Fox Stories
Dedicated to
a bridge to adulthood.
PABLO HERZBERG
Days I shall feel
When, with joy, the eye for the boundless desert fills,
When to a mere multitude the grains transmute,
And dunes ever-changing, exchangeable hills.
Days I shall see
When neighborly vultures flee my persuasion’s feat,
When shadows – once cast – provoke peace at their leave,
And the astral eye enlightens the worlds he meets.
Days I shall smell
When naturally manufactured fragrances dwindle,
When perceptibly desolate, odorful meadows turn,
And unnamed scents – at a resurrecting dawn – enkindle.
Days I shall taste
When grey’s bitter savor – at last – dulls,
When but the meaningful I’m left to revolve,
And empires of exquisite (flavorless) roses fall.
Days I shall hear
When the wind plays in the silence of the screams,
When its ever-present howls light the fire within,
And wisdom I encounter – a ceaseless gleam.
Fox Stories
It was a fortune and an almost certain chance of death for bringing down trees in the Alaskan frost. I think our university peers paid too much attention to the last part. John thought they did not pay enough to the first.
December 25 (Leaving Academia)
As we were departing the known world, the mountains got closer and the trees taller. The ponds laid frozen, the rivers flowing fast. The white of the snow, the blues of the water and sky, and the occasional dark greens of the winter trees took the views. And as I digested the beautiful and heartless ecosystems, I felt the kind of dread that must have driven our species to settle in every corner of the world. A dread drowned in curiosity and thirst for adventure. A feeling to make shaking limbs move forward into the darkness.
But as any action rooted in ignorance, we could not grasp our decision or its consequential product. We were traveling only sighted enough to know our destination and, on the seven days of pilgrimage, for no continuous repetition of an identical sight to lessen our awe at the natural splendors.
We were to arrive with the new year.
Be with me, dear all
My sight will yield to you
Humor me with a world
And with a witness I’ll honor you.
December 28
The first time we camped in meadows, John and I mutely spoke as not to break a stillness we had never heard. It had never occurred to me how overwhelming civilization was. How many stimuli continuously avalanche into a person in the lands of men. And yet, as we dwelled in a shoutless space, the silence was elusive and the moment too dense to seize.
Gift me a dwelling
Of usual splendor,
Mend me forgetful
Of the hunt to render
And such prospect
Will rout as tender.
January 4 (Working with the Brutes)
I saw the foxes and the weariness turned unseeable by the frozen sweat. I felt the winds that slithered through the paths laid by the scattered tree - the gales that tested our jaws’ force-. I think of the women who offered their divine virtues to the wifeless men and the sound of the ax’s blade piercing the mashing oak.
Comfort had been the compass of our way forward. The indicator of the correct succeeding step. And now we fared where our minds served no use, where our shapes proved brittle, and our status was lesser than none. Uneasiness had made its masterpiece on us.
But in those spaces between the swings of metals, the forgetting of the touch of bitter cold in exhalation, the pauses of human movement in the fallings of the giant trees. In those spaces, I felt a faded sense of something. Something both buried deep within me and simultaneously everywhere.
In the chasms of heaven’s hells
My unshackled form achingly sleeps.
For my boughs I despise
Though their fruit I lust to keep
Thus, let bitter words shepherd the nature of thy nature,
For victors of an own war art but lesser losers in truth’s gaze:
Bless all thy sins, for they’ve led you to thyself.
With an ally’s summer zeal embrace thy winter foe.
For thy river dries not from the changing of its sea,
It swills thaws much as heaven showers turned storms.
And raging waters art golden shields for our routes home.
February 5
I imagine it was what I felt in the woods what led to the mysticisms that took our ancestors. The monotonous work in the bone burning cold of the natural splendors. It turns men into the beasts we speak of so foreignly. John rendered their simple manners unworldly; their dismissal of the height of the stacked knowledge of our civilization as clearly the actions of the ignorant. And they were indeed ignorant.
He never joined the brutes in the woods in their strange communions, for they strayed far from what was ours to what was fate’s. He never felt unrest for the moonlight or the enigmatic mountains that preceded it. His existence was never endangered by a swift conclusion or a dreadful episode. But with all his wisdom, I think he never understood existence in his escape from pain. For he who explores nature always betrays it and, in change, comes closer to infinity.
And so, John never heard the stories told within that unknown where we made foxes and fire coexist. But he had learned of many others of the same significance. And thus, he will keep the steady rhythm.
Dawn to dawn, winter sceneries hearts display
For when not, ardor’s brittle meadows nudely lay.
Yet slothful’s the gaze which bears sway
As the veiled construct crumbles the prey.
What’s vainglory at mastery’s greed?
What’s secrecy for warmth’s needed need?
On pillars of Ruth royalty’s charm rests not,
For golden crowns on dull hairs merely rot.
February 15 (The Fox Stories)
Many stories were sung and told in the night. Stories which I can scarcely remember yet their message certainly bear. Simple stories about things that were once felt and heard and seen, stories that in their lack of abstraction were unquestionably honest. Tales of foxes and wolves and heroes and warriors and travelers and common men and women. And although no prose lingered in my mind to be precisely transcribed, one was sung enough to be engraved in my memory:
Now,
Run from me
You fleeing smile.
Run from times
Made time worthwhile.
Burn your bones
With fleeting stones.
Light your lights
With fleeting fights.
Trust the flame
That kept you sane.
Lust the name.
Eat the shame.
But dear,
Don’t fear.
What’s time without us here?
And so, as we marched back to our beds, we were only left with the silence of the mountains and the fresh recollection of the tales to be reflected upon our lives. And in our dreams, our minds would wander free to attempt the recited feats. And in our wake, our bones would renew and our souls be born anew.
March 19 (leaving the brutes)
As we departed once again to the countryside into civilization, the ponds had thawed, the rivers flowing fast. The brutes farewelled us with great gratitude for the time that we had shared but did not attempt to extend it. They had lived too long in the wild to force a fixed plan upon a destiny that already came with much grandeur.
And now as I return, the steady sights are no longer foreign and the lingering route is no walk into the darkness. The discomfort that had once dominated my peace was now absent. And when the stillness of rest crosses the tenderness of beauty, I sink softly and deep. The moment an engulfing sea. And as I become detached from my desires and passions, I lay as nothing palpable or present, like an energy, a boundless shaping and reshaping source of transcendence. And for a second there is just the essence of everything, a grand common denominator rendered magnificent through the vessel of my mind.
June 15
Like leaves of the same root, everything and everyone a child of the same source. The brutes lived to die well, they walked to the rhythm written by a trillion lives before them. They did not become untangled in humanity’s entanglements to which our people had succumbed. And from this status I had embraced an unspoken doctrine and felt it grow ever more securely within me. And instead of corrupting the structures granted by divine academia, they folded and refined one another. And so, my mind was a demigod, a mixture of the men that were and the mankind that will once be. And as I gazed at the stars, I laid easy in this threshold.
The Light drops, the Night falls
- memories are all.
Moments enlarge,
And the hush fills the voice of Light.
He walks the forest.
What can he do but fall?
And he screams,
It’s bittersweet,
The agony he casts.
A feather escapes the bow,
Red fills the skies.
Death kills the wolves,
And he is alive.