Reading Poetry by the Morning Moon :: Personal Narrative Essays

Reading Poetry by the Morning lunation Wind 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 gossamer sea. Sitting in the mossy crook of a hickory tree, my legs drop above the creek. A walnut leaf drifts past, on its way by the valley, destined for the river and finally the bay. For a moment, I think of taking dispatch my sneakers and socks, rolling up my jeans, and dipping my toes into the soft silt lining the creek bed. The go stream is only shin-deep and with four strides I could sit on the new(prenominal) shore. In the October chill, however, I reconsider instead, the smells - mud, fish, decaying leaves - intoxicate me.My tongue, every atom of my blood, constellationd from this soil, this air.I know its a romantic idea, drill Song of Myself on a stream bank. In fact, if Walt Whitmans living were to brush by me in the gusting intrude, Id probably regard him say Close the bo ok and watch. Listen.A shriek pierces through the orange tree and gold treetops like a blast of steam escaping a teakettle. look up, I see 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, moldiness have witnessed the swooping undulations of a ruddy-winged bird. His heart, like mine, unburdened.From my rough but solid lieu in the hickory tree, I hear, at first, the sounds of Annvilles busy lane - the drone of engines, squealing brakes, the chime of a church bell. Soon, however, other noises dripping into my consciousness. Water over fallen branches. Staccato crackles of a squirrel in the brush. My consume breathing. The world has been reduced to a microcosm in which I am the center. In this cosmos there are no thoughts of the future, only a change of the present and past.Maybe its my solitude, or perhaps its the wind caressing my face with the smell of wet leaves, but I int ent suddenly close to my home, a farm that is sixty miles west and a mountain 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 barn roof, and the mountains that surround the valley, Hidden Valley, like the walls of Jericho.