I’ve traveled as far as Odysseus from Ithaca since the time I first heard tell of a gathering in the night woods. Since I sat, back to a knotty pine wall, typing my first honest words in an epoch. 

Since I gingerly set them aloft. I still write this way, back against wood, legs outstretched. Wetting the tip of my index finger and smoothing my eyebrows, feeling for grit between my incisors. One bottom tooth is sharp to the touch from the infinite times I’ve dragged it under my fingernail bed, looking for the right words. 

And the dog still lies, washed by snow on a white duvet, instead of brown and flea-bitten in the back of my truck. His eyes are milkier, his gums bloodier and his joints flex gently as he chases down flying things in his dreams.  

I only live across town from that time. I can smell the fires from Ithaca’s shore.  

But I’ve been joined and unjoined since. Declared myself whole to the wide world and been unceremoniously disassembled in an operating theatre. I’ve lifted a jug of whiskey to my lips before the house awoke and spent the day curled around my own knees. Risen before the sun to demand the pistons in my chest do something, anything, but quiver like a kicked mongrel. 

There was a time that the colours disappeared completely.  

Before, I was a baker, a traveling minstrel. I ate fried dough in a swamp in Louisiana and watched men in colourful tatters chase chickens in the freezing rain. Ate a sow’s belly from a smouldering cauldron. I watched plastic door handles snap in the snow and I left the windshield-struck body of an owl, cleaved from its wings and claws, on a promontory in the Appalachians.  

The music in my head woke me up when I was sleeping.  

I have a retirement plan now. I discuss compounding interest. My belly is barren and I’m afraid to fill it. Afraid it might not take to filling. I keep a green notebook full of little squares that are checked when I change my engine oil or send some small token to a child not bound to me by blood.  

Some mornings when I wake, there’s a tang that’s sour and old, and I shoo it out with incandescent pine and black tea and maple.  

And some mornings, the birds streak across the blue and give way to clouds, and the hoarfrost-hung air gives up no smell at all.   

And it’s easier to soothe a dull ache with skittering blue light than to pull a knife from its sheath and tease out slivers from a red-run hand.  

I first wrote to share the story of a fire with a covey of kindred spirits, and then again when I pulled things from the earth and felt they bore repeating. And I’ve been grateful this world has kept me haunted. 

It is a gift to know there are others that sit with pottery shards spilling through their fingers, listening with curiosity to the sound of clay hitting stone.  

…Please visit the Dark Mountain Project, to which most of my recent writings have been dedicated.

my neighbor has a bug zapper, and it stays on blue all night long. I turn on my fan and my humidifier to drown out the sound of insects constantly being drawn into its siren song and annihilated. 

For two summers I have stood at my window and listened to it sing in triumph as it claims another life. I can’t imagine how many each night. sometimes the sound lasts a long time, and I think it must be a sphinx moth, or even a bat, following prey into the light. it sounds so electric for so long. like wings stuck to a searing grate, convulsing. 

I wonder what it looks like in the morning underneath the light. and I wonder that the sound of the dead and dying doesn’t trouble their sleep. 

I’ve stared through a rifle sight and delivered a killing blow to a baby pig. But I find this machine barbaric.  

Today I saw a chipmunk sit in the middle of the road, eating the remains of a ground squirrel. 

Every night when I undress in front of the window, looking out into the blue dot in the blackness, listening to the sounds of it, I wonder why I don’t sneak out at five in the morning, unplug it, and smash it upon their front lawn. Or secret it away and hide it in a black plastic trash bag until suspicion has passed.

Same reason I don’t drive to deliver diapers to the captive children in Arizona. same reason I fiddle with the radio dial at the freeway offramp, where a gray old man, the same gray old man, cowers in the heat. Same reason I buy fried chicken and bacon. 

Same reason i kept driving the afternoon i watched the truck rend apart the doe, its legs kicking, belly cleaved from its chest cavity. Same reason I skirt around the drenched wings of a hawk moth, its magic powder drowned and draining. 

But I always let the wolf spiders I find in the sink free.

One morning I found two—one large, one small. The small one was missing several limbs, which were scattered onto the white porcelain in the bluedawn light. I imagined the night that had just passed, and I scooped the small one up in a quarter pint mason jar, the kind i drink whiskey out of most nights, and let him free at the front of the house.

The larger one I let out at the back.