(My class, "Writing Place: Landscape, People, and the Natural World," on Whitehead Island, Maine, August 17 to 20 has only 2 spots left. http://www.whiteheadlightstation.org/programs.html)
Entering the Abandoned Grain Mill at Dusk
Allentejo, Portugal
It’s as if generations of bells accompany us – cow, sheep,
the rituals of being human. They carry the lengthening
shadows
and are in turn carried as our small processional, like a
band of peasants,
rings through. The trail is clear and we have only to
follow.
We have only to follow, and the walk, not far, is far enough
to move
through field, past barking dogs, along the road and into
brushy woods
as the sun’s last red lingers on tree trunks and fence
posts. We find the
approach through dried grasses has been swept clean.
The approach has been swept clean. Spent seed heads mark the
edges.
We enter shyly. How will we touch loss, rambling
architecture made only
by what was at hand? Rooms that once had functions and names
now
spaces open to the sky, millstones still and silent, not a
speck of grain.
Not a speck of grain. Everything that could be taken away,
taken away.
We each make our own associations here, layers of peeling white
stucco
revealing lives lived. We are old enough to know those
things that have
finely ground us down over time: sometimes to dust, sometimes
to flour.
