Walking Home with Wet Feet Looking out over this weary farmland abandoned to November, abandoned to trailers, car-dumps and second-growth, seeing endless wires on weathered poles, shot-riddled roadsigns, the sprung silo smothered in grapevine under grey sky sodden as your socks with ditch-water-- you can't imagine that beneath you spring water, crisp as vodka from the freezer, runs through grottos studded with calcite crystals by colonnades of limestone over falls to churn pools full of blind fish and insects; you can scarcely credit a secret world cupped in the burr oak's hand, beneath whose cork marvelous cities of carpenter ants hide, whose roots are a maze of shrews, whose boles hold an owl, a squirrel and a nest of wasps. Unseen above the clouds sun and moon shine in opposition; a chevron of geese cries of absolute liberation. You can only shiver, sigh and limp home in twilight. © Dale R. Hobson. All rights reserved.