A group of mallards at Polson Park, acclimated to humans; the geese leave all of a sudden, fly away. 

Desires were placed upon a board to reduce our counts; we understood this on some level though text was conventionally unreadable to us, yet we understood the same, as humans understand what is going on even before learning to speak a conventionally recognized dialect.  The understanding pulsed through and exited our mouths as a call; honk we said, a single percussive honk, deep and hiccup-like.  It sounded like a human’s voice.

———————————————————————————————-

The beaver so serene, passive in appearance floating in the pool.

In the night air a voice passes, one beaver to another: “I’ll allow the purchase of that wooden sculpture of a golfer, painted burgundy and green, so long as it is kept outside; I don’t want it golfing in the house.”

———————————————————————————————-

Deer upon the rising plate of Middleton Mountain, bare and arid with treed mountains on the horizon:

I’m walking in a way I haven’t before; just stumbling along, feeling strange.  I used to be wary and nervous, always scanning for danger; my instincts are dulled now and I allow it to be so.  I see Bear on the horizon, and I approach him without attempting any change in my direction and without attempting to distance myself from him.  He himself appears wary, seemingly afraid of me, with a profoundly sad look in his eyes that itself would have sent the past me into a panic – what inkling of that sensation still pulses through me recedes quickly into the background as I pass him by.  I step on a cactus and walk with it for ten strides, and I look at the lake in the distance. 

A ways later I see Cow, separated from me by a fence and framed against the night sky.

Cow looked at me as she does, dully probing – an extremely weary dullness that seems to mask an unbearable and constant swelling of emotion, which in my perception only appeared to see release when I once saw it attempt to run alongside a set of trucks upon a dirt road, with an uncharacteristically urgent look in its eye.  “I remember you,” Cow says, in a voice I can only describe as sounding like a muffled, slow-motion recording of metal pipes being rubbed against each other.  Cow continues, “I saw you chewing some grass in one segment of the hill, then down in another segment, then bottom left, then top right.”  I’m able to halt the grinding of my teeth long enough to concede to Cow that this is likely true. 

By some mysterious means a desire to manage Cow out from behind the fence rises within me, and by some mysterious means this is accomplished within the space of two very focused hours; maybe I lifted the entire fence up for Cow to pass under, or perhaps I bored a boulder-sized hole within the fence with a giant screwdriver, the moon watching with studied interest.  Cow’s face, mute and apparently bored during these two hours, begins to exhibit the same attentive urgency I saw in it roadside as it takes leave of its former pastureland, and chooses to follow me down the path for the time being.  By this time my staggering gait has increased twofold relative to when I encountered Bear, but I am in no hurry.

We come up to Marmot City high on the hill of the Allan Brooks Nature Centre, where the past me used to build and break bread with Marmots.  Lively festivals I used to take part in, Marmots playing drums and blowing flutes.  I see two Marmots in the distance in front of an open-doored ambulance, speaking to each other in venomous tones.  One of them is trying to light a fire with a magnifying glass, the other is throwing darts at an optometrist office’s eye chart perched onto a painter’s easel.  They stir to as we approach, looking us over with interest and commiserating to each other at a lower tide than previous. 

Rising above this tide, enough so to be perceptible, two bemused waves flow toward me.

———————————————————————————————-

Marmots; are we not gophers?  Different?  A partly built-up area stands around us; artificial; here we are traipsing around what is framed upon a metal sign post as our very own space to cross; presumably some of our ancestors pieced about this same area, then unkempt and uncultivated.  As it stands, marmots millwright around, browsing underground or sunning upon stones. 

Some of us marmots have been pierced by the adversarial appeal of what is framed as “dark humour” deployed it is said as a means of “blowing off steam.”  In consideration of this one first may wonder what realities would be rendered by the obstruction of such steam left to fatten and spread within the body, with such steam, now blockaded from its passage out the ears, ballooning up instead to inaugurate a grand anti-opening of suffocating repression.  By this coin, pressed and varnished by the hypothesizing mind, a pair of marmots working as emergency room medical staff underground in Marmot City, tending to their habit of prophesying the alcohol content reading of incapacitated patients, are suffused with suffocation’s opposite, are given full clearance and safety from the ravings of steam.

Were a conscious rationalization of such simple pleasures to be unfairly plied from them, the pair would counter thusly; “I feel only incomprehension for those who would deny us this and find it difficult to model the type that would; one imagines puffed cheeks bearing down at us, steam blowing in an oppressive haze, forefingers waving.”  “Don’t think that this is heaven to us; you blow it far out of proportion.  It stands beyond word or rationale.  Ethanol levels are a universal reality, a fact of life; centuries, eons before our likes were brought into being, ambulance LED screens bid their time in knowing anticipation, that one day we would stand to dispassionately forecast and then check against reality the projected residue of intoxication.”