bushman

At first we believed you to be so sure, so unshakably solid. There existed no element that made you twitch. You stepped forward so mellowly confident as if you had seen it all, survived it all, and now with your overly relaxed advice we wondered what brink you had just arrived from. You looked like a bushman with a ball cap, as if you paddled here from the middle of nowhere in your hand carved canoe.

But something didn't jar into place about you. So close to mimicking the workings of a wise man yet narrowly ajar from syncing with it. I think your sunken voice and thick facial hair reminded me of Santa only their repressed and sullen nostalgia's prevented them from every knowing it. That, or because you were a brunette.

Your perfectly timed tone, smooth and peak-less was evidence enough of your harrowing escapades in the underbrush of all things living out of sight. We pictured you under the moon with the flames of a lucid fire drifting with hallucination, into the bark of a fallen aspen branch.

You were not just the man of the land, you were the land. Every wisp of sound, every drop of dew, every cluster of sap, every animal's eye, every last footprint from here to the horizon and from that horizon to the next.