AFTER THE FALL-TWO

In the dark I can see the black line of trees, a slightly less inky midnight sky, and a small moon of reflection wallowing on wind-wave pond-ripples.

It's like a movie. 

I drop in a dive from the overhanging embankment, my feet finally freed from dirt and from weed, leaving behind everything that just now happened back there behind me in the woods.  Until that moment, now aloft, she hung on me too but then with the plunge into the water all her traces were gone and she became again only a thing in my head; a thought, an idea, a memory.

Baptized (again) by the water's chill, below the surface it is all solitude, complete.  The fish, you know, have nothing to say and only the bottom calls out its black purpose: "stay here."  There are always spirits at the bottom of a pond in the woods; they are taunted by the wood-witches gliding above the surface and by all manner of gnomes, goblins and billy-goats-gruff with mossy beards and hiding corners down at tree root, ferned-in by the cloud of magic surrounding the dew-dappled deerdoes. 

She sleeps there among them, her spell cast off and then turned on herself. 

Submerged I take rest.