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  • Hardened Mud
  • Mark Halliday (bio)

On a cold and windy day in March I went for a walkall by myself. Significantly this was soon afterthe death of a fairly close friend from the past ora writer I always admired and had a few drinks with.I walked pretty far beneath the pale chilly sun of Marchacross a field of hardened mud toward the forest.

(I say forest, I mean a lot of trees, probably almosta thousand trees—not a wilderness, but yetsomething in my soul is spoken toby the elemental idea of wilderness, by somethingfar bigger and deeper than routine conventional humanity.)In my hand as I walked on and on across the hardened mud

I did not hold a take-out cup of coffee from Dunkin Donutsbecause this would not fit the scene. The pale sun was cool,the cool sun was pale among the blustery clouds of Marchas I walked and walked some more, thinking about death,and the wind was like an uncaring knife cutting nothingas if nothing were a cold loaf of bread which needless to say

was not there at all. And I walked across that fieldof weeds humbled by the hardened mud and I noticedoccasional obscure wildflowers, so independent and alone,thinking of how we live and die, live only to die,as though death were the great point of it all somehow,the answer to any number of muddy questions.

And as I drew near the cool woods I too grew coolfor it was as though the nobility of ten thousand gray boughsnot yet teased by spring summed up what I’d meantin the closing lines of many previous poems, so I walked on, notbothered by the mud on my Adidas, so calmly,grateful for the edge of the wind, the dried puddles,

the pale sun and the defeated weeds and my huge thoughts;this was not an average sort of experience,and though the wind was actually colder than I would have preferredand though there was no camera and no film crewin that entire bleak hard muddy field to record my experiencestill I was glad to be alive there, meeting the edgy wind

and of course remembering my friend and feeling so much. [End Page 227]

Mark Halliday

MARK HALLIDAY teaches at Ohio University. His sixth book of poems Thresherphobe was published in 2013 by the University of Chicago Press.

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