Untitled: Forest Road

Down around the trees the sunlight gathers in little puffs of mist and ferns twist their limbs like spider legs between the birch trees that grow up and cover us and cover everything but the road and the trail and  the lake. We drove up here in silence. We drove up here for a weekend together. We drove up here to get away from all the things that are haunting us and we didn't succeed. The photograph tumbles from my hands inside my mind and lands face up on the polished wooden floor showing me that road disappearing into the green. It's the end of summer it's almost the end of us. I'll go on forever and so will you like a river flowing backwards, a confluence in reverse. The water forks and splits. We listened to death speaking and we listened to the silence where conversations used to be. We searched the forest floor for firewood and found mushrooms and we didn't find each other. We found silence and an empty wood and we made love in a tent and I emptied my air mattress and you bought me a foam mattress and I still sleep on it and I'm still in the night where I used to turn and toss and throw my weight around. I sleep all through the night even though I don't hold you tight. I sleep and I snore and I raise a ruckus and I raise the sun. I greet it in the morning with coffee, the sun. I send it to bed with wine and I let little flowers drop from my hand into a stream and I don't know where the stream goes, don't know what's around it's bends. More woods I guess. The ocean somewhere I guess. I ate Palak Paneer and something with Chickpeas and something with lentils from a heavy foil bag, cold with a spoon and ripped open like an animal like a coyote like I'd let all my manners drop away. I poured it all down my shirt and ripped that too and threw it in the fire and watched the smoke go up and carry everything away, all my old lives, little flowers dropped into a cold running stream from my hands. I don't miss anything anymore. I've got my eyes open. I've got them on the road. I watch it bend before me. Like it's bowing. Like it's bowing back and forth, side to side. It bows and bends and rises to meet my feet. My tires. My bicycle tires. Then it falls away from beneath me and I'm floating. I'm not on the ground. I'm not sitting next to a stream anymore, I've let all the flowers fall away from my hands I've become something with wings. Something on the wind. i'm becoming something more than I am I'm around the bend. I'm in the forest with the trees, but you can't see me. I'm down that mountain pass. I'm in the distance on that saddle ridge. The one that runs from snowy peaks to rocky range. I'm flying over mountains. Up them, down them. That thunder that echoes down the pass is me exploding as I run past. I'm around the bedn in the forest road. This is just shit I write down when I need to clear my head. The photograph of the forest road tumbles to the polished wooden floors in my mind. I see it through the windshield of your car. The one I fucked up on the way back from Chicago. We brought back your bicycle and left the pedal against the bare metal and it made a circular scratch. It let the rust in. It let the rust in, and things were never the same and things were always back down that road, like two rivers separating up the streams leaves fall to the floor of the forest in the photograph on the polished wooden floors of my mind. There are mushrooms and the birthplace of Judy Garland too, and we had breakfast in a country diner.