Of Woods and Waters: A Kentucky Outdoors Reader

The Hermit on His Gate (2004)

The Hermit on His Gate (2004) JAMES GASH After months of continuous weathers together, snowed in, mudded in, flooded in, she's gone tonight— her absence an oboe in my suddenly still life as only owl bassoons news of thaw, up and downriver. I flounder about in my old ways. Four miles from any real road what was it I used to do? one life under a single light in one room . . . Old bachelor recipes wrinkle as well— tongue is smarter now, belly snobbier; doesn't want everything in one pot. So, oh me, it's room to room, vacantly, then house to furthest gate, stalemate. And, oh my, I the wry gargoyle now perched atop ancient gatepost vn craning outwards straining to hear over the moon-crazed peepers. Irretrievably forlorn. And, unbelievably, unnoticed. Or simply irrelevant to this sudden Mardi Gras of woodcocks everywhere marching out from their shy thickets to court drunkenly across the darkling plain all about whistling and whirring they strut themselves into bold pairs dancing first upon the moist earth then gyring moonwards on tandem wing recreating over and again, in ritual flight the ecstatic double-helix exhausting the night, 318 OF WOODS & WATERS ...