Writing Inspired by Bishop

On the trail traveled by my bare feet— by my mother’s, father’s sister’s, brothers’, daughter’s, dogs’, tourists’, every year. The path, usually littered with boot prints and broken lures was clean— an erased chalkboard. It circled the lake, which was never the same size twice, found me on it alone. The quiet humming of motor boats and splashes of kayak paddles could be heard across the still water to the river’s mouth. It was summer, no autumn when the needles smothered the red clay like a woven Miwok basket, when I found myself a sparkling pinecone, wet from the licks of the lake. Ice had glued itself to the scale tips. The color was mahogany, the reddish brown of my hair after giving birth. The cone clung to the branch that had left its mother (or perhaps the mother expelled it from her trunk because of the weight) the way an infant is attached to a snipped umbilical cord— slimed over with moss, bristled with bark from growth—the only memory it would have of ever having been connected to another living thing. I couldn’t help but carry it over the forged, yet raw terrain tracing the lakes edges. The knocking of blue jays and the crinkling of scattered squirrels bounced off the granite. The smooth clay mixed between my toes. We traveled together until the end where I sailed the cone out into the frigid waters to return home.

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