STARTLED I hadn't gone three steps before the mocking began. The bell again, of course. Flutes blowing slowly, but the bell. From its ringing, eyes looked out: the world was paper to them, and the writing was something else. He spoke, and the spokes formed a wheel around me. We could move forward or back up, my nature as axle supported a black box appropriate for either movement. The experienced world was not callous, though it had lost much to its emptiness. Wider and wider, emptier and emptier. I saw my experience and startled. I reflected on this and tried to understand. He spoke again, this time about grief and its connec- tion to the growing emptiness. After gravity, after vibration, grief will be the last force at work. Very soft light this mor- ning, the eastern cedars green wherever they get a chance, brown otherwise, or gray. I will never understand what I did by living. A choice could be made, wood of the trees fashioned into boats, the wide inward-to-outward sea, steel on board to cut with or build. Voices over the water, no echoes, the song disperses ahead of us, will we find it on the shore that catches us? Or it may go on ahead, following the rivers up to the mountains, their marble revealed, something always too hard and upward to gain, but the echoes! at last, shod in our troubles, they come back to us.