The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Kirsten Hampton FLIGHT the right way Pass the Blue Mountain Deli on the right but take the left fork Even though it feels like you should continue straight. This road is unsigned. Travel .02 miles bearing left beyond Ulster County Road #35 Pass the Tango Café with the spray painted sign Make a hard left sharply uphill as if you are turning back on yourself At the stone wall turn right until you get to the dead end Where it continues with a dirt road going steeply uphill You cannot see the top of the road You cannot see the cabin from the road Turn right up the steep unmarked driveway and keep accelerating so you don’t get stuck Come see why I left my Big Apple accounting life Come see the white clouds resting in the valley of our blue mountain view. CANANDAIGUA LAKE The Indians called it “the chosen place” and it is mine too a blue reservoir between rising hills, the fourth largest of the Finger Lakes, part of two outstretched hands. I answer their beckoning and come in summer to hear the cottage door slam and the till and stones crunch as we tread in our sandals to the shore or I come anytime in my mind when my heart begins to race, or my palms sweat, or I feel that unsteady sense of self. The high clouds over the west drumlin wait to make a day’s end their billows will thin with the jet streams and coat the sky a shell of color, the turtle shell, the Iroquois believed, the only one strong enough to carry the world. The kids get in and I swim, the top layer of water warm, milky thick but a toe below the cold hints of perch and blue gills darting in the weed beds and a lake floor that rolls, then drops more than two hundred feet, to the dark deep the glacier carved two million years ago. Overhead I see the Iroquois green corn moon, still out to celebrate the ripening, and between the far moon and depth below I drift, weightless, timeless, in ancient hands which hold me when I am here, or anywhere. Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |