dog years: Time Moves at Night
What was beautiful about West Virginia in 1979 was that when Mom sent me out onto the back porch to call the cats in for the night, I'd see things. I'd like for those things to come back. I liked the sight of movement in the dark. You dread getting used to the wind moving the trees across the face of a mountain like a girl shaking out a quilt at the clothesline. It's something you only want to see once and again. I think one more time would be fine. But, then, in my core, I know once more wouldn't ever be enough.
Try to fight the small movement your body makes when your heart beats. Hold your arms so still that the small sensation of your pulse feels like a violent palsy. I've made my body like that, watching things in the purple night. Perched on a step, clenched, bringing some blur into focus.
I mean a movement beyond creatures and plants. It was time I saw. Time moved at night. I saw it sometimes as a elderly woman with a hen and an axe, sometimes a preacher with muddy boots hung in the stirrups of his horse. I've stopped breathing at the sight of a fly rod bending. I've seen a woman's face look through a fogged window on to the next mountain.
Then my eyes would relax and the details would emerge, outlines would form, and through the woods, I'd see Loomis Anderson, in his bathrobe and slippers, false casting his fly rod in the gravel road. And later, I'd see the Andersons making love in the hot tub he made from the ribs and hoops of old barrels....her face looking away, to the next mountain.