To leave the inner critic on the empty street beneath my windows.<\/p>\n
To outride the arrows, or slings at least, of civic life.<\/p>\n
To put the forces separating me from my daughter\u2014the moderator<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/span>in elastic-waisted slacks, the decree signed<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>by the liver-spotted judge\u2014in the rear-view.<\/p>\n To look ahead and see the world\u2019s impersonal love song again<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>lifted from night.<\/p>\n To know the song is about the attention we give the wild,<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>unfixable everything we love yet is always already<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>indifferent to us.<\/p>\n And yet to see the sun rise, like a couched friend, from blankets of fog<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>in the lowland orchards.<\/p>\n To see the fields of our anxieties cut and gathered in silos.<\/p>\n To hear the wind wrap us, undeserving, in the sun\u2019s resolve<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>to sustain us another day.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n To stuff a campsite into my backpack and somehow walk ten miles.<\/p>\n To feel the weight of our basic needs shouldered across streams,<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>over hills, up crevices.<\/p>\n To remember having walked the home-forsaken trail before.<\/p>\n To realize I\u2019d compressed memory of all this pain\u2014all but the sacrament<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>of red, gold and orange leaves<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>above river bluffs.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Only here do I realize I must have forgotten just how many uphills,<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>just how fucking much elevation hurts.<\/p>\n Here I think such thoughts as our sapiens ancestors ground as many miles<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>over mountains each day<\/em>.<\/p>\n I wake and drive and walk to think: Perhaps the downhill mortar and pestle <\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>of our patellae almost crushes recall <\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>of profane elevation<\/em>.<\/p>\n And to meet the inner critic, somehow already at the top, and<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>to accept his message:<\/p>\n You wake at four and drive to the mountains<\/em><\/p>\n to accept the body\u2019s pain as the cost of all the beauty there is to see.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To leave the inner critic on the empty street beneath my windows . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":4087,"template":"","categories":[9,49,119],"tags":[1167,6,1168,1169,1170,164],"class_list":["post-4079","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-literary-features","category-poetry","tag-anxiety","tag-aquifer-the-florida-review-online","tag-hiking","tag-i-wake-at-four-drive-to-the-mountains","tag-marcus-meyers","tag-nature"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n