On Routine: Back to the Roots
May 2018
Wake up at four thirty. Grind the coffee. Make the pour-over coffee. Boil eggs for B’s trip to the city. Send him off and immediately melt into relief when I watch his car headlights curve into invisibility behind the sentinel pines. Make the second cup of coffee and walk out to the abandoned bridge over the Esopus. Place coffee in the patch of sedge tufting through the crumbling concrete as I inch under the No Trespassing tape. Take each sip like sacrament. Cocoa and soil. Chaga and cinnamon. Delicious. Flash of bone-white against the strawberry light that leaks upwards from behind Mount Tremper. Inky wing flap. Sunrise capillaries through a vasculature of sky and wind. Clots in clouds. Stains the creek pink. The eagle flies to its nest in the tallest sycamore that stands like a sylvan stitch at the confluence of the Beaverkill and the Esopus. I’ve noticed sycamores do this. They stand at riverine intersections like liquid Hecates. Are their roots directing the underworld traffic?