The hills beneath him stretched out like the curves of women. Bent
to the clouds he fell from the earth which geared him prickly as would
a range of *******, then soaring higher, he dived, topping valleys
reshaped downy now into ridges slowly writhed before catching
under toe his own dazzled stare on a water loch of milk and coal-
haired body strewn out to her lily'd bones and still falling, he dropped
to the break of morn dribbling wet sand from his eyes and woke
in the sparring light of his least favourite day.
In a grainish and utter room, where hanged more than two
pictures of two people, he sank down to Sunday diminished in sighs
from the four tilting walls and blew dead inward unfolding a book.
As he reached for some volume, a baby finger nicked the hair string
of his guitar and for a moment was reminded of her voice in the bedded
vibrations. Looking on her curves she felt the soft nape of her neck
with his eyes, then those same eyes unhanded her and she, his
dejected guitar, faced him unsung in the cornered glare of his boxed
in room. He felt frost in throes all that morning and sideways out
of doors— the sun looked back on him even colder. It would be hours
now until the end of days, so after lunch he went for a walk and a bird
sang nearly the whole way.
. . . . . . .
It was much warmer than he had fared it to be outside and having wrestled
with this idea, that the day was somehow harder than his soft, flat room,
the mere remembering was rote by him to his pangs. He turned, thinking
toward other things, like the void of driven streets or the mimicking cruelty
of shadows, until he saw a sullen field and left the road to dust. He knew
that if lost, walking through the lofted hills, he would end up in the ocean
so he headed higher to the crest and over then saw a stand of trees.
And facing the water that rilled on its way, in the tall grasses he saw
patches of red, flying with the black birds and his heart, in a boat of swells,
traveled like the red patches those birds carried. Snowed on alder trees
brushed by him, but the wind was blowing in from the west and there
were beautiful things to behold. A red-tailed hawk striped the ceiling
of his day by the sea and built an island to his eye and then his head sank
droning into a syndrome of birds as he joined in silence with them all
singing;
'ta— hee— tae.'
Showers of poppies spilled to his heel and the keel-brew of rushes and rain
tasted purple on its way perning to the sky. At one stop in the middle of his
path, he came upon a purfled coil, a briar snake, its body shaped in question,
unmoved and long. The dark Orphic frieze, branding his way, it would not
listen, as if she had always been there, deaf to his song. He felt the loss
of love by echoes from his room in the out of doors. The drumming trunks,
the stringing leaves harping and the water that gurgled by stones into poems.
A Northerly blew begrudging the trunks, the leaves and the stones and by
the woods sinking taller he felt rushes of time running as breath through
trees and felt chimes of things flying buttery like feathers to a bell.