Begin by walking the cracked, chamomile-paths.
Let the path stretch across a wide stubbed field.  
Fill the air with the sounds of birds.  
Fill the air with fat bees and the machine hum of insects. 
Post appropriate markers that mark miles but not the whole truth.

Try to contain the fissures of time in each quick step. 
When you walk under the lone oak that constellates the field 
like the last visible star, smell smoke.  
See the ghosts of hundreds of other thick oak trunks 
that once crowded this space.  
Hear their lost leaves whispering.

When you reach the man-made lake 
constructed to replace the natural lake, 
walk the perimeter.  Observe the cattails 
that cage the floating bodies of seven white pelicans 
that have stopped here to rest on route back to the sea.

Look out across the drought-dry field 
and imagine a chain of hundreds of lakes 
linking their way back to the sea. 

Drain them for the good soil underneath. 
Fill them with soot.  
Fill them again with feces and urine.  
Cover what’s left of them in brambles. 
Get tangled in the sticky blood of berry juice.

And when you near the last of the water, 
the floating pontoon bridge, 
and the sounds of children playing baseball 
in the dirt on the chalked diamond, 
let a red-snake T-bone the trail.

Let it open in you a wound that, at its center, is a mouth.