The back country landscape is sliced open right down its center. Panning left and right, I see things slipping by either side of me as I drive this truck through the outlands. Imagine me; walking the trellis lengths of this winter vineyard, only it’s harvest time and I’m picking each grape – just me here alone – pruning the withering vines, fastening wire between the cross arms. I’m slipping by like ripening fruit, like the wine it yields… then gone.
Sprawling seldom seen properties with antebellum style houses are set way back … some hollow and up for sale, others waiting for life to stir again within. I try out all of them in my mind, buying each one and living there alone for a moment. Here, on the porch of this one, it’s just me and the perpetuity of memories of things I only dreamt back there in my city.
I don’t play the radio – this way I can hear a silent conversation with an essence that persists beyond the flesh… some call it a ghost. But I am the ghost in these passing outlands. Yes. Memories are born in the city, but they die here peacefully.
Winter is the season of our final accounting… the accrual of small deaths and the completion of one last transaction with amounts owed and amounts due. The trees have paid their debts and manage to stand there, all boney and bare and utterly still – and accounted for. But not me, I’m the transcendental outlander here… my soul is the firewood burning for this cold forest.
Back there, I’m caught between things I must do while I’m alive and things I must avoid in order to live. But from here, the suburb where I live is but a trite awareness, a busy glimmer beyond these outlands… a spreading wound that I nurse and medicate on occasion, but one that I’d sooner choose to skirt around in this journey. I’m too sympathetic toward my frailties.
Whenever I am amidst the distance between two cities, I’m where I should be… in the outlands.
