WILD GOVERNMENT

Wading into the bamboo over-and-undergrowth, a broad green tapestry woofed with vines of kudzu, wild grape, wisteria, yamaimo and other strivings wrapped around every rising stalk, all battling for a bit of the sky...

You're trying to get to the opportunistic locust tree, one among the many that rise up here and there on untended properties, the flexy bamboo and curly vines grabbing at your boots and buttons, legs and arms, feet and tools, you have to be free of artifice and shaped like a snake, boar or fox to flow like life through this kind of mountain growth, this vegetable government, but you're unsuited in about every way possible so progress is slow, a constant leaning against the relentlessly buffered presence, much like trying to deal directly with a human government, which everyone living and dead knows is akin to madness, but once you get started, the further you advance the more of a waste it is to turn back, so you keep on going, you keep on trying, working at leaning farther, pushing harder, falling forward with all the meager weight you can bring to bear against it all while forging forward with your shoulders, legs and feet and you do... appear... to... make... some...... progress... though only a little—it takes a while…

But did you really advance, did you really, drenched in sweat but perhaps truly halfway there now, with scythe, clippers and saw, all targeted by the vines that pull at them, trying to wrench them from your hand or pocket, loop or holster, take them back to the earth, and you too, you might wind up here forever one big green verticality, overgrown before too long, wrapped in green, kudzu grows as fast as any bureaucracy, and you're really part of all this anyway, over your head out here in this green expanse, eyes peeled for a true sign of progress through all this green tape, this tangle that is home to snakes and hornets' nests, wild pig dens, deer beds and bear lairs, trying just to get to a tree-- the tree--

Is the view all that important from the living room of the house you used to live in back there in that other time, that other place so far away on one shore of this green sea, becoming the illusion that perhaps it always has been - that may be the true nature of things - fuzzy at the edges and shimmery at the center like an old movie, do you really need that comfort to which you may never return, can you have it more than once, be again where you spent such a pleasant portion of your life as it passes before your eyes and then you are at the tree itself, struggling to regain your focus, clippers and folding saw at the ready...

Wiping the sweat from your eyes you climb a bit, reach up and clip off the tips of the highest branches, saw off the big one that splays its fingers in front of the nose of the Sleeping Buddha out on the Lake, or so it looks from that living room you had back there, the cut branches fall, you climb down and turn around like a world turns around and begin the falling struggle of your journey homeward across and through this green governance, fighting for each step, the well-organized wildness plucking at everything about you that has an angle and seeks to be elsewhere-- and may be, before too long...