The Wildling

The Wildling
Its dark limbs are twisted, agonized, as though its break from civilization caused it literal pain. Its wood is snarled and dark; it looks sprawled, like something from a haunting. Each spring the dark branches are softened by a fragrant froth of pale pink and white, that moves in the chilled breezes like the soft flutterings of moth wings.

Each autumn it bears hard, sour, green fruit, pock marked by bird beaks and wasp stings. It is fruit that appears one day and has disappeared the next, perhaps nibbled in its entirety by a white tailed deer with an adequate reach. The tree has run to an unlikely setting for a cultivar, a marshy wetland ringed by a dark skeletal fringe of wild trees, cottonwood, poplar and alder. And strangely, in its twisted crouching, it looks far less civilized than they do. This morning its naked branches are rimmed in silver eastern light. At its top hunches a patient Swainsons hawk, his pale belly glows, metallic. He waits for the sun-warmed afternoon breezes that will make it easy to soar over the wetlands, to hunt for the plentiful mice that crouch there. They believe themselves to be invisible under the flattened gold and lavender wild grasses.

In the heart of the marshland is the usual mated pair of coyotes. They hunt with rapturous leaps and bounds,come up smiling, and swallow a still wriggling, furry and very surprised vole. I know they den in the dilapidated stack of cattails on the north side of the meadow. I know there are no hungry pups there yet.
Overhead, skeins of Canada geese fly in long, wavering Vs, like wisps of smoke. Their wings surge against the silver air in perfect time with strains of Handel’s Ombra Mai Fu. The sacred sounding melody pours full-throated from my car stereo. I’ve just leapt from my seat. The door is left hanging open. I step from the road onto the soft, yielding duff of flattened, frosted grass. The surface cradles my feet in a way that is inviting; that asks me to keep walking. Its yielding fills me with a longing that is like lust. It calls me forward. I lay my hand on the rough, straining bark of the escaped fruit tree. The hawk will not tolerate this boldness and soars with a single wing beat to one of the safer, taller cottonwoods on the other side. There he watches me, his entire posture sullen and cross.

In the west, there is a single rolled band of cloud. It reflects the morning light through the newly shorn thatch of trees – it backlights the summer-hidden charm of nests. Grass woven, stick stacked, leaf formed treasures. Adornments laid bare for eyes that want them. I realize that my body wants to move into those dark edges. My feet want to keep pressing into the softness of yielding ground. I want to fill my eyes with those secrets, infinite, minuscule, not given to the casual observer. I realize now my starvation for words and silver light, for images reflected on my retinas, for the quiet rustling of impending winter. I feel the passing time so much more sharply, when it passes unmarked, when it is uncolored by wonders that I have been too busy to notice. This morning, I make the time. I allow the seduction, yield to it, like leaning into a kiss. I tremble with the things I long for. I waste away and grow pale for wanting and not having them. It is like unrequited love, but I am the lover refusing to submit. I need only do it. To melt into the dark fringes of the meadow owned by the wilded apple tree. Slip away unnoticed, to become feral and uncultivated, to grow hard, green wild fruit of my own.