day? Because around you roll those drums, beating from somewhere near the garden. Drums you know you can’t confront, and yet you still long to see and to revisit that moment at the end. Drums. You can’t tell where they might be now, and that black curls in around the vision like paper on fire, and you don’t mind, and wouldn’t know where else to look.