ACCOUNT OF MY DAYS
Sequence: 4
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.