SHOULDER OF THE WILD

Last night I was driving Kasumi home from the station in the heavy rainy mist, she and I in the dashboard-lit, theater-like front seat with the movie "Mountain Road on Rainy Autumn Night" playing on the windshield, chatting on the way about everyday things, college, friends, work, supper etc., high-beaming our way up the mountainside through the thickening mist-rain when, like bestial lightning, all at once the theater screen was filled with the headlight-lit, rain-glistening matted dark brown hairy fur shoulder-back-thigh wildness of a great beast shape leaping instantly across the road and being struck only lightly but with a very real-sounding thump by the left side bumper, the sudden star of the movie abruptly leaving the screen and disappearing into the woods in the complete darkness of the wild home on the left side of the road, erasing our thoughts that had just now been, as we plunged all unready into the sudden deep awareness that one mere flash of the wild can engender, reality rending the quotidian with a bristling bestial flank wet with rain (hairs on the bumper later told us it was an inoshishi (wild pig)), the shoulder of the wild flashing by in the mist of our oldest mythologies, the wildness we carry in us at the bottom of our blood, wildness we are now and then vouchsafed to glimpse as on a dark road, mirror of the pathways that span our souls and passions, the ways of the ancient ones, who spark in our eyes and begin to breathe at such a glimpse, then fade back into the apparent quiescence of memory at the next turning in the road, becoming ember-dreams of being free as the wild... then on up to the house into the arena of light at the front drive stone wall where a huge owl was spiral gliding into light and dark, turning away into tree darkness at our approach, trying to tell us something...