It would not come out of the waste of autumn, she knew,
as she knelt among the yellow corpses of leaves shed
by the elm trees surrounding. She knew, too,
that it would not come out of the ancient
voice of the Earth, rumbling and maternal,
which she had heard of.
It could never be pulled right
from the ethereal rivers of her mind,
wrestled straight from the blank banks of her consciousness.
She wondered if a metaphor might do, or if
she could reconcile misery by some pithy
turn of phrase in an altruistic sort of way. That
got her thinking about humor, and whether she ought
to go for some kind of deadpan wittiness, but she knew
the brevity could kill it anyway–if it had no substance.
She noticed a ladybug slowly making its way
up the side of one of her Doc Martens.
She watched it for a moment,
then flicked it away with a manicured nail.
She was impatient. What if it was already out there,
undiscovered, gliding around the unending spiral eddies
of the Internet—or printed on the side of a bus somewhere,
glaring down inner-city trees planted long ago but still skinny,
or hung up and framed on the wall of a pre-teen, maybe bedazzled,
blown up, expendable? It could be hidden, swept up beneath some
distant mountain, no longer vulgar and digital but solid and true,
hidden just for the truthfulness of it, sacred only
for having never been discovered.
Can you imagine? Finding it out here, tangibly real.
What secrets might she then glean from among the trees
or down in the soil, whispered through the mouths
of thrushes or sunken in brooks?
Might she not now check for bars,
open the app, type with expert thumbs,
Great day for a hike?