I struggle up the mountain, tattered on its sides. The incline so steep and with no ropes to hold me. There is moon up above, punctuating the sky. Breathmarks, the verbs between the objects. I tumble often, scrape, slide and bruise. The outcome is uncertain. Way up, way down, no way out.

 

 

I clambered over the wall. It was there I found the well. I have gazed into that dark cylinder, at times with light in my eyes like flint-flecks, at times in weeping worry. How slick, how straight and untraversed the walls.

 

 

I float in a cloud-like balloon. I hover there in dream. I spend days traveling this way, ranging over presence and past, over water and plain, jagged peaks and craggy fjords, memories. I cannot describe what I perceive at this distance, it is untrustworthy like dark carrion in the sun’s glare.

 

 

I swim in my sleep. Lumber and slumber are rhyme. I move about that way when under, submersion and windowless light. This room in my cranium, this hallway my heart, tangled in entrails and veins, I wriggle a slow-motion dance. The death kind – the circles and spins.

 

 

I suspect it was a struggle, the clawing and chuffing up over the wall. An inside, an outside, beyond. A large forest of straight-spined blackened pines. I I I I l l l – giant digits seeming infinite, numberless, thick with resemblance and variations.

 

 

I discovered myself in the music, each bleak stick-figure with its bulbs of dark baggage and death-flags and banners. Occasionally a hollow, a void, a rest. I slept through the rectangles sheeted in white, I peered through the half-notes with clarity, I sounded the holes of the wholes. The rest scattered polyps of pain, dashes and branches running together, an aggregate noise.

 

 

I saw my father once, with his father. Saw through. Grandfather, eaten away on a hospital bed, what moisture remained dabbed the corners of his wadded-up eyes, pleading with my father to kidnap him home for his death. I understood then. About home being a safe place to die. That ends come out of beginnings and belong to each other. I watched my father depart.