Following the Shadow When I walk I could easily forget my body in motion, and watch my shadow as it glides across the ground, over everything, without obstacle. Each time I walk I could choose and appoint my shadow as my alter self, my soul walking free. I could go out on a bright day and wander everywhere and follow with admiration the sometimes surprising grace of its movements. I like to imagine it would know the way better than I do. And so I find myself leaning further into the shadow, as if to transfer to it my own volition and momentum, gradually letting go of this awkward body with its long life of wearying missteps. And when obscuring clouds come over, I know that the shadow does not disappear, but instead spreads out across all that I can see of earth. Perhaps then it encompasses the world. The Expanse In another life that must have been my youth I walked beaches of a distant ocean. And then years later other beaches of a different ocean, and then yet another. Always drawn to wander the boundary of the known and unknown worlds, looking for anything that had been brought to me from the other side--shells, driftwood, seaweed. In this way the whole expanse and depth of the sea spoke to me of itself. Even now, finding myself in another life, here among green hills and dark woods, I'm keen and alight for any things that might be brought forth from all that is unseen. This life of appearances is rich with signs. Each day presents a new reading of whatever comes. I watch and listen. The sun comes up and it goes down. The birds come and go. Once I found antlers shed by a deer just outside my back door. Seer I have settled into this quiet place where little happens-- watchful for changes and portents, any tiny openings into the future. A future to be sifted out from a hazy spectrum of dangers-- fire and ice, the slow dissolution of the familiar, hardships as yet unnamed. Though every day I strain to see I can see little but bits of love passed on, from this point, beginning with me, from one to others and from them to yet others, stretching far forward in time, fragile bridges into the nothing. The Lake It has stood by us all these years, steadfast and silent ally. Not asking, not telling. Seen here from our house just a thin bright sliver of blue with tiny white houses stacked around its shores, a dock and some bright dots of sailboats, scattered, as if to make invisible forces visible. Closer in the shallows children swim laughing in bright water. We can't see the depths but they are not so far and as we get older we imagine them. Timeless currents revolving in the dark, somewhere underneath our life. We can see so little of what is happening. We love the lake but sometimes we love even more whatever made the lake, and whatever made that... The Secret History of Summer Finding myself left, becalmed in an aftermath, I wandered down the trail through woods from the house to the creek, as if something in me sought the water's level. And stood for a while, as I had before, in that place where no one ever went. Where the passage of time was slowed to the flow of the barely rippling water. I loved that when I swam in the creek I could see no houses or roads or telephone poles. Could not see where I'd come from or how I'd come to be there. Only clouds and water, trees and wildflowers. Happy at last to have nothing left over and to feel the simple fullness of my life flow on through me, unimpeded.
E. J. Evans is the author of Ghost Houses (Clare Songbirds), Conversations With the Horizon (Box Turtle Press), and the chapbook First Snow Coming (Kattywompus Press).
