Reading Poetry by the Morning Moon :: Personal Narrative Essays

Reading Poetry by the Morning Moon go up sweeps a stray cloud across the sky, exposing half of a gray-mottled moon. Its nine-thirty in the morning, and the moon looks like an island in a pellucid sea. posing in the mossy crook of a hickory tree, my legs dangle in a higher place the creek. A walnut leaf drifts past, on its way through the valley, indentured for the river and finally the bay. For a moment, I think of taking off my sneakers and socks, roller up my jeans, and dipping my toes into the soft silt lining the creek bed. The meandering waterway is only shin-deep and with four strides I could sit on the other shore. In the October chill, however, I reconsider instead, the smells - mud, fish, decaying leaves - intoxicate me.My tongue, every atom of my blood, formd from this soil, this air.I know its a romantic idea, reading mental strain of Myself on a stream bank. In fact, if Walt Whitmans spirit were to lave by me in the gusting wind, Id probably hear him govern Close the book and watch. Listen.A shriek pierces through the orange and capital treetops like a blast of steam escaping a teakettle. Looking up, I influence the silver belly of a red-tailed hawk as it glides in circles below the moon.I fly those flights of a fluid and swallowing soul, writes Whitman. He, too, must bring forth witnessed the swooping undulations of a ruddy-winged bird. His heart, like mine, unburdened.From my rough but solid seat in the hickory tree, I hear, at first, the sounds of Annvilles busy thoroughfare - the preview of engines, squealing brakes, the chime of a church bell. Soon, however, other noises trickle into my consciousness. water system over fallen branches. Staccato crackles of a squirrel in the brush. My own breathing. The cosmea has been reduced to a microcosm in which I am the center. In this human race there are no thoughts of the future, only a mingling of the break and past.Maybe its my solitude, or perhaps its the wind smooching my face with t he smell of wet leaves, but I feel dead close to my home, a farm that is sixty miles west and a potentiometer away from this hickory tree on the Quittie. Closing my eyes, I see the familiar wisp of smoke curling from our brick chimney, the crooked lightning rod on the boron roof, and the mountains that surround the valley, Hidden Valley, like the walls of Jericho.