At Lake Merritt, on the morning of my 70th birth, 11/24/22

Last year, on my 70th birthday I was housesitting, waiting on a balcony by the lake, which was really a slough—a brine estuary glistening with adamantine stars in the hard winter light. I watched the early joggers pass by in slow-mo, their breath visible in the crisp air. And the small red hands of maple leaves, exhausted by all that applause with the wind, they danced down the footpath, across the sidewalk, and flirted with the dangerous wheels of passing cars. We waited for the windsongs to arrive, but the clouds cast their tarot cards on the mirrored lake, as wild geese patrolled the surface like U boats. I drew the hanged man. Some war was brewing, but there was yet another war in progress. Story of our lives. No escaping it. Once Iraq. Then Ukraine. Now, Gaza. The war against nature is a war against the self. I was so near, yet so far from home, that the words never came. I was mute. As if I were never born, as if the wind never had given birth, though this lake was once my constant companion, my familiar, perhaps even a muse. I remember one birthday as we circled the lake—maybe 10 years ago—for I measure this friendship in decades—I once saw what I thought was a white arm reaching out from the water, and I thought, Lady of the Lake. But it was the jawbone of a horse, or mule with large yellow teeth like pawns on a chessboard. Not a sword. No warrior heroes. No dragon quests. Its mate, long gone, much like mine. Has it really been five years? I leaped from the stone gat into the water to retrieve a story of the past, imagining a wilderness of horse-drawn carriages disgorging their bounty from a distant time. Pierced by an arrow of light, I could only imagine my Saggitarian kin, the dance of their clattering hooves on cobblestones, a type of music locked in the distant past. A sound that still stirred the blood and made me remember the names of my dead horses, the memories I harbored during that supple time of youth, when we rode out into the mist, seeking the glimmering light. And the articulate wind was singing, singing to me, a melody of the cosmos on the day of my birth. But I could not celebrate this turn of year, for I had no words left to mark the occasion. A slender silvered fish leapt skyward, as if attempting the rudiments of flight.

11/29/23 Write On! with Susie Terence