IN THE DESPOILED AND RADIANT NOW
A group of us had gathered on the porch for a drink at the end of the day—late August, Vermont, sun bright-but-downshifting, leaves green-but-red-tinging—when a moose wandered into the meadow behind the house. She stood chest-deep in the tall grass, so dark she shone like a black, still lake. No one had ever seen a moose in that spot, or so close. Just an hour earlier, I was circling the mowed edge of the meadow, woods on one side, milkweed on the other; with my arms outstretched I could almost touch both. As I walked—and there isn’t a why to be had in this story—I was conjuring moose. Considering it a moose-like day, and why wouldn’t one want to step out of the woods—not to see me but just because. Because if I were a moose, I’d want exactly, full and straight on, summer turning, the air sweet, the greens thick. Then the moment cracked open, stretched wide, went deep, and it was moose all around. My own measure was moose-hipbone-high; each hummock I stepped on was spanned by a hoof, each branch overhanging muzzled out of the way. A musky, rich, rooty scent rose and a hunger drew powerfully forth (those catkins so tender I wanted a mouthful). I don’t know why it wasn’t a deer, hawk, or fox moment; I have no experience at all with moose-presence. But that’s what came.
And then—there she was. Golden where sun touched her haunches. Wet-nosed, mouth full, and quivering at flies, before a porch full of noisy observers.
I don’t mean to centralize myself in this story—just that I had been in a state to sense moose, and was given to register ease, ripeness, desire in a way not my own. When the moose turned after maybe ten minutes of chewing and watching, and shuffled back to the woods in her heavy, mild way, everyone on the porch applauded.
But I kept what happened earlier to myself. Telling would’ve made it a footnote, or worse, a groovy synchronicity. That such a moment marked me wasn’t a point I wanted to make. What it did mean, though, is such things can be trusted, such moments held and believed. Like yesterday’s fast certainty that the street I live on, the ground below, was suffocating, and all the arterials, rivulets, creek beds, all the would-be nest sites, spots where seeds might have rooted and greened, while not dead, were only partly alive. The chart I consulted on how roads are made, the multiple layers for weight-bearing and drainage, the fixed order and variety of materials poured and packed in confirmed it: no simple, cartoonish peeling away, no rolling up of asphalt like a rug would be possible. And suddenly seeing the road—no, hearing its straining, a sharp in-suck—that was an unbidden grief on a otherwise beautiful fall afternoon.
A body’s desire for sun-on-flank, and the land’s stoppered breath in search of release. An unseen moose making herself felt, and stifled land registering in the chest—such moments arrive trailing their shine, flagging their ruin. Without words they come calling and let their rogue impression be held. That taste in the air of musk and hunger, the feel of a street’s very hardened skin—such is my latest proof: there exist ways of listening a listener hardly understands. In the despoiled and radiant now, these moments approach—the presence of ease and the presence of ruin, a lit stillness, a dense grief, impossible to unknow—like any great love or loss taken into the body.