This one got tired
of lugging his fortress
wherever he went,
was done with duck and cover
at every explosion
through rustling leaves
of fox and dog and skunk.
Said au revoir to the ritual
of pulling himself together. . .
I imagine him waiting
for the cover of darkness
to let down his hinged drawbridge.
He wanted, after so many
protracted years of caution,
to dance naked and nimble
as a flame under the moon—
even if dancing just once
was all that the teeth
of the forest would allow.~Jeff Worley, ‘Fortress’
photo: Paddling a kayak along the shoreline of a partly frozen lake in the Shawnee National Forest just a couple months before throwing everything into an old Dodge and leaving for Alaska – a sign, a marker, a no-occupant notice perfectly placed among fallen, accumulated brown oak leaves, mud, sand and some broken limbs, as if simply having vanished, now without a home, leaving the calamitous, disastrous tempest behind.