Friday night, driving home along a familiar road from visiting friends, I stop by the elementary school. Solstice, the Strawberry Moon, the daylight lingers, and the dusk is long, multiple hues of blue. No one’s there, of course. I follow the path along the wetlands. Shimmering with lilypads and twilight, the water chirrups, sings, buzzes. Fish leap and splash. I loiter, and the dusk closes in. Still, I keep walking, following the path through the brushy woods up a slight hill, so I can get to the other side.

In my twenties, I had a tendency to get lost in the night woods, stumbling off the path. Years before cell phones, we were always searching for flashlights with working batteries, to visit somebody in a remote cabin. But I’m in familiar territory, and I take my time, in this bowl of evening, letting the cacophony of the wild chorus diminish my stringy thoughts.

I haven’t been back here for a good long while, but this school and the town and the library where I worked was a warm place, with its own complicated stories, sure. Those were the years when my life fell apart. I pause, hoping to see the quicksilver flash of a fish. Across the wetlands, a single vehicle rolls along the road. Maybe it’s the passage of time, or the evening’s mellifuous beauty, but I see suddenly that I was following two strands of my story in those years. I was leaving my husband (and for months, I wasn’t at all certain how to do that), and I was also recreating my life (and how exhilarating and hard that was, too.) I’ve written about my struggle with addiction; when I began to lift that veil, my fierce hunger quickened for what I had wanted all along — to pursue my own creative and often dicey life. In this throbbing evening, I sense the limits of language, that words fail here, that to divide creation and destruction into two words, held in two hands, is illusory.

The fish I didn’t see smacked through the water. Fireflies winked around me as I threaded my way back to civilization in the dark.

“Train Ride”

All things come to an end;
small calves in Arkansas,
the bend of the muddy river.
Do all things come to an end?
No, they go on forever.
They go on forever, the swamp,
the vine-choked cypress, the oaks
rattling last year’s leaves,
the thump of the rails, the kite,
the still white stilted heron.
All things come to an end.
The red clay bank, the spread hawk,
the bodies riding this train,
the stalled truck, pale sunlight, the talk;
the talk goes on forever,
the wide dry field of geese,
a man stopped near his porch
to watch. Release, release;
between cold death and a fever,
send what you will, I will listen.
All things come to an end.
No, they go on forever.

— RUTH STONE