The Close of the Year (prose)
Below me a fog lake slowly wells up aid roils over like milk flowing down the hillsides in a slow dance that bathes the trees with dew and moisture on the slopes of Gilliam Ridge. The peaks of the Cedars and the Red Slide jut out of angular winter shadow like pyramids catching the sun.
Below me, hikers climb out of the ravines of Austin Creek, and a chainsaw buzzes, a woodpecker calls to her mate, and somewhere far off, an early lamb bleats for its mother. Somewhere to the south near Point Reyes a killer is stalking unwary hikers and the corpses are an unholy offering in a place such as this that cries "no more blood".
A bloodthirsty killer who knows these woods, who somehow lures young women away from the relative safety of numbers, and places precise bullet holes in their heads. Why this? That these woods have come to harbor such evil? The sunshine is so warm. I take off my woolen clothing, my bare skin and feet are stroked by feeble winter sun. My eyes grow heavy with sleep. Should I also expect danger from that intruder this far north?
The body of fog roils toward me like spores furring on excrement and three ravens cut across its surface making their own kind of offering to the land.
The sun in the southernmost position of the sky needs fire, not blood, no bone-fires to bring it back from solstice. I hear the ticking of the clock. The ticking of the clock... a line from one of my earlier poems.
I learn to settle down and rest comfortably like a cat among lines of my own choosing. I inherit them, I, who disavowed them, they keep coming back in all of their angular beauty—an untamed vision to haunt me—like those nameless faces of those murdered women of Point Reyes.
A roaring sound is heard. Does the fog roar through the trees as it passes through? or is the fog a lake, and do the the waves lapping up against the shore of the ridge roar? or is it the eyeless souls and mouthless tongues of all those murdered women of Point Reyes?
12/22/1980
added 7/17, minor revision
A reference to the Trailside Killer
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