In high school, I’d been set free to take French classes at the university. Waiting in the library to be picked up, I wandered and read. On a physical level I was hungry for more than stories. I didn’t eat much breakfast and found the atmosphere at school non-conducive to lunch. Like many students locked into what seemed an alien rhythm, I existed in a tattered state.
Posts tagged #irena nagler
Field of the Five Horses
I’d been given some gourmet coffee for Christmas. It was late at night. I’d have to work in the morning, but, feeling impelled to give it a try, I brewed the rich dark potion.
The next day I remembered a night when I was eight years old. I was living in the tropics with my family, where heat thins boundaries and can induce fertile dreaming. I’d been allowed to drink a caffeinated beverage just before going to bed, a one-time occurrence. As I lay wide awake, the aquarium music from Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals played in my brain. It got louder and louder. My room faded into green mist and shoals of golden fish swam through it from various angles and directions, hovering and then dissolving. Having gone to school opposite one of those old, gothic mental hospitals, I was frightened I might be locked up in it when we returned to the States, and I clutched the sheets until the vision dissipated.
City of Crows
I’m preparing to leave a corvid hurly-burly. Beneath its restless swirl I lean against an oak tree, attempting to be unobtrusive. Nearby, under the storm of wings, a man is standing, his back to me, profoundly rooted, silent by a stone marker. We both wear coats as black as the feathers of the birds. Above us, they arrive: alighting and arising, some perching on branches, others in perpetual motion and outcry.
In the Heart of the Wood on a Rainy Night — Reflections on Black Pond Woods
An equinoctial night in 2016. It’s raining. The injured raptor birds, often used in educational programs, sleep in little wooden houses on the hillside. Community gardens and orchards await spring, leaves poised to unfurl and earth to be turned. It is the night of the salamander survey at Black Pond Woods.
Forest in the City: A Meditation on Present Deer and Absent Wolves
There is a forest in the city. The ground holds the memory of it. In the night, animals hunt and mate and weave starlight with scent.I wake one morning from a dream of family. In it I am a misfit in my generation, my eyes blinking in sunlight that streams through porch windows. Yet I sense that I am close to distant ancestors. I go outdoors. I am holding the leg bone of a doe. I throw it into a dark wood, and a herd of deer springs forth.
