Christopher Louvet
Southern Anthem
The man goes into the woods because a man must go into the woods.
He crosses into the charred pastoral with a step over bobbed wire, what remains of a fence.
Musky rot brown of felled trees. Smokey Appalachian edges. Green memories cased in cadmium red clay, like loss before it is loss.
A man makes his own myths if he doesn’t have any.
He meets a bear—the gun doesn’t go off. He’s aware of his breath in the air, of the bear’s breath in the air.
Dimensionless, the bear is nothing to shoot.
I could be king of infinite space, the man thinks, if only I didn’t have bad dreams.
The man thinks of the soul’s many mansions. Castles he builds around him crumble like a roof of wind.
He thinks that the bear is a woman, that the woods are a woman, but the bear will not sing to him or through him. The woods refuse him.
Bear, the man says, I don’t suppose it’s your fault.
Light doesn’t fill the air but seeps from within the trees, the forest floor, the wind between the leaves.
A vision of the world emptied of him.
The translucent moon nearly halved, the afternoon folds upon itself by pulse, by accident. And on into the night.
As in any comedy, the man can’t come back from this.