Seen By Instinct

More about Seen By Instinct

There is a country that keeps slipping between one moment and the next. No map
has held it because maps require duration. No traveler has crossed it because
crossing assumes a before and an after, and this place lives in the hairline where
those two fail to touch. Still, something in the blood remembers it. A child stares too
long at rain on a window and sees black trees beside a yellow lake. A dying man
smells pine where there is no forest. Animals stop in mid-step, ears lifted toward a
silence too old for weather.

The mountains there are not mountains as stone understands them. They rise like
decisions made before geology learned patience: blue blades, green walls,
impossible ridges cut clean against a sky the color of bruised gold. Forests gather at
their feet in shapes more exact than trees have any right to make. The lake holds
everything twice; its reflection is a second country pressed face-to-face with the first,
waiting to see which one flinches.

The creatures know this place better than we do. They stand at the water in black
silhouette, antlers branching like remembered lightning, muzzles lifted toward scents
that have never entered our air. They do not startle when the world changes around
them. Perhaps every deer that bolts before the branch snaps has seen it. Perhaps
every wolf that takes the wrong trail and survives has crossed one step through that
green silence and returned carrying no proof except the decision already made in its
muscles.

Human beings visit badly. Fever opens it. Exhaustion opens it. Childhood opens it
without asking. In the instant before sleep takes the body by the throat, a valley
replaces the bedroom wall. Water burns blue. Trees lean without wind. Something
horned watches from the opposite shore and knows exactly what we are.
Sometimes the body brings back an insult to reason: yellow pollen under a
fingernail, mud on a bare heel after a locked-room sleep, the taste of cold lakewater
in a mouth that has not left its bed. We wash it off. We spit. We call the dream
strange and go to work.

By breakfast the peaks have become “mountains.” The watching thing becomes “a
deer.” The impossible blue of the lake is beaten flat into a word already used for
oceans, paint, bruises. Memory does not merely fade; it domesticates. It puts fences
around what terrified it, hangs names on the fences, then congratulates itself for
knowing where everything belongs.

But the country is still there, jammed into intervals no instrument can prise open:
forests darkening beneath a sun that has never risen here, animals drinking from the
doubled lake, mountains holding shapes our waking world would grind down out of
embarrassment. Nothing waits for belief. Nothing needs our permission to remain.

And every so often, between one thought and the next, something in us looks up.

And finds something there already looking back.