Traveling Dialogues

A few days after he thought he remembered it starting,

A Wednesday,

He asked the old man,

“Do you need whiskey to think about it?

To remember it all?”

For a long time

The old man kept his eyes forward, looking

Through the trees

And sometimes he looked down

and sideways.

Their boots, the old man’s and his, made crunching

Noises and thudded; a rhythmless cadence that

He heard, but the old man pretended not to.

“I don’t need it, but I want it.”

Then the old man stopped walking and looked first at him, then ahead again,

Through the trees.

“Listen,” the old man told him,

“Everything you’ll ever want to know is here.

And it’s as dark as a bat’s eye.

In the dirt, in your mind, in here.”

With a fist,

He beat the breast of his black

And red flannel.

“You don’t need to know no more just yet.

I’ll remember it for you and for me both.”

The bootsteps crunched and thudded again.

He looked at the old man, but couldn’t

Tell his face from the trunk of an oak.

Couldn’t distinguish which wore the lines and the grooves

And which brandished them.

Time was running on,

And time was running out.

And the old man and him…

They were in this together.

On Saturday (Where did Thursday and Friday go?), they

Crunched and thudded, and the sun was gray

And mostly gone in the midrange between

Earth and Heavens,

And the trees stretched on,

And he couldn’t recall if he’d spoken, and knew the old man

Hadn’t.

And that dull sun, in the middle of the sky, he thought had never

Set.

No stars nor moon had shone, no night had draped the branches

Or shrouded the ground.

But everything was as dark as a bat’s eye.

On Monday, suddenly, over the crunching and thudding,

The old man said, “Now, I’ll remember her to you,

And you’ll be wise to be wary. 

The whore.

She moved with the seconds of the day and the hours of the night, and

She whirled with the seasons. 

There wasn’t any telling where she ended and the sweet ground

We tread on now began, or where this very path spilled into her

Blasphemous depths.

She promised me a son

But

Was barren.”

On Wednesday, he asked the old man,

“Can a shelter be built to withstand her

Scratching and clawing and lies?

To keep her away?  To shut her out?”

Crunch.  Thud.  Crunch.  Thud.

The trees stretched on and were

The entire horizon as they’d been

Since it started,

Beneath the gray hidden sun

That never set, and the old man said,

“Shelter could maybe be thrown up, but

She’ll have you regardless.”

Friday, and the trees stretched out in front of them and

To the sides and

Behind them as far as he and the old man could see,

And the tepid capsule

Of a sun hung hidden in the midrange between the ground and

The Heavens,

And their boots crunched and thudded on their path

Under the light that was

Dark as a bat’s eye.

And the old man’s words, and his warnings,

Were silhouettes of that which grew in the ground

Of his own heart.

On Monday, over their bootsteps,

The old man spoke again.

“You’ll be here, where I walk, and I’ll be dust,

Or,

Maybe you’ll be. 

But it won’t matter… “ And then the crunch-thud stopped.

The old man’s face and the bark on the trunk of

The tree on which

He rested his gnarled hand were the same.

But now

It was clear that it was the old man who

Brandished the lines and the grooves.

With gloating disguised as resignation

(One was indistinguishable from the other in

The constant light that shone as dark

As a bat’s eye),

The old man faced the boundless treescape and snatched

His hand back from the tree trunk

As if it had been scalded.

And the pair continued, the crunch-thud-crunch-thud

Of their bootsteps

The only sounds now,

And, as they almost always

Had been.

As he watched the old man

With sidelong eye,

And their bootsteps continued toward

An unassailable, tree-clotted horizon,

He knew there would be no time to erect

Futile shelter against

Man, woman, or devil,

Or anything else that crawled from his own

Parched and blackened chasms.

And it continued as it started,

The endless plodding through the

Trees.

The old man and him.

Together.

Conversation pausing only, with days as moments

(The one indistinguishable from the other in filthy sunlight

As dark as a bat’s eye),

For thoughts of ruination.

He and the old man.

The engulfing forest at their backs

Identical to the forest stretching before them.

The inexorable crunch-thud of bootsteps

Beneath a wan disk of a never-setting

Gray and hidden sun.