Whiskey Dreams of Pixie Dancers

I once saw light flickering through leaves of a tree, a tree not like the others on the mountain, and would swear I saw a dryad dance amongst the branches, who turned into a wren and flitted away. I saw a pale nymph dancing, and she turned into a girl with short hair and whose lips taste of red wine. Rain running sideways like the river it once was, and a mountain basin turn from green, yellow, gold and silver to a world of white, blue and infinity. Through such eyes I see this world, all that I see now merely a thin shade over the layers that came before it.

I have closed these eyes and opened my ears, to sounds of a world long past. The beat of grouse wings, the shrill of a hawk and rumble of a rushing creek turn to the raucous laughter of old prospecting miners singing and drinking their joys around fires, the whistle of wind between old logs of a cabin. I have heard the resounding crashing of two bull elk fighting in lodge pole thickets in autumn, the snaps and bugles dissipating across the ridges, becoming the songs of tribal peoples who’s spirits have never left this land.

I have shut my ears and opened my hands, feeling a world that is largely forgotten today. The hickory wood, cold weight of a double bit axe that has seen many cords of timber, many hands and generations gone by whose sweat and leather skin has worn the handle to glass. No instruction needed, for it has a song transmitted by touch. The transformation of self and matter via skill and craft. The rough granite of the mountain, and the chert flakes that are like razors, the unyielding softness of pine bark and the wisp of prairie grass reminds me that I am part of it all.

I have shut my hands and opened my mouth, my body light as wind rushes in. The taste of sagebrush, cedar and larch seasons the sky, and I can taste their colors as splashes of color behind closed eyes. The water of the river ceases to be cold and clear, becomes a life clock, always running, the its song apart from stories of those who drink from it like a writer from characters in a book. The burn of whiskey, harsh and tingling, a story of secret practices and traditions passed from spirits to man before man learned to turn stone to iron.

I have shut my mouth, and opened my heart, a dangerous thing in a world lost of magic and song, she has walked into it. She is Salish, Celt, Assyrian, Roman, Scythian, Asian, Maori and Zulu. She embodies life, dance, song and love, and her face never ceases to change for a hundred thousand years of time, but her eyes rage a fire that rivals the sun and moon, who must bow to her. She embodies a story that shall never stop being written until all the stars are lost.

I have looked into a mirror, lost for wolfish amber eyes looking back. Ripples in the water turn those wolf eyes to the sweeping wings of a raven, two creatures who can cross the river between worlds, inseparable yet always separate. How else would I see the symbols to write on cave walls, outlasting everything?