Reading Poetry by the Morning Moon :: Personal Narrative Essays

Reading Poetry by the Morning Moon 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 pellucid sea. Sitting in the covered crook of a hickory tree, my legs dangle above the creek. A walnut leaf drifts past, on its way through the valley, destined for the river and finally the bay. For a moment, I think of taking off my sneakers and socks, rolling up my jeans, and dipping my toes into the soft silt lining the creek bed. The meandering stream is only shin-deep and with four strides I could tantalize on the other shore. In the October chill, however, I reconsider instead, the smells - mud, fish, decaying leaves - intoxicate me.My tongue, every atom of my blood, formd from this soil, this air.I know its a romanticistic idea, reading Song of Myself on a stream bank. In fact, if Walt Whitmans spirit were to brush by me in the gusting wind, Id probably let out him say Close the book and w atch. Listen.A shriek pierces through the orange and gold treetops like a blast of steam escaping a teakettle. Looking 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, must have witnessed the swooping undulations of a ruddy-winged bird. His heart, like mine, unburdened.From my rough but solid seat in the hickory tree, I hear, at first, the sounds of Annvilles busy thoroughfare - the drone of engines, squealing brakes, the toll of a church bell. Soon, however, other noises trickle into my consciousness. Water over fallen branches. Staccato crackles of a squirrel in the brush. My own 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 mingling of the present and past.Maybe its my solitude, or by chance its the wind caressing my face with the smell of wet leaves, but I feel suddenly clo se to my home, a farm that is sixty miles western hemisphere 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.