Entry Cove

I say entry cove in ignorance, to name the world as I can, makeshift, by a phrase that lights on the skin—entry cove, a space made in tall grass and darted through, sound enough to constitute a hideaway in a meadow. A cove is generous in definition: a sheltering bay, a cave, gap, or hollow. As I near, an animal slower and heavier than a cat slips in. Cove, because I want to follow, everything outside too loud and wrong. Here at the edge of this meadow, late summer, the goldenrod high, the sun warm and air soft, there’s a motor, compressor, something violently chewing the quiet, shredding the peace. Hard to locate its origin. Overhead, a plane tears a path into blue sky. Then comes a far train whistle I make romantic to alter the imposition—until it turns back to the truck horn it is and I’m recomposed, on the outskirts again, making do.

You asked for my impression, you who once lived in this ruined town for years. After just a few days, I’m so hungry I’ll take anything. I sift for green moments, accept reduced portions, this circumscribed walk. Some stretches are fine: rows of stables have been made into offices and the worn-smooth silvery boards are intact. Near a once-barn, there’s a real footbridge arcing over a trickle of creek. And this meadow-reprieve, preserve, conscious allotment of wild—it helps.

It was a woodchuck, I can see now. She’s out and settled on the shorn path, fully adapted to the machinery noise, no wincing or twitching, just nibbling grass. As I move closer, she slips back into the green tangle. Then we do it again: I circle the meadow, and coming around, she’s out on the path. I close in, she retreats—only partly, though, now that she knows it’s me. And just as she’s wagered, I do move along. There’s a name for me and the distance I keep. That I can’t know it doesn’t mean that I’m not, at this moment, being addressed.

Though I grew up across the street from a parking lot, it did at least lead to a small county park and a lake—my fancy, my scrap, really, only a pond. Half the pond was belted by a path paved for walking and half was left wooded. Whole stretches had their microclimates, each distinct and brief as a shiver, or a stripe of afternoon sun in the eyes. At the path’s beginning was a rocky area where fat white Long Island ducks gathered for handouts. Then a sadder stretch, treeless and too-bright, with splintery pilings where old men sat and fished in the murk. Then a reliefstretch where the pilings stopped and tough, scrubby grass ran down to the water, willows shaded the banks, and the year-round geese slept. On the far side of the pond before the woods started was a rise, an open, mowed area I tried to believe in for years, thought could be used, it should have been used, made productive, trod, tilled, or encamped—but such language wasn’t available to me, plots went undrawn, we weren’t a village, there wasn’t a harvest, we had dirt and not soil, and no one had earth. The space felt shunned—not left-to-reverence, not sacred-kept—and I couldn’t get it to breathe or work or activate. Walking up there was an obligation, an attempt to restore I couldn’t say what. Most days I’d focus past it, move quickly and try not to feel its need. The path ended in a turnaround, and beyond that loop, with its garbage cans, snarls of fishing line, rusty hooks, was the fence to the woods, called “the pit” by the neighborhood kids. But it wasn’t a pit. It was never a quarry. It had no maw. There was no story, no town legend telling its origin. By “pit” they meant only the interval—filler, like TV snow...