Blah blah

My American subconscious calls me West.  I listened in that history lesson, the one where Gast's Columbia (a fine woman) hung on the projector in the background in suspended progress.  And I wanted to go with her, to the place where my father lives.  That was in a room at a school in Northeast Ohio.  They too were westerners, once.  But no longer, now fixed in the western east of the United States.  

Here I am in green woods of the middle-northeast and it's not enough to disjoint the sea otter bones I remember finding on an island in the Puget Sound.  Those otter bones mean much to me: the way they found me, intrigued me to the things I didn't know were there.  For example, the seaweed flecks dried to the skull, which had sprouted from the ocean floor, and the people who used to dive down there to harvest it, the way that people's women beaded oyster shells to look like sea otters, and the dances walked around cedar fires in those adorned shawls.  By "there",  I mean "out West".  By "things",  I mean magic.

Here, in the wild of the East, I'm missing out on something.  In the brooks and river, I find no bones.  Sometimes, when the woods are red here, I think I might just stay.  It could be nice since the water's always warm in the summer and salt wouldn't sting my eyes.  And in winter I would still be pleased by the isolation of the deafening snow.  In these woods, though, I am touched.  Everything stands close together here, cloaked and braided by tree limbs.  What few clearings I find, marked private, invite me to trespass in order to feel far away from the deep woods that might swallow me.

I am fooled in thinking that gold waits to be panned out West.  The salt water tastes better from memory than at the back of my scorched throat.  The East isn't so bad.  But I want to join the westward migration that runs and continues to run for all of these years now.