Midway on my morning run. The sidewalk offers a detour away from the traffic of Debar Road into the densely buffering woods of Russian Jack Park. More often than not, I keep to the sidewalk, but ambient music pipes from my iPod and the aesthete in my brain is demanding more appropriate scenery. Last second, I choose the woods. It’s fall and the paper birches are shaggy and almost sepia in color as if a nostalgic memory of the landscape. Good decision, I think to myself

Before the scenery can transport me to a meditative state, I hear a crackling noise over the gentle harmonies in my ear. I rip my earbuds out instinctively as my sympathetic nervous system takes control. I’ve been intensely phobic of bears since early childhood, and thirteen people have been mauled in Alaska this year alone: a new record. Rationally I know I’m more likely to die a million other more mundane and domestic ways, but to have your neck clamped in the jaws of some brutal animal trips off the amygdala in a way slipping in the shower simply does not, even if bathrooms have claimed more scalps than bears ever will. Still, every fellow born-and-raised Alaskan I know has had bear encounters and I figure I’m well overdue.

Fear is a drug, and in large enough doses, a powerful hallucinogen, but there is undoubtably something large barreling through the dry foliage thirty feet to my right. Still in my periphery, my stalker remains a blur, not definitively a bear, not definitely anything really. I could be overreacting but careful deliberation is not a luxury right now so I max out my pace. Normally, the best deterrent for a bear attack is being as boring of an object as you can possibly be. Encountering a bear while running is the absolute worse scenario, but it’s too late to alter survival strategies. Something falls out of my coat pocket with a jangle but I don’t look to see if it’s change or my house keys. My focus is directly on the end of the detour where the trail meets Boniface Parkway.

*     *     *

Cut to six years later: I’m living in Portland, Oregon and my face, thankfully, isn’t a jigsaw puzzle I use as a conversation-starter at parties. I made it to Boniface Parkway and never did find out what was chasing me or what fell out of my pocket (it wasn’t my keys). Even though objectively nothing really happened, I still think about that harried moment whenever outdoors if only to contrast the mindset the two states induce in me. Nature seems so benign and well-behaved here, as if I view it through museum glass. While Alaska is imperious, chiseled, muscular, and vast, Oregon is lush, floral, brimming, clammy.

I run a lot more now than in Alaska, and if the trail I’m on offers a forested detour I always take it. I regard being outside a peaceful activity–to the point of being enervating at times–rather than alarming. Yet my interactions with my present surroundings seem mitigated by a kind of passivity and so it remains a low-engagement relationship. When people ask me about Oregon, I give them observations. But when people ask me about Alaska, I give them stories.

To redact my wounds,

you doctored my hues slyly.

But will these pigments

maintain their sterile fictions

as the underpainting bleeds?

Keeva, while collecting acorns, saw a strange bird, nearly as tall as she and purple like an artichoke flower, hop between two trees crossed like swords into the dark of the woods. Delighted, she chased after it, her bright red hair trailing her like the tail of a comet.

“The birch here are poised like maidens,” she whispered to herself, having lost the bird. She then saw, holding court at the center of the slim, graceful trees, a giant oak. The roots on this oak are thick as a soldier’s thigh, she thought, but what does this low branch resemble? She reached for it and upon her touch it began to move.

“You have returned,” said the oak in an eldritch language she somehow understood, and from his bark emerged a handsome face–strange yet familiar.

As they made love, she remembered words her mother told her as a girl while collecting acorns: “One day, little Keeva, the Tuatha Dé Danann will be born into this world once again.”

The magistrate was having a smoke and pondering alternative careers when a flutter of blue tugged the corner of his eye; a young man was walking briskly down Marlborough Street, his trench coat untied and catching the wind like a wing. The fine poplin was dyed with dusky woad, but to the magistrate, it looked cut from a bolt of evening sky.

He stamped his cigarette and chased the young man, keeping just shy of a run. The young man’s brisk pace was offset by his strange trajectory, veering left and right, sometimes onto the front steps of an office, sometimes into the street, and so was easy to catch.

“Pardon,” said the magistrate nearly out of breath. The young man turned, his face white as parchment, his eyes large and almond-shaped. “Sorry to interrupt your errands,” he continued, “but can you give me the name of your coat maker? It’s quite a beautiful garment.”

The young man thought for a second as if he did not understand the question. “No one made this coat, Sir. It has always been in my possession ever since I was born.”

The magistrate laughed. “That’s an awfully big coat for a newborn. Although I supposed you may have been swaddled in it.”

“Oh, it wasn’t a coat at the time, Sir, and it certainly wasn’t this size. My mother tells me it began as a blue dot on my tongue which grew into a coil of ribbon I used as a pacifier. My earliest memory of it was a bow tie I wore as a child, then as a shirt I wore everyday at boarding school. And now…” The young man took hold of both flaps of his coat and spread them out like wings.

The boy is mad, thought the magistrate helplessly infatuated. “Are you busy? Join me for a cup of tea.”

“But teatime is nearly over. You must be due for the courts,” said the young man pedantically.

“Oh, I have just resigned. Come, let us celebrate,” said the very recently unemployed older man unable to tame his excitement.

The young man said nothing, he just nodded and smiled a smile that reminded the older man of those faces painted on the backs of tropical insects.

It is the moonlight binding together

our miseries, the hurried wine stoking

the embers of lust, how you let my mouth

challenge your shy, satin lock that I blame.

O my anxious bud, split and cascading

my honeypaper trap, you have conquered

a good husband, blew noirish smoke over

the spotless cinema of my union.

Apologia: drunk on gutter songs

and streetlight, you foxed me into your cage

where I moan in the summery night and

maintain the joy that was my only vow.

As winter incites treason in our land–

soil constricts to stone, trees flash their spears

and the lake shuts its doors–you smooth an ounce

of summer into my thighs as we heat

each other with the coals of remembrance.