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25. the secret is in leaving
Leave the country secretly, like the secret petal opening. Secret landscapes; like the Canadian farmhouse far out on the snowy prairie that does not say, 'I live' so much as 'I understand death', and for this reason it lives heartily. It lives with the elongated icicles cramping onto the eaves of the red barn and the snowplough at rest. It lives with the mysterious face of the great snowy owl alert on the wire at midday. This house understands death and the owl points the way forward for me. These are the things we must note as we move into our future along these barren landscapes. Already I am leaving and as you can see, there is another world that I not only have left, but I am leaving from. So soon it all happens, like the dreams I had as a child, where I was a kangaroo escaping the cops and gangsters, by jumping fences into one suburban backyard, through to another and another that paralleled it. Soon there are many secret worlds I am leaving that parallel each other, and the trail I leave behind comes like a maze so that they cannot follow me. They can only hope to destroy me from the edges, nibbling there like they would at flesh hung from hooks, eating fish up from the centre of an old lake. I leave them behind striking the shoreline and planting their explosives in order to bring the shoreline forests down. They cannot follow me into the snowy wilderness. If they choose to be lost in a blizzard, there they may find what they didn't expect. Or perhaps there will be nothing but each gangster forlornly calling out to themselves, now holding the quietest guns in the world, as the snow still turns everything and turn it into quietness. The secrets I keep burning inside me for months are like winters more than fires. I had to deceive, to secure and utilise secrecy, so that he wouldn't murder me. The quietest eyes and breath come out of me. That is the quietest crop you ever did see. Or was it simply the dead heart of a Northern Hemisphere winter, with its faint message of yields for the future, or an arctic snow hare twitching there. Whatever it is that is talking to you is of your own interpretation, your need to uncover what frustrates and thwarts you. At every effort you make to turn the corner in pursuit, I secretly turn my back on you. |
