Tomorrow shall be the day I think. After being holed up here because of the rainstorms and power outages, the ice, the weather warnings, not to mention winter sicknesses , tomorrow shall be the day. I will rise with the sun, somewhat like the sun, strong and determined, not too quickly, yet confidently. We will warm the van, we will get ready, and we will travel out to the greater roads and meet the day. I wonder who will be in the far fields or forests. I think we shall go to the open spaces, and see the flaxen growth kissed with the week’s snow, and then with the new sun.

As I write this, the coyotes howl and their sounds carry across the crisp and raw and cold dark. The only light comes from a distant street lamp. There is no snow presently descending, but a wind wrestles loose flakes off rooftops. This snow twirls and swirls around the air and while it comes dancing down in front of the light, I sometimes step outside for air and to survey the winter or ask the moon questions it never answers. Swirl and swirl. The coyotes, loquacious, have perhaps caught something. I don’t know much about it, but I try to imagine what the coming days will be like. I look down into the darkness of winter and it’s quiet for a moment. A transport truck whizzes by a few miles over, on Coyote Road. Maybe the coyotes know what life is about. But they are hard to read being the tricksters, shape shifters, nomadic wanderers existence meant them to be. Surely they know things I do not. But I can’t enter their sleeping dream or their living dream enough to understand.

The large rocks, the town birdhouses, the frozen pond small, will all be there in the morning. I know where the yellow buttercups hide and grow by the hundred, untouched, , near a small marsh down the way, when the summer is in full bloom. I know where the deer like to cross, at the far and far back, where the valley ends and paths begin to meander down to the open fields if you know how to follow them correctly. I know how one morning, such as I hope tomorrow will be, a fox, in the distance, turned and looked, then ran up and up a hill to its summit and over and away into the forest, the fox and the forest both a mystery, but alive, like a daemon, like a muse, like a story itself with no beginning or ending, or like the invisible but pronounced and loquacious living wind.

***

Brian Michael Barbeito is a Canadian poet and photographer. Recent work appears at Fiction International and The Tishman Review.

See The Astrology House also by Brian Michael Barbeito here.

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