Harvest Song
Of Death.

By D. Ebenezer Baldwin Bowles
CornDancer & Company

Death is everywhere around me. The billion brown and brittle leaves attest to its awesome presence. I've seen this kind of death before, though not often. I find it ominous.

The drought, which grips the land like an exhausted digression, robs the season of its visual splendor. The autumnal Equinox arrives today with a strange pallor on its face.

I want to sleep until December. I want to be slain again in the Spirit, fall in corporeal blindness into the waters of life, but something precious is slipping away from me. The hot green sap once ran with vigor. I could squeeze a supple branch and feel the sap circulate, surge, transport sustenance from the core to all lithe portions. Its stream is halted now.

Too many of the souls I view have become so weakened from artificial desiccation that they lose their religion. They fall in line, not dutifully but benumbed, to join the dull and wearisome march.

Once I possessed a roster of hopeful potential, held it firmly in the palms of my hands. It was a river that flowed through everyday. Its waters created a parallel flow of fresh friendships, mutually useful liaisons, alliances and unions of strength and good succor.

'Very Many Bones in the Open Valley'

Earlier today the Equinox arrived in the dry socket of a severe societal materialism. The traces of unity and fellowship that do manage to flow o'er the dry bones are merely a serial trickle.

She arrives, she stays a fortnight, she falls away. He races before me, runs along side for a season, drifts beyond sight into unknowing regions.

"The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley, which was full of bones," Ezekiel envisioned. "And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many bones in the open valley; and lo, they were very dry." (Ezekiel, Chapter 37)

You are lost to me, all of you imagined others. No more can I fathom our connection. I wonder if the link ever existed.

I look out windows, see the brilliant colors of the few trees I have dutifully fed, watered, and nurtured through the devastating drought. I walk outside, stand beneath a healthy eastern elm, a strong western oak, the bountiful northern pecan, the young southern cypress. On the boundary of a private citadel I see naught but parched grass and brown dullness, heaps of psychic garbage piled in the bins. The temps and vagabonds who hover on all frontiers of the hermitage chose to put their resources elsewhere. They let the slivers of nature under their stewardship become parched from thirst, burning and dying.

I will not condemn them, merely draw attention to their choices. I accept that there is not enough water to go 'round.

He Made the Children Drink the Dust.

"And it came to pass," Exodus recounts, that "as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the golden calf, and the dancing: and Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tablets of the law out of his hands, and broke them beneath the mountain." Moses burned the golden calf in the bonfire of the naked dancers. He made the children drink the dust. (Exodus, Chapter 32)

"If you had your way, you'd fire us all," the master businessman told me one tumultuous afternoon at the factory. I could have disputed the truth of his contention, but the dispute would have accomplished nothing. His wisdom far surpasses mine.

When the end game came, the only one fired was the herald.

"Hide not thy poison with such sugared words," he shouted. "Thou baleful messenger, out of my sight!"

Am I able to out-stalk the death throe? The sound of the parched wind races through the dead leaves like a dry tubercular cough. Can I dig deep and resurrect the dogged spirit of optimism? Maybe I shall muster the courage to rest in a respite of trust, then call it forth, this baleful optimism, call it to the front and the center, on your demand. I could, but why bother? Who is John Galt anyway?

To Maintain the Fiction that Something Matters.

A part of me wants to give up the ghost, fall there in the anonymous pile of the scuttling leaves, be dead and gone and done with it. The greater part of me works overtime to maintain the fiction that something matters. Were it true that fiction is truer than life, I'd have it made in the mild shade of my highest expectations.

I have, I own, I rely on a gnawing, explosive, supposedly eternal kernel of an inner fire called an Imagination. The death of the natural spirit is far more severe, so much starker than I imagined.

Eons have passed since I saw her last. She must be elderly now, the beautiful sage of my mind's eye, which peers into the old days in search of some desperate solace. I cannot fully picture her as the crone. Elegant and beautiful and profound, she stood beside the doorway of my potential, pointing a direction for me to wander. Go now.

She, too, drifts far away from this citadel. Our tenuous link is interminably broken. She, too, has rejected me. She falls to the wayside of a raging entropy.

The day and the night stand equal now. In the fields the farmers chop the cotton and the corn, the beans and the squash. I would join them, but I'm sitting on the edge of a ditch next to the millstone. I have been assigned the task of making the straw doll. Beside me in the dark dust lies the severed head of Saint Matthew. I glance at the head, disdainfully, on this moment of passage from a fulsome season, but to what? On the morrow, when I awake with the others, night will have conquered the day.

WATCH FOR MISSIVE THE TWENTY-FIRST
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