By Christopher Brean Murray
Featured Image: from “Check the Mail for Her Letter” by Amy Parrish

At the trail’s end, I glimpsed
a humming nook of activity.
It wasn’t metallic, yet it shined.
Not liquid, yet it sloshed
and gurgled. A squirrel approached it
and stood on hind legs
before darting away over needles.
It produced an intoxicating odor.
The sound it made was soothing
like a hand smoothing sanded wood.
Then the whole thing shook,
flickered, and morphed into a voice
formulating a bewildering sentence.
There were pauses, and in them
other voices arose, some critiquing
the primary one, others elaborating
on ideas only suggested by the initial oration.
I took no notes. I couldn’t keep up.
New voices had coiled around
my own interior monologue. I felt
like a blimp lost in a system of caves
delving deep into the earth
as a spotlight scans the walls
scrawled with bison and deer
and the visage of a hunter
whose concerns are divorced
from our own. Even those caves
filled with voices: inquisitive, morose,
plaintive, shrill, consoling, and dismissive.
Irate iterations and blanket condemnations
strove to eclipse terse pronouncements
of enduring wisdom. Infantile babbling
percolated amidst the gossip of fools.
One voice said, “Confess,” as if into
a well of wastrels. Another recited
terms and conditions without end.
The voices melded into an intolerable buzzing,
a mandala of jabber, an encyclopedia
of interruptions, an anthology of blog posts
scat-sung over the crimes of a distracted quintet.
Eventually, the noise dissipated. I wiped
the drool from my chin. The squirrel eyed me
from a branch. I’d somehow lost my watch.
I needed to go. I was late for a lecture.

---

Read More