Trail of Bones

Occasionally I get up very early and go outside, ideally with a mug of coffee in my hand. I scout around for remnants of last night’s miracles and calamities, hoping for a glimpse of the neighborhood bobcat, and I clamber up a steep hillside for a new perspective on our canyon. I watch the way the rising sun casts swaths of golden light across the slopes, gilding the grasses and blanching out the pink of sky until it is as blank and patient as a sheet of paper, then little by little veers to blue.

I look down upon our sleeping house and the curving road that leads to it.

And I pause, as William Stafford would:

Next time what I'd do is look at the earth before saying anything. I'd stop just before going into a house and be an emperor for a minute and listen better to the wind or to the air being still.

My reign is brief, but I am emperor of morning.

The path I take today is lined with large white cow bones, a sundry assortment of shapes, an outdoor gallery of plaster sculpture, objects fully metamorphosed into a state that seems entirely disconnected from the living creatures that once contained them. I walk between them like a bride, stepping gingerly downhill, protective of my own brittle bones, which have served me well but lately seem tenuous.

There’s a peculiar familiarity to this walk down the aisle. My trails are always lined with bones.

But, oh, to what places they have led!

This is a place I will miss, and I will miss this kind of morning. I never could have imagined any of this, but I kept on going, and even now I believe something wondrous yet awaits. I just have to summon up the radar and the faith.

Langston Hughes knew rivers. I’ve known buses. I turned twenty-four on a Greyhound bus, shivering as night fell and a chill filled the carapace I shared with strangers. A skinny young man with an alien twang to his talk rifled through his duffle bag, unbidden, pulled out a jacket, and put it over my shoulders.

“You looked cold,” he said.

Yes, I’ve known buses. The sight of a depot still evokes these words that I wrote long ago:

you have been damaged in transit

and seen this sign in the saddest part of every town

blank block letters bleached blue

plain and forthright

you know exactly what you are getting here

a comfortless conveyance

bleak transport through a long night

it suits you

you buy your bitter coffee from the vending machine

and take your place on a bench to wait

holding a ticket that holds no promise

your days have no shape

you are terminally lonesome

fallen into disrepair

maybe you can

disappear

But sometimes there was kindness on those buses, and certainly there were stories, and I heard quite a few. And I was hellbent on leaving but not clear where to, and nevertheless I kept going, and the trails were lined with bones.

“Will you cast me aside, and all my encumbrances?” My father wrote those words to me in a letter, and they hurt. But maybe that’s exactly what I did.

My mother said I had a mean streak, which is an odd thing for a mother to tell her child, but if saving oneself is meanness, I suppose I am guilty again as charged. I don’t know if it was strength or weakness that prompted my career as a fugitive, but I am grateful for the boy who put his jacket around me, and a man who told me, amidst the clamor of church bells, to imagine my future self, and friends who offered bicycles and couches to crash on and didn’t disdain me for stepping out of an Old World opera whose notes I couldn’t carry.

I’m even a little bit grateful for the young hoodlums who knocked me down on a Syracuse street and took my purse, newly flush with twenty dollars from the ATM, but ran off without further ado. And maybe to the vacuum cleaner salesmen who picked up Cyd and me when we were hitchhiking in Oregon, and made half-hearted passes but neither raped nor murdered us.

It’s a strange and wondrous thing to be standing on a hilltop at the age of seventy contemplating all the trails of bones you have traversed in your impossibly long and fleeting life span, looking at a house you will one day vacate, seeing the trees tremble as the wind gathers, everything simultaneously frail and resilient.