Of all the lives I’ve lived this is my happiest life. Easy to say with the black-wet live oaks large and gnarled from wearing years. The way soaked boughs cross, snag and crease the sky. A sodden, dark footpath a sharp line through the lime green clover and new grass. Amid the shaded boulders placed there from collapse. Past the three young boys wearing wetsuits in the large open field who with skimboards run and drop to a slope and surf the wet slop, the slick earth and their wet hair. Obvious they rule the earth. Past the crumbling walls that too exist from collapse: every and all things rumble down fast or slow, an eroding earth, a slashing, wild sea. Across the footbridge last summer Mission Creek was dry. As it is half the year. A man stands and throws back his head this laugh. Now the creek a brown explosion, water ripping at trees and tossing boulders and tearing with constant pressure at man’s concrete. Water blasts skyward, spits and froths, churns a living cataract through ours. Tempestuous and mean, pitched to a fever, it serves no master save gravity. And even then it loves defiance with upward jumps, backward spins, the flight of brown, silted liquid birds. Don’t neglect the trees, though you’re captivated by the vision of your impermanence. Turn away from the torrent and see them, whorled, rising, falling, in apparent stasis; wet living, very wet with their dark meat and searing, green dripping hearts.
“Getting up early everyday and going somewhere sucks.”
Silby on going to work
