(Glade, World, Master, Boy, Hero)

                                                 GLADE

There is a glacier.
Its blue tongue’s tip just tastes a frozen gorge.
There is a gorge, its walls shattered by cold; a once-green thing that, in dying, birthed a thousand aching fissures. It works its jagged way downhill, round ragged rifts and drifts until it comes upon a little frosted wood.
There is a wood, an island locked in ice.
Within this wood the gorge descends. It wanders and it wends; it brakes and all but ends outside a clearing wet with sun. And there, forking, its bent and broken arms embrace a strange, enchanted glade.

There is a glade.
And in this glade the black bears sleep, though salmon leap fat between falls. Here the field mouse draws no shadow, the eagle seeks no prey; they spend their while caressed by rays, and halcyon days are they. Here rabbit and fawn may linger, no longer need they flee. For in this timeless, taintless space, the Wild has ceased to be. (Outside the glade are shadow and prey, are ice and naked death. There blood may run freely. There the eagle, that thief, is a righteous savage, a noble fiend. But once in the glade he is dove, and has no taste for blood, running freely or otherwise).
And in this glade there nests a pool:  a dazzling, blue-and-silver jewel; profoundly deep, pristinely clear. All who sip find solace here, for this is the Eye of Being. They lap in peace, assuming blear, not knowing it is seeing. And ever thus this pool shall peer:  a silent seer, reflecting on—all that Is, and all Beyond.
(Outside the glade there lies a world where rivers ever run, where ghastly calves in random file revile a bitter sun. East, the day is born in mist. West she dies:  her rest, the deep. And North…North the Earth lies mute. Wind gnaws her hide, wind wracks her dreams. Wind screams like a flute in her white, white sleep).
But in the glade are tall, stately grasses, sunning raptly, spinning lore. Roots render the rhythms, blades bend without breeze, as signals ascend from the glade’s tender floor. (In this wise the glade weaves its word, airs its views. All the glade’s flora are bearers of news). They do not wither with fall, for in the glade there is no fall. They do not bind or wilt or brown—they gesture, spreading the mood, the mind; conveying, indeed, the very soul of the glade. As ever they have, as they shall evermore.
Bees do not hum here; they sing. They fatten the dream. Mellow and round are the timbres they sound, sweet is the music they bring. Birds do not sing here—they play. They carry the theme. Dulcet and warm are the strains they perform. Gifted musicians are they. (All in the glade are virtuosi. They were born to create. Melody, harmony, meter…are innate). Now the performance is lively and bright, now full, now almost still. For, though all in the glade may lean to the light, they must bend to the maestro’s feel.
And yet…there was a day, long ago in a dream, when this ongoing opus was torn. And on that day (so the lullaby goes) the wind brought a scream, and Dissonance was born.
There was a noise.
Moose tensed, their coffee eyes narrowed, their patient brows creased. Bees mauled the tempo, birds lost their place. The grass stood *****, all blades pointing east. There was a crash, and a shriek, and a naked, bleeding beast burst stinking through the fern, fell stumbling on its face.
Moose scattered:  unheard of. Sheep brawled, geese burst out of rhyme. The symphony, forever endeavored to soar sublime, fluttered, plunged, and, for all of a measure, ceased.
The pool was appalled…what manner brute—what kind of monster was this? Furless flank to forelimb, hide obscured by blood. As for its face…it had no face; only a look:  of shock frozen in time, of horror in amber. A deep welling rift ran temple to chin, halving the mask, caving it in. Such a grievous wound…the pool watched it stagger, on two legs and four, thrashing about till it came to a rise. There it labored for air, wiped the blood from its eyes, lashed at illusion, looked wildly round. Beholding the pool, the beast tumbled down.
And there this wretch plunged his thirst, drank his fill, fell back on his haunches.
The pool became still.
The two traded stares.
The glass read his features:  that durable eye pondered the wreckage and probed the debris. Revolted, the pool sought the succor of sky. But that thing remained—that face…in all creation…surely there could be…no other creature so ugly as he.
And he gazed in the glass.
Beneath the surface were…images…swimming in currents of shadow and light. He saw half-shapes and fragments…hideous men, exotic beasts…saw blue worlds of water, saw white worlds of ice…it was all so vague and unreal—yet somehow strangely familiar. Deeper he peered, but, as his mangled face neared, the sun smote the pool and the shapes disappeared. The brute pawed the ground and, dreaming he’d drowned, shook his head sharply and slowly looked round:
There were starlings at arm’s-length, transfixed with suspense, their tail feathers trembling, their dark eyes intense. Fantails and timber wolves, stepping in sync, paused for a sniff, stooped for a drink. Bees, pirouetting, threw light in his eyes. Seizing the moment, the pool pressed its hold.
And the glade revolved.
The freak watched it spin—saw the ferns’ greedy fingers reach round and close in, saw the tall grass rise high in an emerald sheen, swaying to rhythms from somewhere obscene. This place was madness; he struggled to stand, but, weak as he was, keeled over cold.
And the glade heaved a sigh, and the tall grass reclined, in curious patterns once rendered in whim. Far off in thunder the hard world replied, as iced pines exploded and screamed on the breeze. Down bore the sun, a chill just behind. The pool, grown blood-red, fended frost from its rim. Details dissolved in the oncoming tide. The pool dimmed to black. Night seeped through the trees.
Now flora found slumber while, pulsing below, the pool was infused with a soft ruby glow.
Soon birds bearing beech leaves, and needles of pine, laid down a spread and returned to the limb. But breath from the North blew their blanket aside. The wind grew in earnest, the air seemed to freeze.
And the wolf and the she-bear, of contrary mind, abhorring their task approached, looking grim. They sniffed him for measure, then, loathing his hide, growled their displeasure and dropped to their knees.
All night these glum attendants flanked his naked quaking form. The rising moon drew dreams in gray.
In time the man grew warm.

Morning swept through the glade in one broad stroke of the master’s brush, dappling the foliage with amber and rose. The pool was roused by the sweet pass of light. He opened his eye and the glade came alive:  into the whirlpool of life a thousand colors swam, chasing the scattering eddies of night. The magic of morning began.
Bluebird and goldfinch descended in rings, primaries clashing with robin and jay. Dollops of sun, repelled by their wings, spattered anew on the palette of day. Banking as one, the hues struck away.
There was a crowd.
And in this crowd that oddity sat, its chin on its chest, its rear pointing west. Its forepaws lay leaning, upturned and at rest. ***** and blood messed its muzzle and breast. Passed overnight. Or perhaps only dozed…tendril by tendril, claw by claw, the crowd decompressed:  the ring slowly closed.
And the stranger cried out and shifted his seat. His eyes sought his feet—rounding the arches, and topping the toes, the tall grass was questing. The little brute froze.
And the fauna took pause, and the flora went slack. Leaves followed talons, stems followed claws. Hooves tromped on paws as the crowd drifted back.
Not a breath taken. Not a move made. Stillness, like fog, enveloped the glade.
Now the grass tugged his feet, now the sea of jade splayed—left hand and right, the slender shafts reared. Gaining momentum, blade followed blade. The green field was torn till a deep swath appeared. The swath hurtled west, reflecting the sun. A hundred yards distant it died. Once more the grass stood, its tips spreading wide. The swath, born again, repeated its run.
Plain was the message, and clearly conveyed. The newcomer gawked. Confusion ensued.
The tall blades were swayed by the pulse of the glade.
But the swath was not renewed.
Something tiny bounced by. He ventured a peek, barely rolling an eye.
A chocolate sparrow, with pinfeathers black, popped past an ankle and paused to look back. The bird cocked its head, rocked in place, hopped ahead. It fluttered. It freaked. It glared and stopped dead. Vexed to its limit, it burst into flight.
The sitting thing watched till it passed out of sight.
Now a breeze bent his back, picked him half off his stern. The wind, done its best, grew flustered at last. It trailed to the west, thrilling lilies it passed. It wound round the willows and didn’t return.
So the fauna repaired to the live oak’s shade.
A strange kind of stupor fell over the glade.
From deep in the wood came a shape through the trees—a pronghorn, perhaps, or an elk swift and sure. But up limped a moose, a flyport with fur, low in the belly and wide at the knees. Wizened he was, scarcely able to see. Neither vision, nor vigor, nor velvet had he. He hobbled abreast, then groveled or died, his nose facing west, his tail flung aside.
The brute merely glazed.
But the glade was unfazed.
Those long shafts reshuffled. A tense moment passed.
The ominous shadows of badgers were cast. Three left their holes, as if to attack. They pedaled like moles and the stranger jumped back. He stumbled, fell flailing, and, kicking his guide, threw out his arms and tumbled astride. First he stepped on his tail, then he stepped on his pride. The moose bellowed twice and shook side to side while the little pest clung to his high, homely hide.
And the old moose unbent to his knees by degrees. He reeled like a drunk down the path of the breeze. Together they lurched through a break in the trees. And all morning long, and on through the day, both beggar and bearer would buckle and sway. The moose lost his temper, but never his way.
And the wind blew the sun to its deep ruby rest; the scrub, in obeisance, inclined to the west. Their slow taffy shadow in slinking would seem to slip round the rocks like a snake in a dream.
And the sun became a beacon, and the underbrush a stream. The wide Earth took their weight in stride, and the wind named him Hero.

                                               WORLD

When the sun was low the old moose began to stumble, at last limping to a halt beside a swift river lined with stunted pines. He’d half-expected a somewhat graceful dismount, but Hero, dug in like a tick, wasn’t about to let go. The moose knelt until his joints objected, shimmied, bucked, and with a sudden whirl sent the little bother flying.
Hero scraped himself out of the dirt and looked up forlornly. The ancient moose, his good eye gone bad, glared a long minute before hobbling away, his bony **** rocking with dignity, his scraggly tail fighting off imaginary flies.
Hero managed a few steps and dropped, staring in disbelief as the moose disappeared between half-frozen pines. He remained on his knees for the longest time, his jaw hanging, waiting for the moose—waiting for anything to show. At last a ruckus to his left snapped him out of it. His head ratcheted around.
Fifteen feet off the bank, three screaming gulls were dancing on an immense stone outcropping, fighting over a rapids-tossed sockeye. Hero was instantly famished. He wobbled to his feet and stumbled twice wading out, only regaining his balance by leaning against the current while rapidly wheeling his arms. The shrieking gulls reluctantly backed off as he stepped in slow-motion through the rushing water. Hero lunged at the slapping fish, cracked an ankle on the rock, and hopped around howling with both hands holding his shin. One foot was as good as none in the surging water. He went right under. Before he knew it he was being swept downriver.
This was glacial meltwater, so cold he quickly lost all sensation. Hero swallowed a mouthful and surfaced fighting for life; too disoriented to combat the current, too numb to realize his waving arm was striking something solid. That solid something turned out to be a swirling clump of rotted birches tangled up in scrub. He embraced one of these trunks as the mass slammed against isolated rocks, kicked his feet wildly, and somehow hauled himself aboard. The raft ricocheted rock to rock until repeated impacts sent it spinning. Giddy from the whirling and soaking, he clung freezing to the trees, retching continuously while the river roared in his ears. Through spray and tears he made out only cartwheeling fragments of the world.
But then the river was widening, its fury dissipating. The raft was approaching the sea. Hero gasped as the seemingly boundless Pacific swallowed the broad red belly of the sun. And as he spun he was treated to a panoramic, breathtaking spectacle:  the great indigo ocean with its slow traffic of driftwood and ice—voiced-over by the dismal calls of foraging gulls, and broken rhythmically by intermittent glimpses of the river’s rocky banks growing farther and farther apart. Whirling as it went, the dying man’s soul was taken by the sea.

At the 59th Parallel in winter, the Pacific coast plays host to numberless floes and minor bergs orphaned from Alaskan coastal glaciers. Hero cruised into a watery gridlock on a boat of ice-glazed birches, one bit of flotsam among the rest.
The cold wouldn’t let him move, wouldn’t let him breathe, wouldn’t let him think. He lay supine, feet crossed and hands clasped, terrified that to budge was to roll. An ice patina grew over the tangled trees like a white fungus—this growth soon webbed his fingers and toes, speckled his chest and thighs, glazed his hair and face, danced and disintegrated with his breath’s tapering plumes.
Floes and frozen-over debris tended to group with passing collisions; Hero’s married birches bit by bit accrued a mostly-submerged tangle of trunks and branches, all becoming fast in a creeping ice cement. Night came on just as resolutely, until land was only a flat black memory. The raft moved silently over the deep, still accepting the occasional gentle impact. And the floes became thicker and wider in a freezing doldrums; soon the proximate sea was all a broken field of packed ice, bobbing infinitesimally with the planet’s pulse.
Long ghostly strands of fog came striding over the torn ice field. They leaned this way and that, their mourners’ skirts tearing and patching and leaning anew. The ghosts were there to seal it:  their locked fingers and gray diaphanous wings were quickly becoming a wholly opaque descending shroud, its boundaries lost in the soughing wind.
Collisions came less and less. Darkness and silence, breaching some previously impenetrable barrier, began to take up residence in Hero’s chilling marrow. From his very center broke a weak little cry of refusal, of denial, as mind mustered frame in one desperate bid for freedom. His skin, frozen to the raft, peeled right off, and at that his inner brave succumbed. Hero’s smashed head arched back. His face contorted frightfully while the little lamp fluttered and paled within.
A raucous chorus slowly worked its way through the mist. It emerged a few hundred yards off—a tiny, terrified barking, growing in clarity as it grew in volume and urgency. It was a sound beacon. Hero strained eagerly, and when for one excruciating minute the beacon was cut off by a large passing body, was certain death had claimed him. Then it was back, and his heartbeat was quickening. He caught a heaving sound…something was moving his way down a wide tributary between floes. Hero could hear a gasping and snorting, accompanied by a hard slapping and splashing. The sounds vanished. In a moment the raft was rocked from below.
A sputtering muzzle blew salt in his eyes. A cold slimy flipper flapped across his chest and slapped about his face. The fur seal barked directly in his ear. Whiskers raked his dead cheek. The seal barked again.
Back below the surface it slipped. Hero listened anxiously as the splashing sound retreated whence it came.
The seal swam off perhaps a hundred feet and began barking hysterically.
From much farther off came a profusion of answering barks.
The seal swam back to Hero’s raft, circling and calling, circling and calling, while the responders approached en masse.
Now a sallow beam could be seen cutting through the fog. Several more showed vaguely along a plane yawing with some huge, barely discernible object.
A herd of northern fur seals burst into sight, barking madly, beating through the ice. They converged on Hero’s raft, really bellowing now.
Those odd yellow beams came in pursuit, and soon were close enough to eerily illuminate a gigantic wooden vessel parting the ice. The seals barked ferociously. Whenever the vessel leaned away, those nearest Hero’s raft would absolutely howl.
The fog deepened, condensed, crystallized, and then the collective light of a dozen lanterns was playing over a low, listing nightmare. Hero could hear the shouts of many aggressive men, but the waterborne seals, rather than scatter, boarded the ice and redoubled their din, fighting their way onto his quickly mobbed raft.
The sealers hurled serrated spears even as they clambered down rope ladders. When these men reached the ice the seals snapped and gnashed madly, refusing to be dislodged. The sealers lost all composure with the thrill of the hunt:  wielding clubs, spears, and hatchets—sometimes using iron bludgeons or any old utensil handed down—they crushed skulls, dragged carcasses, hooked animals still spurting and bleating. Clinging though he was, Hero was flabbergasted by the way the slipping and scampering men went about their butchery, hacking and smashing more with passion than with precision. But not a single seal attempted to flee—throughout the carnage they barked all the louder, egging on their slayers, carcass by carcass drawing the impassioned sealers to Hero’s ice-locked raft.
It was all so hazy and macabre. Hero’s eyes rolled back, and the next thing he knew he was sitting hunched on the vessel’s sopping deck. Two men were rubbing his limbs while another poured warm water down his back. He looked around in shock. The very notion of a boat containing more than one or two individuals—a sort of floating tribe—was way beyond his ken; so to see it, to have it come looming out of nothingness, was an experience almost supernatural.
He remembered some of those fur-covered men force-feeding him mouthfuls of halibut and seal fat, and he recalled a small group standing around him, shouting words that made no sense at all. After that he had a very vivid memory of their angry little chief repeatedly punching him while hollering one angry little word over and over and over. Hero couldn’t make out his inquisitor’s face, for the large feather-lined hood quite engulfed the man’s head, yet he could see those quick eyes flash as they caught the oil lamps’ light. Finally this man stopped boxing Hero’s ear. He stared hard. In these remaining decades of the tenth century it was fully within his power to administer as he saw fit—he could have ordered Hero’s immediate execution and not a man of his crew would have objected. He hesitated only because there wasn’t a hint of resistance in his prisoner’s pinched and frightened eyes. He leaned forward, studying the wound that all but split Hero’s face in two before grunting, raising his right arm, and yanking down its seal hide sleeve. Attached to the stump of his forearm was a primitive prosthesis consisting of a thick oak cap strapped to the arm with lengths of gut, and, hammered squarely into the center of that cap, a broad, cruelly hooked blade chiseled from a narwhal’s tusk. He held this obscenity in front of Hero’s eyes, traced the face’s deep diagonal rift, and once more demanded his captive’s identity. Hero then vaguely remembered being dragged along a tilting deck and thrown into the ship’s tiny hold. He retained a strong mental image of landing in a place of musty odors and dank projections.
There came a soft scuffling in the darkness, and presently a blind and exceedingly old woman felt her way to his side, mumbling as she approached. Her speech was comprised not of words; it was rather a running gibberish of cooing vowels and clucking consonants. The old woman was as mad as her circumstances; sick with sea and solitude, bedeviled by age and confinement. She sat cross-legged, patting her withered palms up his arm until she came to his face. Her strange mumbling soliloquy rose and fell as her bony fingers daintily explored the newly opened wound. Hero let his head fall back in her lap. A pair of hands like emaciated tarantulas scurried through the filth and tiny bodies until they came upon an old otter’s pelt bag that held her secrets. The woman loosened the bag’s cord and extracted an assortment of herbs, sniffing each in succession. She then scooped a handful of blubber from a bowl made of a previous occupant’s skull, kneaded the selected herbs into the blubber, and commenced gently massaging the wound, clucking and cooing while the black rats watched and waited.
For nine interminable days Hero remained in that cold, stinking compartment, rocking back and forth between life and death. The old woman never gave up on him. She clung to him during his seizures, rubbed his limbs vigorously when his blood pressure fell. She gathered various accumulated skins and, using woven strands of her own long hair, sewed him a multilayered, body-length wraparound with arm sleeves and very deep pockets, working by touch with a needle formed of a cod’s rib. By this same method she was able to fashion a pair of heavily lined snug-fitting moccasins. The old woman made him eat; she masticated the cod and halibut their keepers pitched into the hold, then shoved the results down his throat with a long gnarly forefinger. She called into his screaming nightmares, talking him out of sleep and back into their foul little reality. Together they lowed in the dark, while the keel groaned along and the waves beat time.
At the end of those dark nine days his strength was restored, but not his mind. Once again he was taken on deck.
The vessel had reached a chain of remote wind-swept islands, rocky and treeless, naked except for patchy carpets of hardy grass. These islands stretched far to the west, shrouded in mist. The ship was making for the smallest; just a chip on the sea. When they reached depth for anchorage Hero was hustled into a rowboat and lowered over the side. He looked up, saw two men climbing down by rope. These men positioned themselves at the oars and slowly rowed toward the islet. Seated between them, Hero felt like a man being led to his execution. He snuck a peek. The rowers’ heads were lowered, their features completely obscured by the heavy feathered hoods; they had all the somberness of pallbearers. Not a word passed between them as they rigidly worked their oars:  the only sound was the dip-and-purl of wood in water. Hero looked away. Against his will, he found his eyes drawn to that rocky islet waiting in the fog.
Not a bird, not a sea lion, not a shrub. It was lonesome beyond imagination.
Upon landfall one of the men used a spear’s point to **** Hero ashore. While his companion steadied the boat, he removed a skin sack full of half-frozen halibut, followed by a few armloads of precious tinder. These articles he tossed at Hero’s feet. He resumed his place at the oars and, without looking back, used the blunt end of his spear to shove off.
Hero watched the boat moving away, watched the men climbing their ropes, watched the boat being hauled aboard. As the mysterious vessel receded he saw a number of those silent men standing at the stern, stolidly returning his stare. Their hooded forms grew smaller and smaller, finally becoming indistinct. The vessel was swallowed up in fog.
Hero looked around, at a desolate world of rock and drifting ice. In the sunless pools at his feet a few purplish, flaccid sea anemones were waving in a sickly phosphorescence; along the rocks ran a tattered quilt of wild grass and lichen. It was the end of the world. He began to pace in his anxiety, only to crumple bit by bit inside his furs. At last he just sat with his face in his arms and wept. When he could weep no more he raised his head and opened his red, swollen eyes.
There were gulls all around him, staring like statuary in a madman’s garden. Standing in their midst were auks and puffins and murres, absolutely spellbound, unable to lean away. The silence was broken only by a wild, fitfully pursing wind—a wind that seemed, eerily, on the verge of producing syllables. And on that wind a flock of terns was rising slowly, their beady eyes fixed on the lone sitting man. The terns watched as he trembled, and banked as he swooned.
Then, beating as one, they threw back their wings and blew into the sun.

There was a blaze.
Behind that blaze a pair of black, bug-like eyes met his and immediately withdrew. A man wrapped in caribou hides stood abruptly, drawing angry swarms of sparks.
The Aleut peered queerly into the icy Pacific, his craggy profile merging seamlessly with a jumble of rocks showing just beyond his shoulder. The man was very tall, closer to seven feet than to six, and thin almost to emaciation.
He was also a mute. Soon enough he would display a talent for communication through gutturals, but now his body language spoke louder than words. It told the shivering stranger that he was not only disliked—he was feared.
The islander removed the hides he’d piled on the sleeping man. He produced a bone awl and strategically pierced a caribou hide, draped the hide over the old woman’s handiwork, and ran a cord of tightly woven tendons crosswise through his made holes, knotting it at the bottom to create a kind of cloak. He then killed the fire, heaped wood, fish, and remaining hides into Hero’s arms, and led him to a tiny cove where his long skin canoe lay in the grass. This was not the one-man kayak used by his people for centuries, but an actual canoe modeled on the graceful vessels he’d observed under the control of northern coastal tribesmen. After dragging it into the water he perched Hero in the fore, placed the cargo in the middle, and stepped into the rear like a gaunt furry spider. The Aleut dug out a paddle and began pulling with smooth strokes of surprising muscularity, his black eyes trained on his quiet companion’s back.
So began their long island-hopping journey. They stepped the chain one stone at a time, living off the sea. But much as the islander disliked Hero’s vapid company, it was not in his nature to proceed expeditiously; his people, remote as they were, had learned to count not in days but in generations. Given this, the Aleut took his time. He showed Hero how to build shelters of skin and gut; during bad weather the two would sit on an island in utter silence while rain hammered on their stretched seal-intestine window. And one very clear night he pointed out constellations while attempting to demonstrate, using broad gestures, just how the brighter heavenly bodies were in perfect alignment with the Aleutians. Hero followed his guide’s gestures as a pet follows its master’s movements and, like a pet, soon became bored. The Aleut did not grow flustered. He grew ever more wary:  behind that granite, weather-beaten exterior squirmed a very primitive imagination. Superstitious as he was, the Aleut was almost certain Hero could read his mind. So one time, and one time only, he threw a searing look at the back of Hero’s bowed and listing head. After a long minute of vigorous thought-projection he shifted his gaze aside. The brute appeared to feel this shift, and gently turned his head. And both saw the ocean break rhythm, and watched as otters and sea lions surfaced, noted their progress, and slipped without tremor beneath the waves.
In spring the fogs lifted. The grimness gave way to serenity, a generous sun buttered the dappled sea. On the islands grass grew lushly. Wildflowers leapt on the color-starved eye.
And one day the islander’s nape itched. He turned to see a flock of arctic terns casually tracking them under a gorgeous, white-plumed sky. As the day progressed the terns came drifting high overhead, slowly but surely taking the lead.
The Aleut squinted against the sun. He’d never known these birds to pursue a westerly migratory pattern—the terns were distributing themselves into a rough wedge shape, much like geese on the wing.
For a while he let the flock be his guide. Then, to test his stars, he cunningly steered his canoe north. At once the wedge disintegrated. Not until he’d lowered his eyes and pulled purposefully to the west did the disrupted pattern reassert itself. He peered up timidly. The wedge was now in the shape of a perfect arrowhead.
Just so were the fates of mariners and aviators inextricably entwined. At night, once the Aleut had landed his canoe on the nearest pearl, the terns would light in a quiet circle and remain until sunrise. As the Aleut and Hero took to sea, the flock would quickly form that same authoritative pattern.
In time the Aleut paddled his companion clear to the westernmost islands of the Aleutian chain. His people had dwelt, even here, a thousand years and more, but no contemporary islander knew for certain what lay beyond. Legend told of an enormous land mass forever gripped by cold, where a cruel people waylaid innocent seafarers for barbaric sacrificial rites.
So here the islander paused. But even as he vacillated he noticed the terns were veering south.
If the Aleut had been able to curse aloud he would have been vociferous. He was being compelled to follow an even less desirable course—that of the unknown open ocean. Now he looked upon his passenger’s hunched back not with fear but with loathing. He took a deep breath, rolled his shoulders, and defiantly continued west. The wedge broke up immediately. The terns dive-bombed the canoe, whirled around the windmilling Aleut, tore skyward and hovered determinedly. Something huge broke surface behind them, but the Aleut was way too frayed to turn. He dropped his head, a beaten man, and began paddling south. Little by little the birds returned to formation.
The tiny canoe had no business going up against the mighty Pacific. It would soon have been swallowed and smashed, had not the terns veered in close formation whenever the distant sea appeared too rough. Once he’d lost his bearings the Aleut religiously followed their serpentine course.
The days began to warm.
Now the sea’s bounty all but leapt in the canoe.
It seemed the Aleut was forever catching the finest currents, practically sliding down a corridor entirely free of peril. In this manner he was able to safely navigate waters no such craft had mastered before.
They were proceeding south by southwest, awed children of a plenteous, generous sea. The going became easier by the day, the ocean heavier with cod.
Nights the Aleut drifted comfortably, but a lifetime of wariness made him wake off and on. He’d slowly rise to find Hero sitting quietly under the stars, and soon he’d see, pallid in moonlight, a large body neatly pleating the ocean’s surface. The shape would precede them a while, only to vanish without a ripple.
All this strangeness kept the Aleut’s heart in a whirl, though he took pains to maintain his poise.
To allay his fear he kept a flat black stone planted squarely between them. It was his oldest treasure; an oddity he’d taken off the body of a mauled Tlingit woman when he was a child. Who she was, and how she’d come by the stone, were mysteries far beyond him, for no such piece had ever been known to Aleut or Inuk.
The stone was smooth and had been worked perfectly round. Bright yellow specks were scattered about its dull black face.
Long ago someone had etched a quaint and clumsy rune on that flat black surface—it was the crude, universal symbol for sun:  a broad circle surrounded by several rays. When the stone was rubbed against a pelt it possessed the curious property of growing quite warm and bright in the rune’s grooves, while the surface remained cool and dull.
This stone, both friend and overlord, had always “spoken to him”. It caused him to become restless when it was time to move on, and allowed him to relax when a destination had been reached. In this way he’d come to the familiar islet and discovered the unconscious little man. Just so:  the stone, he was sure, was responsible for making him “feel bad” as he watched the stranger shiver, and “feel better” once he’d built him a life-saving fire from the small pile of tinder he’d found nearby.
By now, however, the Aleut was wholly disenchanted with his stone, and deeply regretted having done its mysterious bidding. Never before had he been so long from sight of land, and never before had he felt so very, very small. The unimagined immensity of the Pacific was really starting to get to him when, after all their while at sea, a gray, seductive haze broke the horizon. They had reached another chain of islands, an Asian chain, the dark and smoky Kurils. Here a cold current kept the climate cool and foggy, and the chill, along with the prevalence of otter and seal, made him feel almost at home.
But this place gave him the creeps; he was a stranger, a trespasser somewhere sacred. There was a looming quality to the island mountains that made him extraordinarily aware of his transience, his pettiness, his puniness. He grew more and more cautious, sure their progress was being monitored—he could have sworn he saw wraiths in the trees, and wolves padding warily in the brush. The big islands looked on breathlessly. All along the rocky cliffs, thousands of auks and puffins followed the canoe in dead silence, their heads turning simultaneously, their countless tiny eyes peering redly through the fog. As the weeks passed, the Aleut’s anxiety was manifested in tics and sighs, and he’d cringe each time the crimson sun sank behind those black volcanic summits. In his imagination the mountains would rise right out of the sea, as though to pluck him. But the islands, in all their dignity, would always refuse to acknowledge so meek a stranger, and return their eyes to sea. The Aleut would hang his head, and timidly paddle by.
Then for days and days he pulled his weary canoe west—through a strait parting two mighty islands not part of the chain, and thence across a sea that was a warm, enticing bath. Spring had come to the East Asian coastal waters, and the Ainu, alone and in groups, were venturing deeper in search of increasing bounty. The Aleut, absorbed in his thoughts of sweet climate and bitter fate, was unaware they’d been spotted.
This first meeting between strangers of different worlds was a brief and awkward one. A lone Ainu fisherman, seeing the Aleut come paddling out of the unknown, dropped his net and turned to stone. The Aleut, for his part, instinctively froze with his body turned half-away to make the leanest target possible. Their stares locked. Never had the Aleut seen a face so heavily bearded, and never hair so fair. The Ainu began banging on his bronze catch pail. Other fishers soon appeared from the north and south, effectively cutting off the canoe. The Aleut caressed his stone and looked to the sky. The wedge had vanished. He put down his head and paddled for all he was worth.
With the word out, uncountable fishing craft appeared out of the blue and broke into hot pursuit, their pilots determined to force the canoe ashore.
Suddenly they were in sight of land, and the sea was absolutely riddled with watercraft. A train of small boats cast off from the mainland, even as a posse of two-man coracle-like tubs began to surround the battered skin canoe, their inhabitants calling back and forth in astonishment at the sight of these dark, savage newcomers. But the pursuing little coastal men, banging excitedly on the sides of their boats, were not Ainu. They had very straight black hair, prominent cheekbones, and strangely slanted eyes. And their speech, oddly marvelous as it was, was a rapid series of coos, chirps, and barks. Their boats formed a tight semi-circle around the canoe, forcing the Aleut to approach the mainland. The little men banged their boats maniacally, with more joining in as the canoe neared shore.
A bit farther south was a natural harbor swarming with fishing vessels of every description. As the canoe was forced into this harbor, people along the rocky coast began banging whatever they could get their hands on, until the air was filled with their lunatic percussion.
Tiny brown men came running along a soft yellow cliff overlooking the harbor, gesturing wildly. The canoe was squeezed between a chain of tubs and the shore, and, as it slowed, the tempo and ferocity of the banging decreased accordingly. When the canoe came to a halt the banging and shouting stopped. Hero creaked to his feet. The first North American to set foot on Asian soil stepped out shakily.
There followed the profoundest silence imaginable.
A second later it was as if a dam had burst.
Hundreds of hysterical, yammering voices erupted from hundreds of hysterical, clinging men and women. Hero was spun around, jostled about, handed along. He stared into their astounded, pinched little faces, and the sun, pulsing between their heads as he was turned, repeatedly stabbed his eyes. There came an excited outburst and frantic splashing which could only have been the Aleut’s violent demise, and then Hero was somehow limping alongside a primitive fishing village, blindly following a narrow dirt path that hugged the yellow cliff’s base. The warm spring sun caught the dust as he shambled. He rounded a bend and stopped.
Half a dozen children stood in his way, too fascinated to run. A chatter and scuffle rose behind him. He looked back to see that he was now in the midst of a small crowd of these children, and that more were running up with cries of amazement.
A stone struck his shoulder. As Hero turned another glanced off his chest.
A moment later he was being pelted from all sides, and the giggles and gasps had become something wildly unreal. He dropped to his knees in a hail of hurled rocks, covered his head with his arms, and slithered up the path on his belly.
A new voice broke in; an older, authoritative voice.
The children scampered off squealing.
Hero, shaken to his feet, found himself face to face with a diminutive, shouting, incomprehensible old man. The old man threw his arm around Hero’s waist and, jabbering all the while, led him to a secondary path cut into the cliff’s face. This path sloped gently upward over the waves. Together they picked their way to a place maybe halfway up, where the cliff’s face was honeycombed with natural alcoves and dug-out caves. Most of these spaces were used as one-man shelters; a few, cut deeper in the earth, as family hives. Strange gabbing people slid out of these holes like worms, reaching, but the little old man, who was evidently a little old man of some stature, embraced his find possessively and shouted them back inside.
The path narrowed as they climbed.
At its summit spread the upscale end of the neighborhood. Hero was led to a hovel nestled amid dozens of similar hovels, all scattered around a dainty stream wending between patches of stunted vegetation.
The old man’s place was basically a one-room hut fashioned of earth and salvaged boat hulls, with a slender side-yard surrounded by dry, dusty hedges. But inside it was clean and tidy, with rice paper partitioning and, built into the far earthen wall, a miniature stone fireplace. The old man sat his guest in the exact center of the room. There he fed him scraps from his bowl, using long sticks to pluck out bits of fish and clumps of tiny, starchy white pellets.
He studied the brute closely, watched him chew, walked round and round him. He poked here. He pinched there.
And that night he lit a fire on his crushed-shell hearth.
Hero curled up on a mat where the gossip of flames could reach him. Nearby, at his delicate wicker table, the old man sat in semi-darkness, illuminated only from the waist down.
But his eyes were alive. They spat and darted as they reflected the fire’s light, and, when at last they’d begun to sputter, his scratchy little voice came pattering out of the dark, muttering something vile and oddly modulated, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes in a gathering snarl.
Hero feigned slumber, unable to ignore those paired ominous flashes. Still, the room was cozy, and the fire warm, and the play of light and shadow kicked sleep in his eyes.

In the morning he woke in the old man’s side-yard, his head pounding, a rusty iron clamp securely fastened around his neck. This clamp was attached to the outermost link of a crude three-foot chain, and the link at the other end to a long stake driven into eight inches of solid rock. The chain and stake, like the clamp, were hammered of local iron. The clamp was too tight for comfortable swallowing, the chain too short to make standing possible. Hero could, however, spread out on his chest and stretch an arm to a low row of hedges. By parting the tangled undergrowth he had a limited view of the fishing village below, and of the harbor beyond. As the days passed he was able to tweak himself a view-space discernible only from his peculiar vantage. He accomplished this by gently breaking small branches strategically, then guiding their interrupted growth with the utmost tenderness. It was his secret garden.
He had no memory—none whatsoever—of being staked here. Obviously the old man hadn’t set this up overnight. Hero’s mind prodded timidly…how many others had been chained to this spot, and why?
But over the subsequent weeks and months he went beyond caring. Each day was the same:  just after dawn the old man would storm into the tiny side-yard swinging his reed whip wildly. The lashings were savage and unremitting. The old man, except for his eyes, would be mute. Only his whip need speak. And the snap of his reed had but one message:  when you see this whip you go down, and you go down immediately.
The naked savage, scarred head to foot, learned to go prostrate on the moment. Even so, the old man couldn’t resist the temptation to indulge in the occasional good old, all-out thrashing. And after each session he would toss the prisoner a vile mess of dead fish and rotting leftovers.
Hero lived like this for many months, lost in a confused world of pain and anticipation. Perversely, he came to look forward to the bite of that whip, for, whether he flogged him in passion or just for sport, the old man was always sure to make it personal. It seemed their relationship might go on forever.
But one day there was a great commotion in the sleepy little fishing village. Hero parted the leaves and beheld a small train of oblong coaches at rest near the harbor. Large oxen yoked in pairs lolled between the carriages, immune to the clamor around them. There were dark shaggy horses and colorfully dressed Bactrian camels. The horses and camels were tethered in the rear, but were occasionally paraded around the carriages by little men wielding long painted bamboo poles. The whole affair was exotic and mesmerizing, eccentric and profane. Hero watched all day in amazement, infected by the hubbub, though he was totally mystified by the crowd’s fascination on the carriages’ far side.
And late that afternoon he saw the old man come walking out of that crowd, talking heatedly with another man. The stranger was shorter and broader than the old man, with long stringy hair and long stringy mustaches. He saw them climbing the path, saw them crawl inside a hole lashing furiously. They were lost from view for a minute, then popped up big as life. Hero glowed and curled up eagerly as they approached.
The old man and stranger came into the narrow side-yard still arguing. The old man grabbed Hero by the hair and twisted until he was facing the newcomer.
The stranger had oily, porous skin, and a round but grave countenance. His highly slanted eyes were bright and restless. He studied Hero’s mutilated face with keen interest before borrowing the old man’s reed. When Hero scraped at his feet he grunted and returned the reed.
The stranger pulled out something shiny and hefted it in his hand. He then raised his other hand while considering Hero, as though weighing him too. The old man’s eyes glinted, and for an instant his expression became grotesquely servile. The stranger and old man, facing, nodded curtly in unison. The stranger dropped the shiny thing onto the old man’s itching palm. The old man whipped Hero frantically before taking a small ax to the chain. A few hard blows split a link, the broken link was bent back by the tool’s shaft, and the prisoner was at last released.
The old man handed the stranger a short hempen rope. The stranger bowed deeply. He then tied an end of the rope through one of the remaining links and began dragging Hero along. Hero’s hands sought the old man, who kicked and cursed him all the way to the path. The three stumbled single-file to the bottom. The old man waved his arms and shouted hysterically, trotting behind until he ran out of breath. But he got in a final kick and, before he came to a gasping halt, managed to lash Hero once for old time’s sake, and to spit on him twice for luck.

There were five carriages; a long one in the center hitched to four oxen, and two smaller coaches in the front and rear with a pair of oxen on each. The carriages were old and battered, built of splitting wood slats and rusted iron braces. Various hides, spare wheels, and a hundred odds and ends were tied to the sides and roofs. Hero’s new master, using him as a ram, shoved him through the crowd to the long carriage. He hauled him up the single wood step and watched the crowd’s reaction. Children hid behind mothers, mothers hissed and jeered, men spat in that smashed, disgusting face.
Satisfied, Hero’s master twisted the rope tighter and dragged him through the hide flap that served as the carriage’s rear wall.
A strange ruckus began at their entrance.
Inside the carriage were bulky shapes and quirky movements, yet the immediate and overwhelming impression was one of unbelievable stench. Hero, instantly covered with flies, was kicked and shoved down a foot-wide aisle. The carriage’s walls were riddled with black flecks of old dried blood, the floor coated with standing *****, a variety of small carcasses, and some clinging, indefinable slime. But the living contents of this hell were so horrifying, and so unexpected, that Hero at once dropped to his knees. Observing this, master grabbed a whip off the wall and lashed him along the floor.
A number of bamboo cages lined either side of the carriage, each four feet high, four feet wide, and three feet deep. In the first cage to their left, a quadruple amputee dangled in a leather harness in a cloud of flies, jealously gnawing a chicken carcass balanced on his belly. The second cage held a man who had been burned over ninety per cent of his body, and the third a middle-aged woman with no eyes or tongue, her head shaved. The next cage housed a fully grown black leopard, its bright eyes fixed on the horrified newcomer. Then an empty cage, and finally a cage containing a demented man whose long yellow nails were busily raking a face deeply scarred and bleeding.
The first cage against the opposite wall held two girls rolling in their own excrement. Siamese twins unable to part, they had developed a unique method of locomotion, and now executed a three-quarters cartwheel in Hero’s direction, their mangled, severely bitten hands attempting to reach him through the bars. In the cage next to theirs a naked dwarf glowered menacingly, his eyes following coldly as Hero’s master shoved him down the narrow aisle, occasionally pausing to lash a cage. The hissing and howling increased as each prisoner beheld the new neighbor.
The third cage held an intensely sick adult Bornean sun bear, so confined it was entirely unable to move. Its hide was a patchwork of scraggly fur and grayish skin, glistening with odd eruptions. It rolled its sunken eyes in Hero’s direction, its muzzle twitching feebly.
The next cage contained a man who was frightfully diseased. Broad fungal patches covered his face and limbs, terminating in waxy folds that dangled like a rooster’s wattles. Welling sores spotted his chest and back. His eyes were bugged and sallow; his lower lip drooped below his chin. He barked wetly at Hero’s passing legs.
The second-to-last cage housed a rare, completely hairless Chinese albino, and the last cage a very tall, skeletal woman. The albino snapped at Hero while repeatedly banging his head against the cage. The woman hissed and coiled like a snake, her spine arching amazingly.
Master hauled Hero to the empty cage on his left, swung its door open with his foot, and forced him to his knees by pushing down with all his weight. He kicked and punched until Hero had been squeezed inside, then shut and secured the wide bamboo door.
Master inched his way back down the carriage, hammering the **** of his whip on each cage as he passed. There was a glimpse of daylight as he lifted the flap.
Once he’d departed, the carriage grew eerily silent.
Hero cautiously turned his head. Less than a foot away, the black leopard was frozen in place, one paw waving hypnotically in his face. The beast’s fangs were bared, its ears straight back, its eyes glistening. Hero turned ever so slowly, until he was looking into the eyes of the demented man in the final cage. The man cocked his head quizzically. A second later he was screaming his lungs out in a bizarre downward spiral.
At once the carriage erupted. The freaks shrieked and scrabbled, the leopard spun in place. Directly across the aisle, the albino hurled himself against the bars of his cage. He batted his face with his fists, threw back his head, and just howled and howled and howled. The snake woman curled even tighter, her long scrawny legs entwined behind her head.
Hero sat with breath held, absolutely silent, absolutely motionless. He very, very slowly closed his eyes.

Later that night the flap was flung high. The menagerie came alive as master, weirdly illuminated by moonlight, slowly made his way down the aisle carrying a skin sack oozing blood. He stopped at each cage to toss in a dying chicken and a handful of smelt.
When he reached Hero’s cage he looked down thoughtfully.
He extracted a quivering chicken and held it above the cage so that blood dripped on the brute’s deeply pleated forehead. Hero lowered his eyes. Master’s face darkened. He smashed the bird against the cage, over and over, a vein throbbing in his temple. Finally he hissed and displayed the limp chicken high over the albino’s head. The albino yelped and kicked, thrusting his hand up between the bars and jerking it back to lick away the blood rolling down his forearm.
Master eyed Hero coldly before pointedly dropping the chicken into the albino’s searching hands.
Master hissed again. He slowly made his way out.
Soon there was a commotion outside. The carriage rocked a bit before settling. Hero, turning in his cage to peek through a rift in the wood, saw horses being urged forward. He could hear men shouting. The carriage rocked again. He looked up and saw the gibbous moon suspended in mist. For just a second something wedge-shaped cut across its soft white face.
But then the oxen were grunting, the wheels had been freed, and the horses drawn abreast. Master’s lash spat left and right, and the show proceeded…west.

                                              MA­STER

She was very round and very small, with very short, very shaggy black hair. Her arms bore the scars of numerous bites from beast and man, and around her neck ran long wheals from a particularly savage owner. Hero, having spent the better part of the morning watching master storm in and out of a strange screaming house, now watched him drag the little round woman through the dirt. For a while he listened to the song of his master’s lash, waiting for the woman to break. But there was never a whimper.
It had been a difficult transaction for master, and an altogether difficult morning. For hours he’d paced up and down the main carriage, alternately murmuring affectionately into, and lashing at, each cage he visited. The sun bear, long dead and stuffed, had been taken outside for barter. It had soon been returned.
Master had lingered over Hero’s cage for a good while, staring critically. He’d begun shouting, and three of his men had burst in through the flap, unlatched the demented man’s cage, and dragged him out by the feet for trade, master personally stomping on his torn and groping hands.
And now master was kicking and shoving the little woman down the aisle as his men restrained her by the hair and throat. Upon master’s command these men stripped her naked and commenced pinching and slapping while making threatening faces and mocking noises. The freaks sat right up in their cages.
The woman looked as though she’d fainted:  her arms were lax, her eyes rolled up. Her whole face seemed to purse, and her body, head to toe, began to run blue. Her fingers quivered, arched, and clawed—the woman was self-asphyxiating. Master fairly leaped with delight while the cages rocked around him. He had the men slap her awake. Once she was fully conscious they stuffed her into the demented man’s old cage next to Hero’s.
Master then looked in eagerly, one to the other, his hands balled into fists. The woman buried her odd round face in her forearms as she squeezed herself into her cage’s deepest corner. Hero gazed indifferently and went back to his peephole.
Master exploded. He smacked and kicked the cages over and over, swore up and down, ran the shaft of his whip back and forth against the heavy bamboo bars. Eventually he calmed somewhat. He stared coldly at Hero, made a ***** smile, and spat right in his eyes. A tense minute passed. Master slowly made his way outside.
Hero automatically relaxed. Across the aisle the albino ****** his face between his cage’s bars to sniff the newcomer. The leopard, bobbing rhythmically, emitted a high-pitched squeal that gradually descended to a steadily throbbing growl.
Hero looked the stranger over. Once she’d lowered her hands he saw that her eyes were crossed, her jaw slack, her face as round as the full moon. He looked closer. There were scars all over her throat and arms:  plainly, the small round woman had been treated very badly. Hero instinctively slid a foot between the bars; the woman cried out and scrunched even deeper. Across the aisle the albino quickly extended an arm. Without knowing why, Hero turned on him. The albino flinched, his eyes tearing into Hero’s. A second later he was stamping his feet and grinning wildly. Hero went back to his peephole.
Next morning master and two of his men dismantled the bamboo walls separating Hero’s and the woman’s cages. They bound the frames with broad leather bands, making a single cage of the two.
A common door was fashioned and secured. Master used his broad blade to shear away Hero’s rags. The men hunched around the long cage expectantly.
The naked couple backed away. Master was instantly exasperated—he shouted, lashed furiously, stamped and screamed, jabbed a broken shaft between the bars with malevolent intent, whirled and hurled the shaft at nothing. The carriage’s inmates went out of their minds. At master’s bellowed command a man scurried outside, returning with a long rope of woven leather strands. Master opened the cage and, applying all his weight, pinned Hero and his new mate in an awkward embrace while his men tied them together.
Again master and his men bent over the long cage to watch.
When Hero realized his predicament he made a desperate attempt to reach his peephole.
The men, misreading his struggles, babbled and cheered, but master threw up his hands. He then, through gesture, ordered his men to drape a number of hides over the long cage. Once these hides were in place he very quietly bent to one knee and placed an ear against the cage. After a while he cursed and rose to his feet. He shook the cage and stormed out, whipping and kicking the howling inmates.
In the semi-darkness the man and woman quit fighting their bonds.
A muffled patter began on the hide-covered roof.
Rain, as always, had a calming effect on the carriage’s occupants, causing the freaks and beasts to slip, one by one, into lethargy or slumber. Under such a spell, the attainment of master’s goal was inevitable.
It was a coupling both innocent and vile, without passion or celebration. Occasionally the freaks would surface, register their excitement by shrieking, shaking their cages, or otherwise clamoring…but very quickly the air would stifle them, weighing their heads and confusing their impulses. The atmosphere grew heavier by the minute. And, when night rolled over the carriages, the rain came down in sheets.

Leaning ******* the woman’s cage, master slipped his gnarly hand between the bars and slowly rubbed her belly in a counter-clockwise motion, his sinister features soft in the candle’s light. And he told, in nonsensical cooing whispers, of a lovingly secure and impossibly prosperous future.
How large and promising that belly had become! And how wise was he, the cunning and aggressive master, in his far-reaching business decisions. He turned his affection to the motionless gaping brute; stroked the battlefield of its face, tossed in another lizard. Master rubbed his palms together. From now on it was extra lizards daily, for both the woman and her mate. He remarked, with only passing interest, his star player’s continuing indifference. They didn’t know each other, didn’t need each other.
There’d been months of shows on the road now, broken only recently by this sensible rejoining of the mates at conception.
Hero’s horrible disfigurement was unquestionably top draw; he was a guaranteed crowd pleaser at every stop. So now master looked him straight in the eyes and smiled. He held the reeking candle high. The carriage was absolutely silent. Master smiled again, rose to his feet, tiptoed away.
Hero watched him retreat until the flap had fallen. He returned to his peephole, saw master round the rear of the carriage and slowly crunch by. For a time he could see nothing but the half-shapes of junipers bathed in starlight. There was a tentative movement to his right and a large shape came to obstruct his view.
The horse stood for a minute in profile. It slowly brought its head to rest against the carriage, applying its eye to the peephole. Hero froze. The two remained fixed, eyeball to eyeball, while a breeze played odd tunes on the outer wall’s hanging paraphernalia. The horse’s big dark eye rolled nervously. A long moment passed. Slowly the horse backed off. It stood uncertainly for a while, staring at the peephole. Then it quietly moved away.

Master kicked the cages one by one, left hand and right, as he slowly made his way down the aisle. Into each cage he delivered a personalized warning in passing—a growl, a hiss, a bark—but he was quickly losing control. Animal electricity hopscotched the carriage, cage to cage, ceiling to floor, front to rear and back again. Master froze. Much more of this excitement, he feared, could seriously agitate the woman—with grave consequences for master.
She was splayed on her back, in labor’s throes, her ankles and wrists bound to the long cage. Hero had been removed to give her room, and now sat hunched atop the snake woman’s cage, two men holding him by the throat and legs.
Master gnashed and snarled, listening to the woman scream, watching her stupid round head bounce up and down and back and forth. He knew it! He’d been suckered, hoodwinked, scammed—ripped off like a common rube. The woman was too ******* to handle even something as natural as childbirth. Still…it was too late to second-guess himself—all these months he’d been patient—he’d been supportive and vigilant and now he would not be denied. He flogged one of the men to alleviate his tension.
The blue lady was very slowly, very dramatically arching her spine. Master wiped the sweat from his eyes. When the bars were pleating her big round belly, her shoulders began drumming on the straw-strewn floor.
Master screamed one very colorful expletive.
A razor silence came over the carriage. Not a body moved or breathed.
At last two men tiptoed around their purpling master and leaned into the cage. One obediently ****** a foot between the bars. He pushed ******* her right knee while using a hand to grip the left knee, spreading her legs wide. The other man drew a broad leather strap between her teeth. After lifting the woman’s head he pulled the strap behind her neck, knotted it to make a gag, and yanked a skin sack over her face. He looked up anxiously. Master licked his lips and nodded. The man made a fist and frantically punched the woman’s face until her muffled screams ceased. She moaned gently throughout her contractions.
Master genuflected, brought a spitting candle in tight, and took a deep breath. As he raised his hand the candle’s light bounced off his knife’s chipped and scored eleven-inch blade. Master swore and reached down carefully. He flicked his wrist twice and the menagerie went mad.

The child was a tremendous disappointment.
Master had eagerly anticipated an infant ******* and deformed; something embracing the best qualities of its parents. He had even designed a special cage that could be expanded by degrees as the spawn developed. There also remained the tantalizing option of a family display, though such an undertaking would require the eventual construction of a structure even larger than the cage its parents now shared. Master anguished over the logistics, knowing it would break his heart to have to cut one of his jewels’ throats just to make room for a growing child. Nights he would slowly pace the carriage with all the possessiveness of a jealous suitor, one hand maneuvering a sputtering candle, the other tenderly rapping his whip’s **** against each visited cage.
But the boy was a flawless specimen; a beautiful, undemanding baby. From the moment master angrily tossed the placenta he felt cheated, even betrayed. He grimaced as it peaceably took to its mother’s breast, despite the surrounding horrors. Master hated it, immediately and entirely. The ****** thing was so docile it was almost charming. He drew his knife and was just reaching down, when an overwhelming sense of dread shook him like a rat in the jaws of a mastiff. Sweat poured down his squat, pig-tailed nape. He knew he would live to regret it, but decided to not cut the child’s throat right away. It was the oddest feeling. His knife hand had trembled for the first time in his life, and he had found himself momentarily contemplating right and wrong at the outset of a perfectly simple and commonplace procedure. That was it, then. His business instincts were letting him know there was a good, albeit unknowable, reason to let the sweet baby live. Master left the carriage anxiously, muttering in his ambivalence.
The boy grew to embody his worst expectations. Not only was it a poorly oriented child, clinging to its father rather than its master almost from the moment of weaning, but it soon proved a lousy draw with the patrons. Those who paid to view the child dangling in its special cage inevitably departed unsatisfied, some vocalizing, strangely, an acute sense of shame. So once again master entered the carriage with his knife hand steady, and once again he exited trembling, his heart in his throat and his soul in a whirl. He whipped the dwarf savagely before leaving. What place conscience in the mind of a businessman?
Soon as the boy could walk, master put him to work fetching and feeding. But the brat was slothful in his chores, preferring to hang around his family’s cage while staring wistfully at his father. For their part, the parents were wholly disinterested. Master would fume while Hero gazed for hours out his peephole—even as the mother lolled, perpetually ill. Sometimes that accursed woman’s condition riled poor master to no end. She could teeter at death’s door for months at a time, her body changing hues to the fascination of customers, only to bounce back with a hardiness that was of interest to no one. But at the peak of her performances the blue lady could really hold a crowd. Master produced an entire outdoors extravaganza around her:  within concentric rings of raging torches his men would slowly strip her naked before wild audiences, then allow the dwarf and albino to take her while the leopard strained against a gaily festooned chain. Master circulated his crew through the crowds to encourage his patrons’ cult-like behavior of breath-holding and fainting. No getting around it:  the customers were crazy about her—village to village, master’s Bactrian vanguard’s colorful robes shouted her approaching fame. And Hero’s popularity continued to soar. Many were the nights when master, pacing the perimeter, wondered just what devilry could have produced the lovely boy.
Overall, Hero remained his master’s favorite conceit and hottest property. Part of the little brute’s appeal was, of course, his exoticness. And certainly the ugliness arising from his deformity was compelling…but there was a detachedness about him that fascinated every soul with a fistful of copper cash coins. Whether they ****** him, cudgeled him, or spat in his face, he remained unflappable, staring only at the aching sky. Though many would leave uneasy, master noted with deep satisfaction that they almost invariably returned.
The boy soon evinced an amazing affinity for animals. No matter how agitated an ox or horse became, the child could pacify it with one hand on a lowered brow. This was a source of endless fascination for the crew. Wagers were made. The boy was pitted against oxen whipped to a frenzy. But they would not harm him; they would rather go prostrate and take the lash. Master tried to work this knack into a viable act, but his patrons just weren’t buying. They wanted freaks.
When the lad was a mere five years old, master had him trained in the peripheral art of the pickpocket. The boy worked well alone, and had all the makings of a fine little flimflam artist. Master sighed, his chronic nightmares a thing of the past. As ever, his business instincts were guiding him well.
Then late one afternoon he found the boy squatting outside his parents’ cage. The boy had done the unthinkable:  he had deposited his day’s pickings at the feet of his father instead of bringing the ***** to master. Master flew into a rage and raised his whip to give the little traitor the lashing he deserved. But before he could deliver a single stroke his other hand shot to his chest and he staggered back against the albino’s cage. He blinked down at the boy, who regarded him steadily while scooping the plunder into a little pile.
From that day on the boy placed whatever he could get his hands on at his father’s feet. As time passed he became ever more adroit at thievery, growing into a youngster both admired and despised by master and his crew; admired because theft was a cinch for him, despised because they were all that much lighter in their possessions.
Now, for eleven long years the strange little train had bounced along, sometimes camping outside villages for months, occasionally pausing on connecting roads. The show traversed the heart of Manchuria, skirted the Gobi in the north, and so eventually crossed almost the entire width of Mongolia before proceeding north to the confluence of the rivers Yenisey and Ob’. Much silver and copper had come to master’s coffer, much fame to his name, but he now sat looking over a vast, unmapped Siberian wilderness. The mostly nomadic characters they’d been encountering spoke in tongues unfamiliar even to his personal valet-translator-accountant, and the tone of these nomads had been unmistakably hostile.
Master huddled surlily under a canopy of sopping hides. Night was falling hard during a merciless rain, the wind was picking up, and his supplies coach was bogged in a growing sea of mud. At that moment he accepted the whole end-of-the-line concept, and knew he wasn’t going anywhere but back. And when he got back he was going to shine! He jumped from the coach.
The earth took his weight for a heartbeat—and he was up to his chin in muck, splashing about on his hands and knees, sliding forward on his palms and toes. He did a belly flop into a rain-filled depression and churned to his feet with the devil in his eyes. Wallowing in mud and bile, master stomped to the supplies coach and kicked wildly at the stuck rear wheels.
Somewhere between kicks he lost it completely.
Master broke for his whip. One minute he was blindly lashing his men, the next he’d succumbed to a mindless ferocity. He thrashed about like a berserker; whipping the beasts, the coach, the very night. His men were scarcely able to move in all that mud, but their dread of his savagery kept them hopping. They gathered as one and shoved the coach recklessly; slipping, splashing, shouting. A minute later, three lay splayed underfoot, but the mired wheel had been freed.
Throughout all this the oxen had swayed nervously, while the horses softly tramped their hooves in place. Master had his men turn the oxen about until the rickety train was pointing dead east. He checked the hitches and personally applied the lash. The oxen didn’t budge. Master swore and wiped the rain from his eyes. He had the horses hitched ahead of the oxen, but they were even less obliging. Master flew into a spectacular rage. His men, fearing for their lives, ran liberally with the lash.
The swaying of oxen picked up until the entire train of carriages was rocking. Yet the oxen could not, would not be compelled, under any amount of prodding, to take an eastward step. Master looked around in exasperation.
The night had gone insane.
Horses were fighting hitches, oxen walking on fire.
Master cursed the rain and mud and lashed all the harder. His men, seeking to please, whipped maniacally until the horses and both lead oxen broke their hitches and bolted west. The men immediately embraced the rear oxen, but the hitches shattered and the beasts stormed off. The remaining horses blew it, kicking at everything and nothing.
Inside the long carriage all was chaos. The albino was neighing and screaming, the aged leopard spinning in its cage. Hero stared out his peephole, amazed at the blur of figures stumbling by in the rain.
A pair of clopping blows rattled the opposite wall. Three slats cracked. A tremendous impact, and a huge section collapsed. A thrashing, hysterical mare burst through the breach in a veil of rain.
The horse went mad, killing the albino and snake woman in a flurry of hooves. She fell ******* the near wall, crushing the cages. The leopard shot into the air like a rocket, slashed at the mare’s throat and vanished in the rain. The horse reared above the family cage. She was just coming down in a wheeling storm of hooves when something made her freeze. Her stare locked with Hero’s, and a second later her eyes were rolling in their sockets. The mare kicked crazily and came down ******* her left flank, smashing the long cage’s side. She whirled upright and leaped outside.
For a tense minute the family sat in the rubble, rain bombarding their eyes. Nothing in their years of captivity had prepared them for such a situation. But by the end of that minute the son had taken full command. He rolled onto his back, braced himself, and kicked his parents across the aisle, through the remnants of the opposing cage, and out of the carriage. They all fell about in the mud and rain. To the west, the mare stared back strangely as she splashed into the night. The boy wedged himself between his parents, threw his arms around them, and pushed with all his might. Their bodies found a common center of gravity. Fumbling drunkenly, the family staggered through the rain in the wake of the mare.

The boy was the natural leader.
Master’s innocent-looking little ex-student could quickly assess and exploit almost any situation. He did the foraging and the figuring, slept with one eye open and one fist ready. He got what he wanted by charm or by stealth, slipping off at nightfall, returning at daybreak with small slaughtered animals and chunks of dark peasant bread. He also pilfered any bauble or oddity he could get his paws on, to be placed reverently at his father’s mangled feet. Breadwinner and watchdog, he faithfully held the family together; a nuclear son. He sewed hardy feather-lined cloaks of reindeer hide, and turned a cache of marmot pelts into a kind of side-slung backpack. He was doting nurse during his mother’s episodes, and unbending apportioner of calories in lean times. Dauntless when it meant crossing mighty rivers, relentless when it came to finding mountain passes. But the endless marching, the unreliable diet, and the countless predators made the three wanderers lean, haggard moving targets. There were times when the little lamp of family was all but extinguished, and long stands in places that seemed absolutely impassable. Still, the boy would work things out. He would stoop to any level to feed Hero, and for a stranger to threaten his father was to summon a psychotic, unyielding monster. He was both spear and shield.
The toughest job of all was maintaining a tight unit, meaning he was forced to become a hard-nosed ******* whenever his father was ready to wander off, which always seemed to be whenever the mother was hurting most. She’d become a tremendous impediment to Hero’s compulsion, and therefore her son’s chief nemesis. It wasn’t a big-picture concern anyway; the writing was on the wall. The blue lady’s attacks were increasing spectacularly on the steppe; her world had always been an enclosure of some kind, and the great horizon was proving just too much. Perhaps these intense affairs served as links to Hero’s suppressed memories, for at the onset of each attack he’d turn and hike, and then only exhaustion could curb him. The boy would press his mother on, dragging, shoving, and smacking—he could be mean when necessary, and though circumstances had made him the nucleus, their worlds unquestionably revolved around Hero. Where he sat, they sat. When he rose, they did the same. In this manner they marched for years across the vast steppes, single-file—father, mother, and son, respectively—unmolested, lacking possessions, always following the sun. Long before they could be measured they had drifted into obscurity.
The woman’s end came quickly and dramatically, in a rocky little depression on a half-frozen field. One moment she was responsive to her son’s prompts, the next she was flat on her back, her eyelids fluttering. That night she leapt from fever to chill, from alertness to stupor. The boy, squatting beside their campfire, watched her face and hands run cadaver-blue to fish belly-pale and back again. While he was staring her eyes popped open and her hands came scrabbling. He sweated through the clawing embrace until he could bear it no longer. He oozed out and ran down to fetch his father.
When they got back Hero watched incuriously for a while. His mate’s face was scrunched up and her skin the color of sapphires. She wasn’t breathing.
His gaze became glassy, his eyes returned to the night. As he rose the boy immediately grabbed an arm. Neither moved for minutes. When the boy at last relinquished, his father casually stumbled off.
Strange things were going on in Hero’s world. Some days he would notice how animals regarded him oddly, in a manner that seemed almost personal. He found, for instance, that particular creatures were recognizable even over great distances. A number of times he would sit with one in a stare-down, waiting patiently, until the animal’s natural disposition caused it to bolt. Though the meaning of these encounters was way over his head, he would watch, and he would listen.
In time he noticed an increasing skittishness in some of these familiar creatures. Something had them spooked. He then observed a number of lean gray wolves moving in and out of the picture with an air of complete indifference:  these wolves weren’t hunting; they were loitering—lounging in the grass, lackadaisically padding to the rear, filing by slowly in the distance. Once in a while a lounger would raise its head, yawn cavernously, and drop back out of sight. So unobtrusive was their behavior that even Hero’s ever-vigilant son began to take them for granted. They paused where the family paused, and halted whenever the woman broke down. Perfectly camouflaged by the gray boulders and dire sky, they were completely forgotten in the drama of her passing.
There were other, far subtler events existing for Hero’s senses alone. He could perceive patterns in everything around him; in the manner vegetation gave way wherever his heart was leading, in the way so many animals appeared to be not merely mirroring, but making his course. And wind, rain, running water:  these phenomena had voices. Yet not for everybody. No one—not his mate, not his son, not another soul on the planet could hear this call, for they were all of a sort. They were static, they were temporal. Hero couldn’t have cared less about the lives of his family, or about the mundane goings-on in the encampments and small tribes they skirted. Such beings lived in a world that was defined by the moment. They shouted, they banged, they clamored.
But west—west was music.
For his boy, once again watching Hero shamble off, the moment of truth had arrived. He looked back down, at his mother’s death mask being remade by the dying light of their campfire. As the flames dwindled he could have sworn he saw shadows creep into the wells of her eyes, while others, crawling up around her jawline, drew her bluing lips like purse strings. He hopped to his feet and ran for another handful of tinder. When their little fire provided enough light he dropped to his knees and looked again.
She was sinking right before his eyes, every aspect of her expression in collapse. The boy watched clinically, fascinated. As the flames began to sputter he thought he could see large purple bruises spreading across her cheeks like the seeping limbs of overflowing pools. He bent closer.
From deep in the night came the longest, the leanest, the saddest wail he’d ever heard. He turned to see the starlit ghost of his father, facing away, staring at a low barren hill. Uncountable stars embroidered the spot. The boy made out a low shape moving along the hilltop, cutting off patches of stars as it passed.
The wolf howled again; a mournful, spiraling cry to nowhere and nothing. Hero’s head notched upward. He began to hike.
Halfway to his feet the boy stopped dead.
It took a minute to sense why he’d frozen in place, and a good while longer for his heart to quit pounding. He was aware of a nervous padding, and, once his vision had adjusted, of a lazy stream of eyes gleaming in the dying campfire’s light. The eyes bobbed around him, glared momentarily, returned to the ground.
A massive gasp, and his mother was tearing at his wrist. He watched her hyperventilating, saw her bulbous yellow eyes sinking in a wide violet pool. With a sizzle and pop the last tongue of flame was taken by the night.
Then her clammy hands were all over him, pulling and demanding, caressing and beseeching. He had to pry them off like leeches, had to place them clasped on her shuddering arched belly.
A silky snarl rose almost in his ear.
With a little squeal he sprang to his feet, even as something nearby jumped back in response.
The boy stood absolutely still while the panting thing padded nearer. They stood very close, smelling each other. He instinctively extended a hand, palm forward. But it was no good; his arm was shaking out of control. The snarl rose again, not so tentatively this time. His mother’s nails tore at his ankle.
The boy gently stepped away, only to find himself surrounded by the shifting silhouettes of half a dozen gray wolves. They approached in a calculated manner:  two from the left, one from the right, another from behind. He was being goaded away from his mother; he could hear her fists beating the ground, and a few seconds later the sounds of a nauseating assault and ravaging.
He shakily raised his other hand. Now both arms were extended, and their message was clearly one of defense rather than control. Two snapping wolves stepped aside, leaving him a gateway into the night. A cold wet nose bumped his wrist.
Screaming like a woman, he took off after his father just as fast as his feet would carry him.

                                                  BOY

Alon­g the great Kazakh Steppe a man could wander a lifetime and never meet another of his kind—especially if his kind happened to be Alaskan Inuk, and if he happened to be the teenaged patriarch of a two-man family going nowhere.
Here history is mostly mute.
Upon this continent-spanning steppe, unnamed communities were scattered and rebuilt, lives blown about by the wind. The only centers of humanity a traveler might encounter, far removed from the Silk Road at the very crack of the new millennium, were temporary encampments of civilization at its rudest—shifting holes of cutthroat commerce existing solely for the barter of silk and spices and hapless souls. Life here was revered far less than merchandise, and the longest-lived men were those who kept their distance.
Hero and his boy hiked over permafrost and tundra for years; their meandering course a drunken mapmaker’s scrawl. Chronological entries along this imaginary line would reveal that they’d stopped, sometimes for months at a time, when the father had grown too weak and disoriented to continue. Hero’s internal compass was long-sprung, and his weight had fallen considerably. He’d sit on his lonesome, scarecrow-scrawny, wistfully scrolling a 360-horizon while his boy scouted and scavenged. Then, for no apparent reason, he’d just up-and hike—sometimes northwest, sometimes along a tangential plane that always threatened to spiral. It was brutal:  winters were frigid, summers, by odd contrast, running steamy to baking. Season by season these marches lost their tenaciousness, and eventually their heart. Hero’s obsession was becoming his demise.
Now, to a hypothetical observer, the ratty pair of woolly camels materializing out of the rising August heat might have been mirages.
These beasts were novelties here, and pioneers, for they were way beyond their normal stomping grounds. They’d tramped for months with a mind-numbing monotonousness, a thousand miles and more; round the Urals to the south, and through the hard territory braced by the Volga and Voronezh, avoiding anything that even smelled of men. They’d been wild camels; ugly, ill-tempered, and unpredictable, until the boy tamed them by touch…but this new pattern was a literal change of pace…for weeks the frail little man and his dark teenaged son rose and fell with the animals’ rhythm, lulled by it, sick of it, dreaming of lands far removed from hoarfrost and peat moss. In this manner they were borne clear to present-day Belarus, whereupon the camels’ stupefying march began to quicken. Mile by mile they put on steam, until one day they reached a broad area distinguishable from its bracing terrain only by its many deep surface cracks. Here the camels’ behavior became erratic; they crouched at an angle while tramping, their long necks oscillating, their noses bobbing along the ground. Eventually they came upon a dingy pool nestled in a pebbly depression. The local brush surrounding this pool was situated like iron filings about a lodestone. The boy hauled back his camel’s neck and laid a hand on its brow. The brute slowed to a halt. The other camel imitated its partner, move for move. Simultaneously the animals dropped to their knees.
The boy jumped off, catching Hero as he fell. The camels stood watching stupidly as son maneuvered father, but after a while grew nervous and began tramping their hooves in time. They slowly stepped to the pool’s rim and knelt woozily, their noses poised just above the surface. Their whiskers danced on the pool’s face, their lids became heavy, their hindquarters quivered as they drank. Their nostrils, having fluttered in unison, remained agape. They appeared to be asleep.
The boy began filling skins.
The water was quite warm; he slurped a palmful and almost immediately felt intoxicated.
He flicked it off his fingers; the water was bad.
Three heads were now mirrored in the pool; the camels’ at ten o’clock and two o’clock, the boy’s at six. He watched their reflections continue to ripple, long after the pool had become still. His face, melting and firming, rapidly fluctuated between extremes of age, and between his own recognizable features and those of some…monstrosity. The effect was hypnotic. He felt his joints stiffen; his eyes became weak, his thoughts muddled…his face was irresistibly drawn to the pool’s surface, and for a moment he was in real peril of drowning. He ****** his head aside and creaked to his feet.
Where the camels had knelt were only the prints of their bellies and knees. In the distance they could be seen galloping all-out for the horizon, right back the way they’d come. The boy watched until they were swallowed by their dust, and when he turned around his father was long gone.
Now he knew it was all just a matter of time.
And sure enough, after eleven more days of feebly staggering along, Hero completely ran out of gas. The boy bundled him up in a shawl, like an old woman.
Sitting there, cradling an unresponsive man weighing less than eighty pounds, he couldn’t help but let his morbid fantasies run wild. He was now old enough to realize his father had at some time suffered severe head trauma, and honest enough to accept that the man was rapidly approaching a vegetative state. This understanding accompanied him like a shadow, and that night he questioned, for the very first time, his own convoluted rationale.
He was just beginning to sense that his will was not his own.
He built a semi-permanent camp west of the Desna and foraged in a tight spiral, always returning in a straight line. Some days he came back feeling uneasy, sensing another presence. Then it was every other day. It bugged him to no end. At last, when it became every day, he hauled his father to his feet and began a resolute march to the west.
Again he became anxious, and after only a dozen yards.
He turned slowly while hunching, certain something bulky had just dropped out of sight. Nothing looked suspicious, everything looked suspicious. He walked Hero some more, occasionally peering back over his shoulder. There was…something.
He whirled:  only masses of rock and high brush. Yet, when he really strained his eyes, he was sure, pretty sure, that he could make out a large crouching body continuous with the rocks. Heart in his throat, he began a slow steady creep, only to pause, positive the bulge, whatever it was, had shifted in response. The boy very gradually raised his arm until it was level with his eyes, faced the palm outward, and extended the arm parallel with the ground. He could almost feel some kind of current passing between his itching palm and…nothing. He walked over to Hero, stopped again. There’d been the subtlest sense of traction. The boy propped up his father in a cloud of flies and waited.
In a minute the bulge drew *****.
Out of the brush strolled a furry gray wild ***, her back inclined from countless weary miles; stretching her neck, pausing to nibble, taking her sweet time. Grungy as she was, she fit right in.
At the boy’s first casual step she immediately hit the dirt and remained flat on her belly, one big dark eye staring between her hooves. Another step, and her **** bunched up. The closer he got, the higher her rear end rose. When he was almost at arm’s length she sprang back and danced away, seeming to bound with delight. But not to the east, as she’d come.
To the northwest.
She backpedaled while the boy came on whistling and cooing, matching him step for step. But the moment he threw up his arms in resignation she spun round as though cued, dropped on her belly, and peered over her shoulder.
The boy was first to blink. This time he approached fractionally, keeping movements to a minimum. She rose just as carefully, sauntering northwest in reverse, and at the first sign of hesitation turned, dropped, and cautiously gazed back. The boy glared at that huge mocking **** and broke into a sprint. She easily danced out of reach, plopped down, and continued to stare.
He began hurling stones, with venom and with accuracy, until she’d scurried into the brush.
But on the way back to his father he could feel her tagging along.
Twenty feet behind she halted, looking bemused.
The boy nodded ironically. He walked Hero over, murmuring baby talk all the way, and firmly placed a palm on the animal’s muzzle once her breath grazed his fingers. She stroked his hand up and down with her whiskers, gave a kind of curtsy, and waited on her knees while he helped his father mount.
At Hero’s touch a shudder ran down her body. She stood up straight. Her eyes became set, her back absolutely stiff. She put down her head and began the long trek northwest, never once breaking stride.
It was an amazing march, an impossible feat. For a little over three days and almost four hundred miles she progressed like an automaton, driving herself without rest, without food or water.
After trotting alongside for an hour the boy climbed on and force-fed his father berries and smoked meat, his dark eyes constantly searching the countryside. Occasionally he’d see a run of red foxes to their left, watching intently, padding cautiously. Sooner or later they’d vanish, only to be replaced by a train of feline or equine pursuers. Packs approached and receded while, high overhead, flocks formed triangular patterns that continually broke up and reformed. There was a peculiar rhythmic quality to this ebb and flow that lulled his senses further. The boy shook his head to clear it, but his exhaustion was deeper than he’d supposed—even the brush appeared to be leaning northwest.
That first day he grew numb with the pace, and that night the relentless pounding of her hooves drew him into a miserable slumber. He wrapped his arms around his sleeping father and lay half atop. When he couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer he tore strips from his skins, then looped his tied wrists round her neck, his ankles round her belly.
On the second day she was breathing hard, but her back was still high and she showed no signs of faltering. Her eyes remained focused on the ground dead ahead. She always sensed the best routes; finding mountain passes, fording wetlands.
But by the third day they could feel her ribs quaking against their legs. Her breath exploded as she marched, blood frothed and caked about her nostrils. Still she pushed herself on, her pace so steady it was almost metronomic.
On the fourth day her legs were gone. She veered and stumbled, shuddering every few paces. The boy hopped off for the umpteenth time and tried to bring her to graze, but she wouldn’t be turned. He ran behind her as she staggered along, unwilling, or unable, to rest.
At last a foreleg gave and she went down hard. Sobbing and snorting, she plowed her muzzle back and forth in the soil, the useless leg repeatedly pounding the ground. After a minute she raised her head and brayed at the sky, her neck muscles taut, her head slowly swinging side to side. Her cry went on and on.
With a tremendous effort she pushed herself upright and butted the boy aside. Every part of her body was shaking. From her depths a low moan grew to a steady bray, and finally to a wild, pulsing howl. She came to a rise, but was too weak to climb without sliding. Stamping in frustration, she managed a few feet, reared feebly, slid some more. The boy got behind her and applied his back; it took all he had to assist her almost to the top. With a desperate lunge she crashed on her belly.
Amazingly, she dragged herself on, her howl now a scream, her head whipping left and right. When she could pull herself no farther she ****** forth her neck to its very limit and, with a shudder that ran from the tip of her nose to the tuft on her tail, shoved her muzzle straight into the dirt and died.
The boy hauled off his father and fell back. The animal’s eyes were fixed upwards, seeming, even in death, to be straining for a glimpse of what lay just beyond the rise. The boy half-dragged Hero the last few yards. They collapsed at the top, and together looked over the cold Baltic Sea.

At water’s edge a haggard fisherman sat on his boat’s ravaged deck, blindly staring out to sea. His was a queer vessel; a family structure built more like an aft-cabined barge than like seacraft typical of that period. The fisherman’s boat, like his mind, had been abused beyond repair.
He’d lost much in his life. Time had taken his dreams, pox his face, hardship his back and shoulders. And, more recently, a brawling band of drunken Baltic pirates had ***** his wife and daughter before butchering them along with his two fine sons, while he sat helplessly bound to the mast. Finally, to further their delight, they’d set the boat aflame and sent it crackling against the sun; knowing he could hear their hoots and howls, knowing he would drift undead, accompanied only by this last unspeakable memory.
But a squall, without prelude, had doused the flames and blown his home ashore.
There he’d remained for a full long day, staring at nothing, his shattered life caught on the rocks. On the second day he’d worked himself free and commenced staggering about in his memories, gathering shards. It was a pathetic claim. He made a pile of all the old bedding and linen and usable cords, and set about sewing a sort of mementos sail. All that third day he had sewn, and on the fourth he had hoisted this sail and been moved to see it billowing in a northwest-blowing breeze. Again he just sat and gaped. And later that day he’d become aware of a commotion taking place on the long grade leading down to the water, where a writhing mass of seagulls was proceeding like a tremendous slow-motion snowball. He’d never seen anything like it. It wasn’t uncommon to find gulls in a group of many dozens or more, but there must have been two, maybe three thousand of the birds now swarming toward his boat. They were making an incredible racket. In the midst of this cloud could be seen a couple of slowly walking figures; as they neared he made out a small man accompanying a boy in his late teens, both dressed in odd skins. When they reached the rocks his eyes were drawn to the small man’s face. It was a foreign face, brutish and dark, with a deep cleft running from above the right temple to the jaw’s left side. Whatever instrument had felled this man had been devastating—everything in its path was smashed, and with permanence. The forehead was caved in. There was no bridge to the nose, the left cheek was completely collapsed, one side of the mouth was a mangled mess. The jaw itself had set improperly, so that it jutted to the side. The general impression, especially from a distance, was of some unforgettable circus freak’s countenance puckering at an angle. It was a face right out of a nightmare. But there was nothing frightening about the eyes. They were the eyes of a child.
Maybe half the gulls hopped screaming on the rocks. The rest circled overhead.
The boy considered the fisherman curiously before placing a foot on the charred deck. His gaze went around the boat, lingered on the makeshift sail, returned to the slumped figure. He passed a hand before the eyes. No response. He then leaned in close and placed his fingers on the man’s forehead. Immediately that bleak expression became fluid, brimming over with horror and heartbreak. Tears rolled down the fisherman’s cheeks as he gasped, shuddered, and backed up the scorched mast to his feet. Thus propped, he squinted at his visitors and was overcome by a wave of homesickness so strong he had to turn away. The feeling bewildered him, for this vessel, and this sea, were all the home he’d ever known. He clung to the mast while the boy helped his father board. Once he’d collected himself, the fisherman tore a heavy crossbeam from the toasted cabin. He and the boy used this as a lever, and together they shoved the boat off the rocks. The wind picked up nicely, and the little craft was swept across the water.
Exploding off the rocks, the gulls shot after the boat as if it were brimming with fish, the loudest and orneriest vying for favored positions directly overhead. The melee attracted additional gulls—they came shrieking in their hundreds from all sides, banking and calling in the oddest manner, until the mass grew so thick as to cast a permanent shadow on the boat. All day long the clamor continued, and all that night. The fisherman rolled with the rudder, listlessly, allowing the sea to control him. Eventually he let go, that the wind might bear them where it would. His sail ballooned but held firm, and the boat fairly zipped across a sea somehow smooth as glass, broken only by the vacillating ripples of bottleneck dolphins and migrating humpback whales. The three tiny sailors sat hunched together, motionless, all throughout the next day, until the black coast of Sweden loomed in the twilight.
As the boat neared land the cloud of gulls broke up, shot to shore, and landed in groups of a thousand and more; a dizzying, wildly uproarious reception committee.
The dung-covered boat slammed into the rocks, shattering the fisherman’s trance. He intuitively walked his **** up the mast and, swaying there, watched the boy draw his father over the side and lead him to a clearing at wood’s edge. There in the dusk he made out what appeared to be a hefty spotted runaway heifer hitched to a rickety wood wagon. He saw the cow gallop up to meet them, saw the boy look around warily, saw him help the little man into the wagon and climb in beside him. The animal immediately began picking through the woods, the large brass bell round her neck clanging forlornly.
The clarity of that bell made him realize just how quiet it had become. He craned his neck:  there wasn’t a gull in sight. He fell back against the shot mast and slid onto his tailbone with a clacking of teeth. His eyes were misting up. In the gathering dark a few sail fragments flew past and were ****** into the woods. The boat rocked and relaxed. After that there was only the sound of the receding bell’s sad, monotonous song being batted about by the wind.

The little cow strode through moonlit woods until she came to a path formed by the rutting of wheels over many years. She followed this broken, serpentine track throughout the night, and by morning was passing farms and, occasionally, crossing broader paths that might realistically be defined as roads. All day long she bore down that ragged track, until she came in late afternoon to a clearing near a village. Here many such tracks converged. And here the boy slipped away while she grazed.
Sometime after dark he returned with a load of straw, a couple of pilfered blankets, and a fat iron kettle. Crammed in this kettle were salt, tubers, cheese, a few loaves of rye, legumes, and a plump foot of lamb sausage. Most of this ***** he’d brought in tied to the bowed back of a huge, puffing, highly amenable black pig which, thus laden, now followed the boy’s every step like a fresh convert tracing the heels of the messiah. The boy built a fire under the stars, filled the kettle with creek water, and commenced simmering their dinner. While waiting, he couldn’t help but note an odd feature of the local flora:  plants, especially trees, all seemed inclined to a northwesterly disposition, though no amount of wind could account for it. He shooed the pig. But rather than run along, it backpedaled in a nervous circle, round and round in reverse, until it lost its balance and fell on its ****. There it remained, a yard behind the wagon. The boy fed his father and lined the wagon with straw. They settled in for the night. The boy must have nodded, might have dreamt, but while he was drifting he became aware of a stirring in the woods. He sat up, saw the pig’s eyes gleaming inches from his nose. And there were a number of animals, some wild, some strayed from farmsteads, arranged in a broad circle around the wagon, their eyes glinting with moonlight. Not a rustle, not a peep, was lifted from the woods.
In the morning he woke to find the pig still staring. The fidgeting heifer, impatient to roll, began her long day’s march while Hero and his boy were yet stretching and scratching, and the ******* pig, galloping heavily, fell in close behind. Each new day this routine was repeated. They banged past farms and small communities until the ruts intersected a broad rocky road wending halfway across the kingdom. The cow addressed this road with vigor. They picked up followers—a goat here, a couple of sheep there—which hurried after the wagon as best they could. The cow stomped on with resolve, mile after mile, day after day, her bell keeping steady time. That bell’s peal attracted foals, lambs, and kids into the wagon’s narrowing wake. Hares hopped between hooves and wheels, boars and blue foxes fell in and withdrew. White falcons, normally solo fliers, whirled into wedge shapes high overhead.
At night the entire train would camp on the road while the boy raided proximate farmsteads, always returning fully laden. And as soon as the fire died the colony grew, creature by creature, and the moment the sun broke the horizon the heifer came to life and moved on, but each day a bit more resolutely, as though straining to meet a deadline. The march took on a sense of real urgency. The cow pressed on with attitude, the clang of her bell more strident with each passing mile. Soon her followers numbered in the hundreds, as animals deserted their farms or crept out of the woods to tag along. Tillers and traders stood dumbfounded, amazed by the bizarre flow.
Once they’d crossed into Norway the frothing cow veered hard to the west. The pace really picked up; no longer were Hero and his boy afforded the luxury of a night’s sleep in one spot. Days blurred into a single variegated flow as the bashed and lopsided wagon continued building its entourage; the riders were surrounded dawn to dusk by a confused and confusing scurry. Word of the flow’s weirdness preceded it clear to the Norwegian coast, so that now plowmen and merchants, wearily gathering their goggling families, found themselves lined in anticipation along the king’s highway. Horsemen went pounding to and fro with news of the procession’s progress and particulars, children ran through the streets banging pots in imitation of the cow’s approaching bell. Livestock wheeled and stamped, fowl leaped and crashed.
The slobbering cow broke into a run.
Bystanders trotted behind, calling back and forth excitedly, while the wagon’s permanent following squealed and squawked between their heels. The cow made a hard turn onto a widening swath in the brush. This swath, seeming to strain against the soil, ran straight down to the crest of a low hill overlooking the Atlantic. On either side a crowd had been studying the phenomenon for some time, but now all eyes swung to the dark and disfigured man and his son, clinging to the disintegrating wagon behind the careening spotted cow.
The trailing people traded views as they ran. Most—at the very outset of the new millennium, with Christianity burgeoning throughout Europe—leaned to the miraculous. Others, just as superstitious but prone to a darker point of view, threw looks of horror at the deformed little man. Yet they ran no less eagerly.
The galloping crowd made for the seaside, where only one local event of any moment was brewing:  on the coast a Greenlander Viking was preparing his longship for the rough voyage home. Impetuous son of the great island’s first permanent European settler, he’d just been baptized in Olaf’s court, and was now eager to sail—but not as a warrior—as a missionary. While his spirit remained in a tug-o’-war between his father Erik’s will and that of gods old and new, his duty was clearly to his king. And Olaf had charged him with the Christianization of pagan Greenland.
Something on the wind now made this destined man turn his head. From behind the gentle hill to his rear came a kind of thunder. Heads popped up, followed by a confused explosion of voices, and seconds later a frantic bug-eyed heifer burst into view, dragging the wheel-less skeleton of a shattered wooden wagon. On the wagon’s splayed frame a man and teenaged boy clung for their lives as the spewing animal made a beeline for his ship.
The new missionary, still egocentric enough to assume his Maker might actually toss him a personal, surreptitiously rolled up his eyes. The sky yawned at his arrogance. At his side a smallish cowled man rose irritably, but the missionary sat him right back down. He then snorted, squared his shoulders, and signaled his men to halt their preparations.
Knowing it was expected, he gathered his hard Nordic pride and coolly made his way into the crowd.

The priest clung to port, gagging above the waves.
After a completely uneventful minute he leaned back and stared through tearing eyes at the distant backdrop of gathering mists. Weeks now…a man of his constitution had no business at sea.
Along, too, were a quirky little man and his fiercely devoted son.
Through his pantomime, the boy had been so persistent in begging their passage that refusal, under the circumstances, would have been unbecoming not only a man of God but a man of the world.
So there it was:  a priest who couldn’t hold his lunch, a witless eyesore who couldn’t sit still, and a surly teenaged protector who snarled at the first hard look. This crossing just had to be some kind of divine test—of mortal patience as well as moral values. Norsemen weren’t made for babysitting.
The mists condensed.
And the shifting shape became a hard familiar coast.
And the longship was mooring, and the crew were jostling and clambering, and the big missionary had booted off the haunted little freak and his hypersensitive son, and was condescendingly half-escorting, half-carrying, the green priest ashore.
And they were home.

Priest in tow, Leif quickly took up the Christianization of Greenland’s Western Settlement, as per Olaf’s command. The mangled little man and his son followed him around like dogs, slept outside his door and annoyed his visitors, ultimately proving far easier to adopt than to shake. Barely tolerable shadows…still, the lad was simply amazing with livestock…and though the youth’s useless father seemed time and again to be just begging for a whooping, his son’s presence bore some ineffable quality that always curbed the missionary’s hand. Several times he’d witnessed the father approached by settlers bent on abuse. Each time the boy had stepped in, and each time the troublemakers were mysteriously repelled. The missionary of course didn’t attribute any kind of celestial intervention to these episodes, and certainly the popular notion of devilry was a natural reaction to the pair’s outrageous exoticness, but…in the son’s company, and even under the sharp eyes of his fellow Norsemen, Leif more than once found himself oddly moved to protect the father. And so the deformed man and his boy day by day blent in—as village idiot and mystic guide. And when in time a ****** brought tales of an unvisited land to the west, it was only natural for the restless Greenlander to buy that ******’s boat and, before stalwart comrades, weary family, and whimsical God Almighty, reluctantly accept the eccentric father and son as sort of seagoing mascots.
Hero was from then on irrepressible. During preparations he would pipe and stammer in his half-mute way, brimming with a confounding anxiety that kept him underfoot and at odds with all. On frigid nights he perched on the westernmost rocks, moaning to the horizon in the strangest fashion while his son stood guard. He positively spooked the locals; they’d gossip, nervously and with bile, of an answering wind that came wailing off the sea like a banshee in labor. The whole island wanted rid of him. And when his champing beneficiary, still clinging to the notion of Christian charity, bundled him aboard with his son and a crew of thirty-five, not a single settler was sorry to see him go.
Almost from the moment they cast off everything went wrong, as all attempts to control the longship were met with some kind of unknowable countermanding force. Vikings were not renowned for passive resistance—they fought, squaresail and steering oar, leaning oarsman to oarsman, until the ship rocked on the waves like a bucking bronco. An erratic weather system pursued them, worsening dramatically at each minute variation in heading. The Norsemen doubled down, and when the clouds finally burst wide, the cowling sea went mad. Dervishes whirled about the hull, crisscrossing winds bedeviled the sail. Patches of kelp belonging to much warmer waters came heaving alongside, fouling the work of the oars, while far to the west a humongous fog bank formed, eradicating the navigable field. The lightning-streaked horizon was a throbbing gray slit.
The longship became locked in a slow westerly current.
Fatigued crewmen complained of headaches and hallucinations, and of a nasty, slightly metallic tang to the air. There were numerous walrus sightings; bobbing flippers and snouts amid drifting ice chunks that came prowling the North Sea like a circling pack of famished white wolves.
Worst of all was the boy’s father—instantly agitated by everything and nothing, prey to some primitive impulse that caused him to periodically incline his head, shudder to his feet, and loop his arms as though embracing the sky. Leif would watch him scrabbling at the prow like a cat at a tree, furs snapping in the wind. He’d watch the boy re-seat him for the hundredth time, and for the hundredth time be filled with an immense contempt. By now he’d acknowledged that it takes a special kind of strength to shoulder charity and tolerance. That brown little freak struck him as an enormous malformed barnacle, slowly working its way back up the prow. Trying so hard to go unnoticed, looking and listening so intently, though there was nothing to see other than the growing shelves of fog, and nothing to hear save the rising, almost hysterical voice of the wind.
Leif sniffed the air, his ******’s instincts nagging him. This was a foul current, and a fool's errand; he took a deep breath and tentatively ordered the longship brought about.
The ship kicked twice, as though an enormous submarine hand had seized and released the hull.
A whirl formed in the water, causing the keeling ship to sweep around like a clock’s second hand. All about them, those drift-ice ghosts cruised dangerously near.
But they’d been liberated from that accursed current. Leif fiercely urged on his rowers, and at last the ship broke free. They made a bead due north.
Night came and the temperature plummeted.
Small sheets of ice converged, drifting between the hunks. The Norsemen, instinctively huddling amidships, passed out one by one in a massive pile of fur and flesh. In the freezing silence the floes bumped and recoiled, bumped and gathered, bumped and bonded. The tiny ship, swallowed whole, was dragged along in a labyrinth of black sea and interlocking slabs of ice.

The Norsemen came to in a surly, foul-smelling heap, lost at sea. While they were still groggy a voice cried out that a darker patch was developing in the fog. The men all fell to port. Under the confusion of their voices could be heard a distant rumble.
At this Hero hauled himself up the high curved prow. A half-light began to penetrate the fog, barely illuminating the irregular faces of drifting ice. The missionary stormed forward and indicated by gestures that if the boy didn’t restrain his father he would have the man tied down.
The longship stopped dead in the water.
The men found themselves regarding a perpetually frozen coastline swathed in bluish veils of mist. Directly before them loomed an immense ice cliff hundreds of feet high. Rising beyond this cliff were endless snow fields, where lean violet shadows seemed to drag about of their own volition. And upon those bleak fields a thin howling wind prowled, kicking up brief white dervishes, leaving a strange zigzagging signature.
Even as they stared, a darker shadow high on the ice cliff’s glistening face began to widen, accompanied by a cracking sound that could be felt before it was heard. With the illusion of slow-motion, a stupendous chunk broke out of the cliff and came screaming toward the sea. It hit the water like a bomb. The thunder of its separation and the explosion of its impact took a moment to reach them. Then, out of a spewing crater of crests and spume, the new calf came lunging, tromping the sea so hard the longship, fully a mile to sea, was swept out and ****** back in like a cork. The floundering mountain of ice bobbed and lilted, generating huge waves which continued to rock the ship long after the monster had settled. In a while the roaring in their ears subsided and there remained only the swirling, nerve-wracking howl of the wind.
The missionary’s eyes swept left and right. Whatever this place was, it sure wasn’t the fair shoreline he’d been promised. Hero again scrambled up the prow, and Leif again yanked him down. This time he made good his threat; he had the little nuisance bound, though he was half-tempted to let him take his chances overboard.
From somewhere deep in the haze grew a soulful, otherworldly call. It went on and on, electrifying the air, bottoming out once the ship had merged with that previously fought westerly flow.
By now Leif’s nerves were shot. He ordered the oars raised.
The longship began to drift. Ship and ice were pulled due west.
The clouds fell far behind as the ship embarked upon an amazingly calm sea—so calm its entire visible surface was featureless except for the faint wakes provided by the ship and its hulking ice companions. To the east a huge fog bank appeared on the horizon, and a while later a smaller bank to the north. Then a very dense one to the south. In time these banks converged, imperceptibly becoming a single mass that closed about the ship, bit by bit creating a slowly heaving dome. Tiny beads of water appeared on beards and eyebrows; in a minute everything was soaked. The only sound was that of the dragging steering oar. The men were now sopping ghosts, speaking only with their eyes.
Directly ahead the fog began to dimple. The dimple became a hollow, the hollow a cave, and then ship and ice were being towed through a low, ever-extending tunnel in fog. The current increased its pull. Ship and drifting ice accelerated through the tunnel.
After a while the missionary quietly stepped forward. He stood with one hand on the prow’s neck, listening to the mist, so motionless he might have been a carved extension of the longship’s aggressive design. Not a man breathed. The tunnel’s dilating and contracting bore was producing an all but seamless series of oscillating, near-phonetic sounds. Leif almost tiptoed back. No god, pagan or Christian, could account for the strangeness of this situation.
They were borne on a course that grew more southerly, and the following day beheld an inhospitable shoreline glazed by dazzling white beaches. Their course held. Two days later they came upon a far pleasanter, thickly wooded coast. Here the current released its hold, and here the missionary untied Hero and personally placed him and his son in a tiny oak faering. He was just as sick of them as he was excited by this promising new land. Once the rowboat had been heaved over the side, he and another man stepped aboard and took up the oars. They began rowing with easy, powerful strokes.
When the boat kissed sand the missionary stood unsteadily.
The first European to set foot on North American soil now placed one hand on his crucifix, the other on his sword’s hilt, and awkwardly plunged his leg into the thigh-deep, ice-cold surf. Before he could take another step the boat lurched as Hero leapt headfirst into the water, followed an instant later by his son. The Greenlanders watched sourly as the two splashed their way into a mad dash for the waiting pines. Leif wished them both good riddance and turned to grin wryly at his fellow Norseman. He must have blacked out for a second, must have been blinded by a shaft of sun, for he found he was staring stupidly at a point midway between his companion and the longship. It felt like he’d been kicked between the eyes.
Everything was dissolving.
He studied the beach and pines closely, but saw nothing of the man or his boy. He turned back, disoriented. With what seemed a superhuman effort he took up his oars. He rowed out sluggishly, in a dream, and the fog rolled in to meet him.

The boy broke into the trees and embraced a trunk, fighting for breath. What happened next happened so fast and so unexpectedly he didn’t have a chance to react.
Three savages stepped from behind the pines and beat him to his knees. They twisted his arms behind his back and hauled him to his feet. He’d barely processed the impression of a wild painted face when something sharp struck him ******* the temple and tore down his cheek to the jaw. Two of the assailants manhandled him into an upright position and held him in place while the third brought his weapon down again and again and again.
All but dead, he watched a nightmare countenance shouting through a shot veil of blood, and behind that image a reeling crimson sun. He lay there gushing while the savages went through his rags. They propped him against a pine and shrieked with triumph, tore the hair and gory scalp from his skull, threw back their heads and screamed at the screaming sky. Tooth and nail, they ripped apart his face and throat and, certain he would die, split what bits of fur were left and let his carcass lie.

                                                HERO

The weeks stretched into months while he fought his way back into the light.
He progressed in stages; only half-conscious, stumbling along in a blood-red stupor punctuated by a slow strobe of frequent blackouts. Days loomed and decayed, nights pounced and were gone; the backlit, swirling gray cosmos collapsed and expanded on every missed beat of his pulse. A thousand times he broke down to die, and a thousand times he clawed to his feet, driven to pursue a tiny, ghost-like figure fluttering in his memory.
Everything conspired to check him.
A bay like an immense landlocked sea was skirted over months or years—it was all the same. Cold locked him in, Hunger drove him afield, that rude ***** Wind lashed him blind, wore him like a shoe, screamed for his skin while he worked his way west.
Somehow he ate, somehow he avoided being eaten; the instincts that had served him halfway around the planet were still vital beneath the abused exterior. His simple burrows became sturdy temporary shelters. He relearned the art of fire, and began to cook what he killed. He manufactured crude snares and weapons and, when his recuperation was complete, paid closer attention to the on-again, off-again trail he’d been following…forever.
Sometimes this trail would call to him like a lover. Other times he stood peering uncertainly, trying to recapture meanings and aims. Then the ground would turn spongy and the sky revolve, and once again he’d be lying all but dead in the woods, while from the face of the sun emerged a vile winged horror, its ugly pale head lashing side to side, its cruelly hooked beak dangling something that glistened in the wild pulsing light…then the fat moon, rising like gas against the icy black night…the feel of the wind:  the slashing of her nails, the chafing of her hem…the sound of things crunching and pausing and sniffing…then the sun, blazing anew. And again that thing, descending, its wide black wings beating slowly, metronomically—but none of that mattered any more. For his mind had quit him, had flown howling into ice and pine to roost with things surreal. In the day his madness might muddle and run, or spend the light stalking, cat-like, watching and waiting. But at night it came creeping from all sides. Sometimes it came in waves. It could gnaw like the devil, or wrap around him like a warm second skin. But none of that mattered either.
The only thing that mattered was the trail—whether it was lost for good, or for only a while. He’d been following it through his episodes, always north, wondering just who and where in the world he was, and trying to shake a ridiculous notion of being led on a wild goose chase.
The cold was unbelievable.
The deeper north he delved, the more confused he became. He grew starved for colors and scents, finding nonexistent patterns in the stark contrast of shadow and snow. He thought he could detect a kind of otherworldly design in the overwhelming number of dead ends he encountered, and, too, in the diabolically frustrating locations of natural obstacles. He seemed to be forever fighting the wind—a hulking, despondent snowman, he hiked face down and focused, while another aspect of his attention floated just behind, disembodied, watching his silent pursuers…leaving no tracks, blending perfectly with the environment in their clever winter coats…not predators, but creatures that normally should have been hightailing it away from him. By the time he could turn, they’d become nothing more menacing than snowdrifts. But they pursued him nevertheless.
And so his paranoia increased…had there ever really been a trail…and when did this miserably cold, miserably anemic crusade begin…his long-term memory was falling apart a chunk at a time. It just got colder and colder and colder until at last, one snippet of a day during one blur of a year, he found himself utterly lost, and clueless as to his history or objective. His mind was a blank, as colorless and featureless as the endless world of ice around him. He’d come this far solely to learn that the only trail he’d been following was his own—and now even that trail was succumbing to ice. On all sides there was nothing to see but an infinite field of glaring whiteness, and nothing to hear but the ululating wail of the tubular polar wind. It was the loneliest, the unholiest, the creepiest sound imaginable. But it wasn’t insanity that made him wheel. It was his self-preservation instinct.
And then he was somehow on his knees in the woods, facing a furious setting sun.
Whole seasons had passed from his memory like chalk from a board. His only recollections were those of a broken, haunted animal:  of being perilously sick, of fearing the unseen, of blindly struggling across a solid-white wilderness. That he’d survived such an ordeal meant nothing to him. And that he had in some indecipherable manner stumbled across the cold-as-stone trail did not fill him with amazement or with thankfulness—there simply wasn’t anything visual or emotional left to draw on. A significant part of his life had been whited out.
But now he could focus entirely on the trail. And before he knew it, the fuzzy area between fantasy and reality found a seam. He began to analyze and plan. He paid attention to hygiene, and kept a kind of running mental journal. Things were sorting out. Yet there were nights when the old sickness would resurface, reestablish its hold, and leave him sweating and uncertain under the stars. Then, paradoxically, his perception would become razor-keen. And so he would see, on a distant hilltop, a pair of scrawny silhouettes, one on four legs and one on two, slowly crossing the faintly pocked face of the setting moon. He would become strangely excited, and thereafter retain crystal-clear images of himself, as if seen from above, hurrying with adroitness through the silent, graveyard-like setting of black and blue night and white-frosted trees. Then the fuzzy area would broaden, and it would be the next morning, and he would be staring at the prints of man and elk in snow. And he would see how the elk’s prints doubled back, and how the man’s prints terminated where he had obviously mounted his guide. An unfathomable glow would bring tears to his eyes. But, even as he gathered himself, a fresh snowfall would wipe out the prints. And once again the world would plummet into white. And the wind would howl as the snow hammered his eyes. And he would ***** on.

A haggard animal sat shivering in a small grove of frozen pines, watching his campfire die. His eyes were fixed. Like the fire, he was running out of warmth, running out of fuel. There wasn’t a whole lot of tinder round his bones, and not much feeling left in his limbs. The slowly heaping downfall was burying him alive, but he was too numb to care.
It had taken him six long years to cross an entire continent, and during that time he’d known only cold and excruciating pain. The pain was leaving him now. The cold was making it right. His eyes glazed over.
Along a narrow plain to the west a herd of caribou filed dreamily through the snow, cutting across a panoramic backdrop of dazzling white mountains. The slow-motion parade was hypnotic. After a while it occurred to the drifting man, in a roundabout way, that he was dying, that he was nonchalantly freezing to death. Concurrent with this notion there rose in his chest a wonderful liquid warmth. His eyes slowly closed and, once shut, began to set fast.
He was jolted from within. It was as if he’d been kicked in the heart.
He ****** to his feet, pounded his fists on his thighs, felt nothing. The breath spurted from his mouth in small white clouds as he stumbled downhill after the slow caribou train. He swam through the snow, hallucinating, imagining that certain individuals in the herd were mocking him by slowing and accelerating, while others glanced back with expressions of contempt.
As he burst into their midst the animals stepped aside indifferently. A few galloped ahead to keep up the herd, but most simply sidestepped while he danced there, stamping his feet and smacking his hands. The herd grew thinner, until only the old and infirm were filing by. The man desperately embraced a hobbling female for warmth, but she cried out and kicked, triggering a panic reaction in the herd. Clinging for his life, the man was dragged along beside her as the herd stormed into a maze of flying ice and snow. His weight caused her to stagger sideways until they slammed against the flank of a sick male. The man instinctively threw an arm over the male and, thus draped between them, was borne across the drifted plain for upwards of a mile, his freezing feet alternately dangling above and dragging through the snow. The herd broke into a hard run, forcing him to assume a broken trot. Soon his legs were stinging. Sensation rushed through his body.
Now the herd, still picking up speed, began to contract, jamming him between his bearers. There was a quick jolt to his right and he was lifted clean off his feet, nearly straddling the bucking female. It had become an all-out stampede. Through hard-flung snow he saw the cause:  just ahead, the caribou had run head-on into a solid wall of galloping wood bison, and both frantic herds had blindly veered to the east; were in fact running side by side down a deep, ragged canyon—were pouring over the canyon’s lip like a cataract. He was approaching, at breakneck pace, that very place where the converged herds so abruptly swerved. The hanging man snarled as he was borne inevitably to the point of deflection.
There came a concussion at his left shoulder, followed by a blast of snow. In an instant the ailing male was tumbling head over heels to the east, ****** into the stampede’s plummeting mass by the fury of its descent. The man and female, rebounding from this impact, were shot to the west in a crazy jumble of flailing legs. The caribou lost her footing, flew nose-first into a snowbank, and came up running. Kicking off, the man used the last of his strength to heave himself astride. At first she fought to shake him, but the spell of the run was too strong. She and half a dozen others went pounding in the opposite direction of the stampede, quickly joined by a number of bison that had likewise splintered from their herd. The riding man could make out their huge hulking shapes thundering by in a blizzard of flying ice, could hear their heavy gasps and explosive grunts. One passed so close he felt its massive flank brush his leg. He peered to his right and saw a black, pig-like eye regarding him excitedly, moving up and down like a piston as the beast ran alongside.
The eye shifted, focusing on the gasping, completely obsessed female. The bull dropped its head and slammed into the caribou’s side, sending her and the man careening down a ***** to the west. The caribou brayed hysterically and her backside went down, but she managed, despite the weight of her rider, to return to all fours and frantically continue along the *****. Again the bull charged, crashing into her shoulder. The man and caribou were launched sideways into the white searing air.
He sat up carefully. The huffing bison was straddling him like a bully laying down the ground rules. Its big wiry beard came right up to brush his chin. The stench of its breath was stupefying.
The bull stamped and snorted, thrusting its stubby horns left and right as the man used his elbows and heels to back away. The bull followed, move for move. When the man collapsed under his own impetus the bull shoved him along with its snout, bellowing furiously. Clear down the ***** they lunged, shoving and lurching, until the man lay sprawled on his back; up to his chin in snow, completely helpless. The ton of a bull butted and kicked, but only glancingly:  those hooves could **** with a blow. At last the man, in one clean sequence, spun on his rear, dropped to his side, and went rolling down the ***** using his elbows for ******.
At the bottom ran a narrow fence of frosted saplings marking an ice cliff’s precipice. He lay face down in the snow, too done in to do anything but **** at an air pocket.
And there came a high-pitched crackling, a sound like the protracted gasp of embers in a dead fire. He turned just as those saplings began leaning to the west, their frozen skins cracking with the strain.
The bison bellowed menacingly.
The sprawled man looked back and saw it still standing with legs spread wide, silhouetted against the sky. In a moment it began huffing downhill, lurching side to side, surfing the snow between lunges.
It chased him through the genuflecting saplings straight into a frozen gully where, protected by a few feet of insurmountable verticality, he was able to slide on the ice between its stomping hooves, downhill out of reach, then downhill out of control—spinning just in time to glimpse a breathtaking vista:
Partly framed by the gully-straddling saplings was a vast crescent of jagged white mountains seemingly huddled round a small stretch of snow-draped pines. The little wood these mountains surrounded was isolated in a broad lake of solid ice. Hundreds of fissures radiated crazily throughout this packed ice field, appearing to issue from somewhere near the frozen wood’s center, which was completely obscured by a ring of rising mist. Above this thumbnail panorama the sun showered gold.
Then the gully dipped radically, and he was skidding headfirst, slamming back and forth against its slick white walls. This uncontrollable plunge had the positive effect of getting his blood flowing. Yet it tore him up. Had the gully concluded in a cul-de-sac, or had further progress required a single calorie of uphill effort, his struggle would certainly have ended here. He would have been too weak to move, and death would have been swift.
But there was a glacier—a great river of ice pouring slowly out of the clouds. The gully, terminating in a little scoop formation near the glacier’s base, spat him flailing onto its gnarly glass hide. He went head over heels, bits of skin and fur flying like chips from a band saw. Somehow he gained his footing, and then he was running against his will, tumbling and recovering and tumbling again.
He didn’t catch much of that crazy run. He half-glimpsed whirling walls of ice, felt a fickle surface underfoot, and broke through an assaultive mist that clung to his ankles and arms. He remembered having the ragged hides torn right off his body, and then being skinned alive. And he remembered reaching the glacier’s base and crawling like an animal; round its sweeping drifts, past its peaked moraines, all the way to a twisting frozen gorge.
And he followed this gorge down; ricocheting wall to wall, delirious, small plumes of thrashed snow marking his descent.
Through a freezing wood he fumbled. In a veil of mist he tumbled down a steep and verdant grade. As cold consumed his closing breath, he fell upon, near-blind, near death, a strange, enchanted glade.

There is a pool.
And in this pool a man lay purged, his broken body half-submerged.
The stumbling man stopped. He knelt to weep, but lost his thread. One hand took a bicep, the other, the head. With a twist and pull the corpse emerged.
That visage…that face—misshapen mask, contorted, bleached; of life’s deposits fully leached. Essence dispatched—a void, sodden wretch.
He let it fall and the glass was breached. All a freak, all a stretch:  upon this act his grip detached.
And the bridge collapsed…one vagabond grasp…what were these feelings; recaptured and trashed…a span elapsed…who was this puckered mass…he hauled it by the waist and thighs…slid it in, watched the pool react:  purse and recover, expand, contract. The glass reformed, now silver-backed…a sudden mirror…the man leaned nearer…saw his reflection, just smashed, remade intact.
The pool grew still.
Within its depth a shadow stirred—visions gathered, some distinct, some obscure. What they meant, and who they were, was much too much to fathom. The glass became blurred.
He closed his eyes, let his heavy head fall, fell back on his haunches, felt the sweat seep and crawl. The air was a pall—as he struggled to rise, a nib crossed his wrist.
He opened his eyes.
Between his fingers the blades poked and crept. Round his knuckles they ventured, up his forearm they stepped:  they seemed to be triggered by prompts from the ground. He shook his head slowly and dully looked round.
There were jays grouped about him, their black eyes aglow. Red hens came running, their fat chicks in tow. Gophers engaged in a weird hide-and-seek. Bluebells and buttercups craned for a peek. Sparrows hopped past and, paying no heed, burst into flight. He watched them recede.
Westward they flew.
Bewildered, he slumped.
Bumped from behind, he jumped to his feet, flabbergasted to find an ancient gray moose near-eclipsing the sky, with grit in his snarl and fire in his eye.
The old moose took aim.
The man turned to flee and stumbled, then tumbled and fell on a palm and a knee.

But there lies a world (so the lullaby goes) where rivers ever run.
Poked from behind, pushed out of his mind, he staggered into sun.







Copyright 2020 by Ron Sanders.

Contact:  ronsandersartofprose(at)yahoo(dot)com

How much fear would he come to stagnate his work ...?, The one that every suitable being knows how to develop and take care of. After he left the pulpit, he did not stop receiving more than the custom of the faithful not to see them changed, nor to see them migrate from his essence, like that of Ludwig and his involution of a well-structured animal.

Ludwig ...: Now I don't see my hands and my feet in good condition, and that this makes me never pretended, the non-biological, what is neither born nor dies. Of course, the changes are periodic and I will let the course continue normally, "Yesterday I was born and tomorrow I will be reborn ..."

My parents did not treasure the things that I needed, they only detracted from the possibility of providing the components and ingredients of the work they brought, "Myself". They were silent until the moment of his death, and I was frozen in the coldest winter that could be borne. Back at his house, he is led by the curiosity of the stone of that night with Antonieta. During the day everything was different, he did not take long to find her until he saw her up close. By having her close to her, he spared no efforts to make something of her, which he knew was not of common origin, but that she carried something magical.

Ludwig ...: Everything has been framed in a light or a halo, and behind these two things is the precursor fire of everything created. He has purified and burned in the atonement and inquisition, and he has created wonder in the eyes just as he did to me ...

... Everything attracts us, everything wants to convey to us what the neighboring elements of the hidden material orb have to experience. Every glimpse of the mountains or the hills, the question of our self is becoming present, that no matter how harmonious it may see in this case, the stone in balance is sought ..., and it will always be one step away from harmony, discord to find the real and accurate science of reason. I can already be proud of the activity that I have chosen, that if I have to meditate deeply and for the eyes of another it is idleness, without contributing anything to the world. It will be something as fleeting and unheard of as the same events over time, they end up ending up, sinking into the mud. For this time, he continued to see the stone, until the works have to have an author, the one that still remained anonymous, which would only change when the balance is favorable. Later, after having been on his property for a long time, he returns to his house and fixes his room somewhat. He orders pictures, books, in short, puts a general order. After ordering, he prepares his things to travel to the South of his Paradise; to the fields and coastal cliffs, to the mosses and the wild pastures with the icy gale blowing through. He alone would go for a few days since he would not miss his date with Antonieta. Near dusk, he left for his destination. The estate of an old friend of his father's awaited him. The trip was a bit hasty, but his anxieties were greater, due to that night that he wandered through the rain.

It has been a long time since I was going to see them, rather than at a Christmas party in 1954. Ludwig ...: Now I can see the horizon and the huge house with its windmills ... I hope they are ...?As he approached he saw Dn. Adolfo through the window, as well as other people who accompanied him, who he assumed, were from his family. Eight years had passed since the last time he was with them. After crossing the bridge, he makes up his mind to beat. Opening the owner of the house, recognizing him immediately.

Adoph ...: My dear Ludwig, what a joy to see you!
Ludwig ...: Thank you very much, me too.

He enters, he greets Adolfo's wife, Mrs. Isabel, then Martina, reminding him of that time they flew in a plane, and Ludwig almost died of vertigo. Isabel serves him some salmon. Adolfo questions him about the famous orchard that he inherited from her father. Ludwig answers him saying that he will die there.

Adolph ...: You have inherited valuable things from your family. Among them is the creative gift and simplicity, with the strength that you impress on everything.

I always remember them, your father from that time we enlisted in the R.A.F., to go to the War Front, since that time we became very close. I remember that in hostilities, Russia joined Germany, initiating fratricide. Your father and I passed the last checks and they commissioned us. On that day Russia defected from Germany.

Ludwig ...: Until his last days, he talked to me about those experiences. I think it turned out to be something of great relevance, especially the help from brother to brother, so as not to feel alone and exterminated. Adolfo tells him to put aside the past a bit, Martina and Aurora think the same. They keep covering until long after midnight. It was two in the morning and the conversation was still entertaining, the women were gone and they had gone to sleep. Ludwig tells Adolfo that they had been talking for two hours and also that they lived only four hours away, and they saw so little of each other --- Adolfo tells him that in the year 51 they had gone to Europe for a year. Also at the end of that year, my daughters finished their studies, coming to me alone with Isabel. After three years, they returned. For now, we will not move from this place, although I had been offered to work in the UN, to go to the conflict in Korea. But fortunately here in Chile I settled and everything came to nothing. Well, Ludwig Germano, I'll show you your room and I'll invite you tomorrow to fly to the Islet to look for some tourists. Now I'll show you your piece and don't forget to be ready at seven.

During the night, lying down, he thought that the changes that took him from place to place made him uneasy and exhausted. Where he was now was what he needed. Exclaim, how peaceful and appetizing ...! At bedtime one of his voices spoke to her ...: “Life is an instrument that must be cared for. If you abuse it, you will no longer have it. It is also mutable, if you give it constructive things, you will get the best and if you don't, the darkness will haunt you. At dawn, they had breakfast and went to the airfield, which was about six hundred meters from the house. When he arrived he saw that the hangar was very large, the plane was green, and it seemed to float in the air.
Adolfo ...: I'll check it and start the engine. Everything was going, the plane was ready, the day helped as it was sunny.

As they took off, they walked around the house, Ludwig was excited, he could barely respond to the greetings of Martina and Aurora. They passed something low for them to see. It was a quarter of an hour to the islet, they landed and proceeded to board the passengers. They were scientists who studied Habitat. In fact, on this islet that is populated, nobody lives on it. It was more difficult to take off since the materials were very complicated and delicate.

Adolph ...: I almost forgot, you have to change the batteries in the headlight. Bring them, they're in the back. They both went to install it, at the other end of a cliff, changed it, and left.

Ludwig ...: This is lonely, there are extraordinary things here, it looks like a huge plant raft. If she saw it Antoinette she would be impressed.

From here you can see the sky drawn, the storm clouds interspersed by the wind, and some timid flashes that try to cross the huge air masses, nearby to a day that could discharge the seas of waters, dropping them to the adjacent environment. Water on water, water on the wind, water on land, water on my hands ...- Also disturbing, the sea hits the cliffs of Adolfo's property. Some waves rush in with a harmonious ripple, hitting the edges until they rise several meters above the sea, only to fall slowly from where they were pushed. The fishing birds worked incessantly, carrying food to their young, and at the same time training them to become independent. This is how this wonderful medium is, that at the entrance of this scene, and the idylls with the immobile rocks give experiences to the Fauna. There is no day that fills us more with life-giving communion, our own imprints on all that is done, on what is reflective, on the immortality of what has just been blessed or cursed with parasite errors. Everything is for us who exist forever eternal and lonely ... "What embraces and governs us is very wise, it induces us to balance, to the same nascent endogenous attitude of infinite knowledge, the Empyrean or Nature. This Animal kingdom ruled by men is nothing more than all species in an unstoppable evolution, which forces us to submit in this twentieth century. A world that is increasingly removed from all-wise and humble spiritual vibrations, dominating at the same time with an insatiable appetite, which should give us governance, to be more dedicated to cultivating the barren being for the good. At that moment that he had just reflected, Adolfo called him surprised, it was time to leave the class. On the flight, silence reigned for minutes, until Adolfo spoke.

Adolph ...: It seems that you liked the islet, I saw you very thoughtful.
Ludwig ...: It is beautiful, and for anyone it is very stimulating.
Adolph ...: You're right, I've lived it.
Ludwig ...: I don't feel scared anymore, I think I'm going to get used to flying.

They landed and unloaded all the boxes they were carrying and this time they did not put the plane into the hangar. They leave walking after saying goodbye to the passengers until they reach the house and their daughters receive them.

Martina ...: Tell me, did you like the islet? It's nice, right ...!
Ludwig ...: Yes I loved it.
Aurora ...: Martina, Ludwig, let's go through.
Ludwig ...: What ...?
Adolfo ...: It's a surprise, see you.
Martina ...: Come ... join us!

Ludwig did not understand the invitation, but as he approached the aerodrome a hundred meters, on the edge of the cliff, there were some ropes hanging, and below a circular net about fifty meters more or less deep, each time the wind grew stronger and bigger. Martina takes a rope and begins to sway, it seemed that the wind was cooperating too much since everything pretended to be weightless in space. Martina was like this, and in a moment of incredible acrobatics, she fell off the hook, falling and circling the net several times. From where Ludwig was, she could see the plane as if it were confused with the jumping pasture, she saw that its wheels were jumping as if the wind wanted to carry it away. Everything belonged to the aeolian promontory, the branches and the trees, everything was beautifully dominated by it. Aurora and Martina looked like little girls, they played with the ropes with great skill. Martina wore her movements, her brown hair and white skin made her overcome all traits. Martina was the center of the acrobatic game, Aurora dominated the game, but not like her sister. There was a time when the risk they took with the inordinateness of time was too much. Ludwig could not contain her joy, he could not ignore the wonderful spectacle of them, the immense energy delivered by them, towards a liberation above all dimensions.

Martina ...: Come on Ludwig ..., try it, you'll like it!

She approached Ludwig and taught him something that she had never learned so fast, she took a rope which she did not stop staring into space until she swayed high and long on the swing.Her tightly clamped hands didn't want to let go or give up, but she grew fatigued. He had to look towards the network that would receive him, and beyond the network, the rocks could be seen. He finally could control the sway and let go, the highest fifty meters of his life, he never believed that such a sensation would bathe him in gushing adrenaline. Then between networks, he relaxed and listened to the advice of his guides. Martina congratulated him, marking him as a hero, told him to stay still and that she was going to move him with a string. Ludwig sighed deeply. Martina, aided by Aurora, pulled Ludwig down, quieting the echoes of him. After a while, he received a big hug from his guides.

Martina ...: I'm very happy, all this has been very exciting, even more so with you.
Ludwig ...: For me, it has been to rise to precious freedom, to an excellent game.
Aurora ...: You really did well, it was an act of great courage. You're the third person to do it, you actually ******* away.
Ludwig ...: Thanks to you that I did it, by motivating myself. But I confess that at one point I thought I was not able to do it, having to use all my strength.

Martina ...: It's time to eat, so let's see what mom made. Come on Aurora, and you Ludwig, if you're late, you'll wash the dishes. Wit and charm made them the happiest beings, they ran like hunted gazelles. Upon reaching the beloved place.

Mrs. Isabel receives them, and Adolfo was smoking a pipe. They are going to dinner, Ludwig says; The decadent rays inspire us with what is healthy, what is meant within me is manifested by the distributed sun. Martina says that was fine, that it was the most attractive when they think like that. To which Ludwig said that he was only meditating out loud. Doña Isabel found it super good for them to do those things. Ludwig expresses his gratitude to them by making them feel like his close relatives. They tell him it was the least they would do for him. And Aurora tells him that of course, there would be more entertainment waiting for him on the ropes. After they spoke, they ate prawns piecemeal with delicious well-seasoned watercress, then beans with sauce. To drink a lot of wine and dessert threads in syrup.

Adolph ...: The rope game seemed real daring. Note that we used it as training, in addition to measuring your audacity it fortifies you enormously. With your father we used to practice hours and hours, we even competed. Ludwig replied that it was just by looking at the trophies on the cabinet, and Adolfo told him that some he had won with Hans; his father.

Isabel ...: So Ludwig, is the exemplary model of his father, and in good honor.
Ludwig tells him not to praise him so much. As the night progresses, they decide to go to sleep. But Adolfo asks Martina to go and find the pantry early, which was well received by them.

Ludwig ...: Well then I'll reserve my ticket.
Martina ...: That you're leaving today!
Ludwig ...: No, tomorrow.
Martina ...: Ah ..., you mean ...? !

Isabel tells Aurora to pick up her silverware. Then Ludwig went to sit on the couch and from there he looked at the patch of desolate land. Every pause he made to digest the wine explored the even relief. Chaos still continues, the antithesis of the pestilential that is only what the rest laugh at. After a while, Martina comes over and tells him what is going on in that head, and he says ... Nothing! Then she thinks of accompanying me to town, to which he says anyway.Ludwig intimately thought about the wide spectrum of changes, he can now see the one who was long invisible. The one that takes you along elongated empirical routes, fraternalism, or perhaps what is linked to spontaneity.

You swell some strain on me,
You, middle kingdom!
Eradicating small detachments,
Of both sailors and marines.

They were ranked on islets and reefs,
With an integer of nine –
There in the island next to me,
I’m sure, you know who Spratly is.

Always wanting such detachment
To be eradicated by your own;
Now stationed
On a World War II era landing ship.

Your toy-ships came near me,
With 9-kilometer of the LST.
“It’s there illegally,”
How adamant that be!

I’ve tipped you off already,
Surely will I stand firm!
Then, you’ve countered me on! –
Opting for the ******* of more skyscrapers;
Those that are on stilts;
Now nearby two Reefs & a Bank? –
Nearby my darling Palawan Island!

“There is no room at all,”
For the negotiation on some point,
You’ve declared.

Oh, here’s my friend, U.S.
Left us with course of action to try;
Everyone calm down,
Be less provocative.
For often, he flies over;
Probing some stuffs.

You are the biggest offender, my friend;
In this dispute, you show no sign of slowing;
Or backing, down.
But hey, I won’t give up!

(9/9/13)

“Nullus enim locus sine genio est.”

  Servius.

“La musique,” says Marmontel, in those “Contes
Moraux” which in all our translations we have insisted upon
calling “Moral Tales,” as if in mockery of their
spirit—”la musique est le seul des talens qui
jouisse de lui-meme: tous les autres veulent des
temoins.” He here confounds the pleasure derivable from
sweet sounds with the capacity for creating them. No more
than any other talent, is that for music susceptible
of complete enjoyment where there is no second party to
appreciate its exercise; and it is only in common with other
talents that it produces effects which may be fully
enjoyed in solitude. The idea which the raconteur has
either failed to entertain clearly, or has sacrificed in its
expression to his national love of point, is
doubtless the very tenable one that the higher order of
music is the most thoroughly estimated when we are
exclusively alone. The proposition in this form will be
admitted at once by those who love the lyre for its own sake
and for its spiritual uses. But there is one pleasure still
within the reach of fallen mortality, and perhaps only one,
which owes even more than does music to the accessory
sentiment of seclusion. I mean the happiness experienced in
the contemplation of natural scenery. In truth, the man who
would behold aright the glory of God upon earth must in
solitude behold that glory. To me at least the presence, not
of human life only, but of life, in any other form than that
of the green things which grow upon the soil and are
voiceless, is a stain upon the landscape, is at war with the
genius of the scene. I love, indeed, to regard the dark
valleys, and the gray rocks, and the waters that silently
smile, and the forests that sigh in uneasy slumbers, and the
proud watchful mountains that look down upon all,—I
love to regard these as themselves but the colossal members
of one vast animate and sentient whole—a whole whose
form (that of the sphere) is the most perfect and most
inclusive of all; whose path is among associate planets;
whose meek handmaiden is the moon; whose mediate sovereign
is the sun; whose life is eternity; whose thought is that of
a god; whose enjoyment is knowledge; whose destinies are
lost in immensity; whose cognizance of ourselves is akin
with our own cognizance of the animalculae which
infest the brain, a being which we in consequence regard as
purely inanimate and material, much in the same manner as
these animalculae must thus regard us.

Our telescopes and our mathematical investigations assure us
on every hand, notwithstanding the cant of the more ignorant
of the priesthood, that space, and therefore that bulk, is
an important consideration in the eyes of the Almighty. The
cycles in which the stars move are those best adapted for
the evolution, without collision, of the greatest possible
number of bodies. The forms of those bodies are accurately
such as within a given surface to include the greatest
possible amount of matter; while the surfaces themselves are
so disposed as to accommodate a denser population than could
be accommodated on the same surfaces otherwise arranged. Nor
is it any argument against bulk being an object with God
that space itself is infinite; for there may be an infinity
of matter to fill it; and since we see clearly that the
endowment of matter with vitality is a principle—
indeed, as far as our judgments extend, the leading
principle in the operations of Deity, it is scarcely logical
to imagine it confined to the regions of the minute, where
we daily trace it, and not extending to those of the august.
As we find cycle within cycle without end, yet all revolving
around one far-distant centre which is the Godhead, may we
not analogically suppose, in the same manner, life within
life, the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit
Divine? In short, we are madly erring through self-esteem in
believing man, in either his temporal or future destinies,
to be of more moment in the universe than that vast “clod of
the valley” which he tills and contemns, and to which he
denies a soul, for no more profound reason than that he does
not behold it in operation.

These fancies, and such as these, have always given to my
meditations among the mountains and the forests, by the
rivers and the ocean, a tinge of what the every-day world
would not fail to term the fantastic. My wanderings amid
such scenes have been many and far-searching, and often
solitary; and the interest with which I have strayed through
many a dim deep valley, or gazed into the reflected heaven
of many a bright lake, has been an interest greatly deepened
by the thought that I have strayed and gazed alone.
What flippant Frenchman was it who said, in allusion to the
well known work of Zimmermann, that “la solitude est une
belle chose; mais il faut quelqu’un pour vous dire que la
solitude est une belle chose”? The epigram cannot be
gainsaid; but the necessity is a thing that does not exist.

It was during one of my lonely journeyings, amid a far
distant region of mountain locked within mountain, and sad
rivers and melancholy tarns writhing or sleeping within all,
that I chanced upon a certain rivulet and island. I came
upon them suddenly in the leafy June, and threw myself upon
the turf beneath the branches of an unknown odorous shrub,
that I might doze as I contemplated the scene. I felt that
thus only should I look upon it, such was the character of
phantasm which it wore.

On all sides, save to the west where the sun was about
sinking, arose the verdant walls of the forest. The little
river which turned sharply in its course, and was thus
immediately lost to sight, seemed to have no exit from its
prison, but to be absorbed by the deep green foliage of the
trees to the east; while in the opposite quarter (so it
appeared to me as I lay at length and glanced upward) there
poured down noiselessly and continuously into the valley a
rich golden and crimson waterfall from the sunset fountains
of the sky.

About midway in the short vista which my dreamy vision took
in, one small circular island, profusely verdured, reposed
upon the ***** of the stream.

So blended bank and shadow there, That each seemed pendulous
in air—

so mirror-like was the glassy water, that it was scarcely
possible to say at what point upon the ***** of the emerald
turf its crystal dominion began. My position enabled me to
include in a single view both the eastern and western
extremities of the islet, and I observed a singularly-marked
difference in their aspects. The latter was all one radiant
harem of garden beauties. It glowed and blushed beneath the
eye of the slant sunlight, and fairly laughed with flowers.
The grass was short, springy, sweet-scented, and Asphodel-
interspersed. The trees were lithe, mirthful, *****, bright,
slender, and graceful, of eastern figure and foliage, with
bark smooth, glossy, and parti-colored. There seemed a deep
sense of life and joy about all, and although no airs blew
from out the heavens, yet everything had motion through the
gentle sweepings to and fro of innumerable butterflies, that
might have been mistaken for tulips with wings.

The other or eastern end of the isle was whelmed in the
blackest shade. A sombre, yet beautiful and peaceful gloom,
here pervaded all things. The trees were dark in color and
mournful in form and attitude— wreathing themselves
into sad, solemn, and spectral shapes, that conveyed ideas
of mortal sorrow and untimely death. The grass wore the deep
tint of the cypress, and the heads of its blades hung
droopingly, and hither and thither among it were many small
unsightly hillocks, low and narrow, and not very long, that
had the aspect of graves, but were not, although over and
all about them the rue and the rosemary clambered. The
shades of the trees fell heavily upon the water, and seemed
to bury itself therein, impregnating the depths of the
element with darkness. I fancied that each shadow, as the
sun descended lower and lower, separated itself sullenly
from the trunk that gave it birth, and thus became absorbed
by the stream, while other shadows issued momently from the
trees, taking the place of their predecessors thus entombed.

This idea having once seized upon my fancy greatly excited
it, and I lost myself forthwith in reverie. “If ever island
were enchanted,” said I to myself, “this is it. This is the
haunt of the few gentle Fays who remain from the wreck of
the race. Are these green tombs theirs?—or do they
yield up their sweet lives as mankind yield up their own? In
dying, do they not rather waste away mournfully, rendering
unto God little by little their existence, as these trees
render up shadow after shadow, exhausting their substance
unto dissolution? What the wasting tree is to the water that
imbibes its shade, growing thus blacker by what it preys
upon, may not the life of the Fay be to the death which
engulfs it?”

As I thus mused, with half-shut eyes, while the sun sank
rapidly to rest, and eddying currents careered round and
round the island, bearing upon their ***** large dazzling
white flakes of the bark of the sycamore, flakes which, in
their multiform positions upon the water, a quick
imagination might have converted into anything it pleased;
while I thus mused, it appeared to me that the form of one
of those very Fays about whom I had been pondering, made its
way slowly into the darkness from out the light at the
western end of the island. She stood ***** in a singularly
fragile canoe, and urged it with the mere phantom of an oar.
While within the influence of the lingering sunbeams, her
attitude seemed indicative of joy, but sorrow deformed it as
she passed within the shade. Slowly she glided along, and at
length rounded the islet and re-entered the region of light.
“The revolution which has just been made by the Fay,”
continued I musingly, “is the cycle of the brief year of her
life. She has floated through her winter and through her
summer. She is a year nearer unto death: for I did not fail
to see that as she came into the shade, her shadow fell from
her, and was swallowed up in the dark water, making its
blackness more black.”

And again the boat appeared and the Fay, but about the
attitude of the latter there was more of care and
uncertainty and less of elastic joy. She floated again from
out the light and into the gloom (which deepened momently),
and again her shadow fell from her into the ebony water, and
became absorbed into its blackness. And again and again she
made the circuit of the island (while the sun rushed down to
his slumbers), and at each issuing into the light there was
more sorrow about her person, while it grew feebler and far
fainter and more indistinct, and at each passage into the
gloom there fell from her a darker shade, which became
whelmed in a shadow more black. But at length, when the sun
had utterly departed, the Fay, now the mere ghost of her
former self, went disconsolately with her boat into the
region of the ebony flood, and that she issued thence at all
I cannot say, for darkness fell over all things, and I
beheld her magical figure no more.

Overcome by this inverted lightning, i storm
into an abbreviated tomorrow, where i flood
into the dreamscape of today, eyes raining

down and inward. i sleep forth into the world
of waking, overcome by the temperament
of this mummified mouth. clawing the dragon
now hungry for my golden intimate currency

our love hides at the ends of my fingertips.
Fire nibbles the soles of my feet through
to my own heart, crumbling me clouded

where i go blind. i am sorry, marooned
on this island, where the corals reach down
from the sky. where stalactites rip the sails
of all incoming boats, the dragon survives

in an ephemeral artery, or in some capillary
where his teeth reign over whatever empire

smothering into, he becomes my face

to she that saves me. i have learned to love,
in that love has shown me it is beyond me;

where
the dragon follows my fingertips to your hair,
you walk beside me. where i am given i,
but awakened, beneath a golden sky

the dragon suckles everywhere

that i am saved. by the weapon of giving,

we carry an honest love
between our outspread palms

richer in treasure is
the continental freedom of having
washed ashore together.

“Beyond this of my coastal lugubrious ,
There was a time I held her hand,
As I slowly watched her floret,
Her beauty adorned like petals cockled,

I grew intoxicated with the scent carapace,  
As we quivered within a new romance,
Becoming immune to its constant presence,
When the wind shifts it drew her aura near,

I had to stop and hear the pounding of waves,
Only to find it was the beating of my heart,  
Our love was of genital flames that night,
And I loved her even more at the dawn,  

My heart now bears an untold story,
Like a ship at sea that longs for land afar,
A great untruth my lips have borrowed,
Boundless treasure now edging my heart,  

Your love had filled my cup up to the brink,
Yet I grow thirsty in this silence tween me,
Now not a drop of love for me to drink,
Love now has left me again on this my,
Lugubrious Islet”
By Andrew Guzaldo 08/11/2018 ©

--To C. M.


Fountains that frisk and sprinkle
The moss they overspill;
Pools that the breezes crinkle;
The wheel beside the mill,
With its wet, weedy frill;
Wind-shadows in the wheat;
A water-cart in the street;
The fringe of foam that girds
An islet's ferneries;
A green sky's minor thirds--
To live, I think of these!

Of ice and glass the ******,
Pellucid, silver-shrill;
Peaches without a wrinkle;
Cherries and snow at will,
From china bowls that fill
The senses with a sweet
Incuriousness of heat;
A melon's dripping sherds;
Cream-clotted strawberries;
Dusk dairies set with curds--
To live, I think of these!

Vale-lily and periwinkle;
Wet stone-crop on the sill;
The look of leaves a-twinkle
With windlets clear and still;
The feel of a forest rill
That wimples fresh and fleet
About one's naked feet;
The muzzles of drinking herds;
Lush flags and bulrushes;
The chirp of rain-bound birds--
To live, I think of these!

Envoy

Dark aisles, new packs of cards,
Mermaidens' tails, cool swards,
Dawn dews and starlit seas,
White marbles, whiter words--
To live, I think of these!

It took him a week to master thought-diversion. He would leave home to walk to work and the moment the door was shut it was as though she followed him like a shadow on snow. If he wasn’t careful the ten-minute walk would be swallowed up in an imagined conversation. He had already allowed himself too many dark thoughts of tears and silences. He saw her befreckled by weeks in a light he had only read about. She would be a stranger for a while, a visitor from another world (until she gradually lost the glow on her skin and the smell of Africa became an elusive memory). He was frightened that he would be overwhelmed by her physical grace enriched by   southern summer and the weight of her experience, having so little to offer in return. So he practised thought diversion: as her shadow entered his consciousness he would divert his attention to China of the Third Century and what he would write next about Zuo Fen and her illustrious brother.

Sister and brother Zou gradually took on a fictional life. This he fuelled by reading poetry of the period and his daily beachcombing along the shores of the Internet. He built up an impressive bibliography for his next visit to the university library. Even in the Han Dynasty there was so much material to study, though much of it the stuff of secondary sources.

One morning he took down from his library shelf Max Loehr’s The Great Painters of China and immediately became seduced by the court images of Ku Kai’chih. This painter is the only artist of this period of Chinese antiquity to be represented today by extant copies. There was also a possible original, a handscroll in The British Museum. It is said Ku was the first portrait artist to give a psychological interpretation of the person portrayed. Before him there seems in portraiture to have been little differentiation in the characterization of figures. His images hold a wonder all their own.

As David looked at the book’s illustrative plates, showing details from The Admonitions of the Instructress to the Palace Ladies, the world of Zuo Fen began to reveal itself. A ‘palace lady’ she certainly was, and so possibly similar to the image before him: a concubine reclines in her bamboo screen and silk-curtained bed; her Lord sits respectively at right-angles to her and half-way down her bed. The artist has captured his feet deftly lifting themselves out of square-toed slippers, whilst Zuo Fen drapes one arm over the painted bamboo screen, her manner resolute and confident. Perhaps she has taken note of those admonitions of her instructress. Her Lord has turned his head to gaze at her directly and to listen. Restless hands hide beneath his gown.

        ‘Honoured Lord, as we have talked lately of flowing water and the symmetry of love I am reminded of the god and goddess of Xiang River’.
       ‘In the Nine Songs of Qu Yaun?’
       ‘Yes, my Lord. The opening verse has the Prince of Xiang say: You have not come; I wait with apprehension / And wonder who makes you prevaricate on your island / When I am so splendidly and perfectly attired in your honour?
       ‘Hmm. . . so you favour this new gown.’
       ‘It is finely made, but perhaps does not suit the light of this hour’.
       ‘Let the Yangzi River flow calmly, / I look for you, but you have not come.’
      ‘I gaze at the distance in a trance, /  Only to see the grey green waters run by.’
        ‘Honourable Companion, I fear you feel my mind lies elsewhere . ‘
       ‘I know you ride the cassia boat downstream.’
       ‘Indeed, my oar is of cassia and my rudder of orchid’.
        ‘I fancy that you build a house underwater, thatching it with a roof of lotus leaves . . .’
       ‘Well, if that is so, drop your sleeves into the Yangzi River and present the thin dress you wear to the bay of Li.’
       ‘I am in awe of my Lord’s recall of such verses . . . I love the Lady of Xiang’s description of the underwater house . . . with its curtains of fig leaves and screens of split basil.’
      ‘But will you send me all the spirits of Juiyi mountains to bring me to your side . . . will they come together as numerous as clouds?’
      ‘My Lord, my nose perspires . . .’
      ‘I offer my jade ring to the Yangzi River / and yield my jade pendant to the bay of Li. / I gather galingale fronds on an islet of fragrant grasses, / still hoping to present them to you. / If I leave, I might not have another chance. / So I’d rather stay here and linger a little longer.’
        ‘I gather the powerful roots of galingale / hoping to offer them to you who are still far away. / If I leave, I might not have another chance. / So I’d rather stay here and linger a little longer.’
      ‘Even though your nose perspires and your ******* harden . . .’
        ‘Kind Lord, you have taken the wrong role in the dialogue. Surely it is the Plain Girl who gives such advise to the Yellow Emperor.’
        ‘And I thought only men read the Sunujing . . .’
        ‘You forget I have a dear brother . . .’
       ‘With whom you have read the Sunujing! . . and no I have not forgotten . . . he sought permission to travel to the Tai mountains, some fool’s errand my minister states.’
         ‘He may surprise you on his return.’
        ‘Only you can surprise me now.’
       ‘My Lord, you know I lack such gifts . . . I hear your sandals dropping to the floor’.
      ‘I sail my boat ever closer to the wind / and the waves are
stirred like drifting snow.’
     ‘I can hear my beloved calling my name. / I shall hasten so that I can ride beside him.’


She seemed so child-like in that singular room of the garden annex. Her head had buried itself between the two pillows so only her ever-curling hair was visible. Opening a small portion of the curtains drawn across the blue metalled-framed French windows, he gazed at her sleeping in the dull light of just dawn. Outside a river-mist lay across the autumnal garden where they had walked yesterday before their tour of the estate. Unable to sleep he had sat in their hosts’ kitchen and mapped their guided walk in the rain, noting down his observations of this remote valley in a sprawling narrative. On the edge of moorland it was a world constrained and contained, with its brooding batchelor-owned farms and the silent legacy everywhere of a Victorian hagiographer and antiquarian. As he wrote and drew, snapshot-like images of her intervened unbidden. She both entranced and purposeful in a physical landscape she delighted in and knew how to read. Although longing to lie next to her he had sat gently for a moment on her bed, feeling the weight of her sleeping form move towards him as the mattress sagged, his bare feet cold on the stone floor. He placed his poem on the empty companion pillow, and returned through the chill of unheated rooms to the desert warmth of the Agared kitchen.


Lying in your arms
I am surprised to hear a voice
That seems in the right key
To sing what is in my heart.

After so many dark
inarticulate hours
I,  desperate
To express this love
That drowns me,
Suddenly come up for breath
(after floundering in
the cold water of night)
to find there were words
like little boats of paper
carrying a tea light,
a vivid yellow flame
on the black depths,
floating gently towards you . . .

Oh log of memory
record these sailing messages
So carefully placed, rehearsed,
Launched and found complete.

Knowing I must not talk of love,
Knowing no other word
(feeling the shape of your knee
with my right hand),
knowing this time will not
come again, I summon
to myself one last intimacy
before the diary of reason closes.

Zou Fen often wrote about herself as a rustic illiterate, country-born in a thatched hut, but given (inexplicably) the purple chamber at the Palace. As the daughter of a significant officer of the Imperial Court she appears to have developed a fictional persona to induce and taste the extremes of melancholy. Otherwise she is mind-travelling the natural world from her courtyard garden, observing in the growth of a tiny plant or the flight of distant bird, the whole pattern of nature. These things fill her rhapsodies and fu poems.

As a young man Zuo Si had wild flights of fantasy. He imagined himself as a warrior. In verse he recalls reading Precepts on the Art of War by Ssu-ma Jang Chu. With a scholar’s knife he writes of quelling the barbarian hordes (the Tibetans) in their incursions along the Yang-tze. When triumphant he would not accept the Emperor’s gift of a title and estate, but would retire to a cottage in the country. Then again, as a student scholar, he describes failure, penury and isolation ‘left stranded like a fish in a pond, without – he hasn’t a single penny in his account: within – not a peck of grain in the larder.’ He was never thus.

Like all good writers sister and brother Zou were the keenest observers. They took into and upon themselves what they saw and gathered from the lives of others, and so often their playful painted characters hide the truth of their real lives. David looks at his dishevelled poetry and wonders about its veracity. He always thought of Rachel as his first (and only) reader; but what if she were not? What would he write? What would his poems say?

*I lie on my back in her bed.
On her stomach, her arm on my chest,
She props herself against me
so that I see her face in close up.
She gazes
out of the window

I don’t think I have slept at all,
My own bed was so cold.
She warms me for a while.

All night
I’ve been thinking
what to say to her,
and now I am too weary
to speak.

I am in despair,
Yet I ache with joy
At having her so close.

I wish I knew who I was,
What I could be,
What I might become.

A voice tells me
that such intimacy
will not come again.

i.

Off to Fuga island
Next to the pamalican;
Then to Bucas grande
In the turquoise shallow end's.

ii.

Next, the Mactan
Wherein the grain's art caramel tan;
Then to the land of Coran
And Cebu, where the shore meet's the dawn.

iii.

Hiding safely, on Bohol isle
There art tarsier, and thing's of wild;
Diogo islet next, an uninhabitable place
Me and mine Reyna shalt explore it, with tribal paint on face.

iv.

Off, to the great Santa Cruz
Ourn feet, in the pink corraline sand;
Zamboanga City, the southern region
Of this Filipino relic strand..

v.

Whilst next the Sangat
The western part of this expedition;
Whilst doing all this sight-seeing
It shalt be with mine Jane nagley, in earth's natural kitchen.



©Brandon nagley
©Lonesome poet's poetry
©Earl Jane nagley dedication

Peri Kousmos became effective with the thunderous lightning and mighty deluges, huge exhalations of fire Spiritu et Igni began with all the beads from the bottom of the sea rising by the seven suns that were duplicated odd, and even on the firmament of Agios Andreas. It was three o'clock in the morning of the antipode, and a splendorous halo with seven satellites that had at their summit the tops of roosters on some resplendent rays, which covered the meridian of a Demiurge that existed erected and frozen, opened over paradise. on the Peri Kosmou or Reference of the World of metamorphosis. Spuriously the emanations of the pamphlet that began to move from its geological boundary were made where everything was silenced and bruised in the compact parts, with all the wandering parts that wanted to enter under the ***** of the islet that was becoming spiritually. The Necromancer Monograph or work was violently prostrated in the four elements of nature with the geodesy of Vernarth, towards the Mandragoron Surveying for when Vóreios slipped into Nótos when Borker and relaxed both senses, then Dyticá with the demiurge Leiak relaxed from the Equinoctial of the Aftó, to fork through the narrow spaces and finally rise in an eternal vertical, whose center was relieved of a non-bellicose admission in a tremolo that wanted to shudder and defer from an extreme like the Eplinctae that made them move obliquely, the Stymphalos came out from the meanders, then the Brastae earthquakes bubbled from the Notós de Borker when he held them on the straight that contorted on the lacerated ones, later with the observation shot of Theus when the subsidence of the ground with the Hizematiae held them evidently parapsychological. Vikentios did the logistics of bridging the lands that were opened and divided around the perimeter, Marie des Allées held them with great force the ground that naively used to quiet for ephemeral moments with the Astae earthquakes, until Wonthelimar appeared and became effective in the verticality that expanded when it sank due to its shaking with the Palmatiae, and finally Vernarth bellowed with disgusting gutturals so that they would react to the Mycetas earthquake, which was exhaled from disgusting visions of the Peri Kosmou evidencing incidental paragraphs of Apollo, which although he understood of analogous emanations that seemed to be demonic plasmas of the aldehyde in the Valley of the Pleisto close to the Phocis. The sublunar pretended to have tangible oracles through the gasifications of the original Epiclintae earthquake that moved them towards the meanders where the bronze birds awaited the precepts of the Saint to take an advance on the celestial kingdom. This implied that the nature of the Stymphalos would require the sensory stimulation of the golden cowbell of the *** to stimulate them in their gift of flight, with their heavy wings that rested at the right angle to later draw on the cavities.

The sky was beginning to disappear and in the fissures that the Dyticá de Leiak line leaned, the shores of the sea were rearranged to assist them by magnifying the supine lines with the vertical ones, within the microseisms that began to increase from the earthquake, avoiding breaking the surface who was still generously supporting them by the cross of Patras that was he bilocated with his five-meter golden cross, up to his goddaughter island with the little finger of the Apostle Andrew. From here in the surface of the earth would be ajar when cracked by the little finger of the Apostle, then he would leave in his hand a minimal piece of earth so that they could be preserved from the cataclysm, and be redeemed by the bronze birds. Only in this way was the revived earth aware of what was happening, and let it escape in the concrete stones that had evaporated from the apostle, only letting in some bursts of the Metelmi that interlaced by springs of the lusters of the sublunar cycle, which intermingled with the land and the ocean, and the fire with the scalded air. The rebellions of the Mega Seism transferred them in psychic divergences towards the Palmatiae earthquake, which recovered the edge of the pilgrims who did not manage to attend the course of the Mashiach holocaust when they were apprehended by this force of the Palmatiae earthquake on the path of Bethany. From the valley of the Pleisto the uproar effects of Golgotha were counteracted, and from Patras when the sense of the earthquake shone on Vernarth's Mycetias in the 70th Earthquakes with the reverberated waves that flared in the verb, and in the guttural lows that They freed themselves from the subsoil, when the substrates of the mother's possession forged discrepancies of order or Kousmos, having to be reissued with so much rapture and sordid frenzy of the verb that did not recognize him from the stench of the waves that rose from the creeping subsoil, like a cobra that smiled linearly through the eyes of the fire conjured by the infected, and with the disproportionate deviations of the adjective, where salvation was the correct invocation where it has not been seen in the pharynx of the cobra, which struck itself in the impetuous fierceness of the burning global balance. The Peris Kosmou or reference of the World was compared with the paragraph that the evangelizing writings indicated with the chromatic, and not with the adverb when the fiery red of the Mycetias Seismic went directly to his fetid belly with halitosis to fully protect the wounded and Marie des Vallés with the reasons for the vertical and horizontal movement of the “Brastae and Epiclintae”.

Willie sat by the side of
the river in a philosophical
mood under a weeping willow.

Midway, between the two
banks, was a small island
only paddling distance away.

Debris from a previous flood
had accumulated on the low
foliage of an uprooted tree.

A funnel of cold air from the
ten arch bridge made a wind
sock of a plastic net nitrate bag.

In all his time, Willie had never
ventured on to this little islet,
even wondered if he should flag it.

Off with the shoes, rolled up the
legs of his trousers and slowly he
negotiated his way over the stones.

On exploring the land mass, which
was an isthmus of a mere ten square
meters, he decided to return to land.

Just before his disembarkation, he
noticed a large denominational euro
note caught in the gills of a dead fish.

Eureka Eureka money and food all
in the one catch (was his thought as
he made his way back).

The sodden state of the 100 euro note
was what guided Willie’s wise decision
to take it, as was, to the local Credit Union.

In the queue whilst waiting for a vacant
teller, everyone was admiring Willie’s
dead fish.

Eventually, at the desk, and known to
those working therein, a 100 euro note
was not his norm and created suspicion.

After tendering the note attached to the
Trout, that had apparently been fowl
hooked up the river by Johnny Logan,

The lady behind the desk called for the
manager, who immediately held the note
up to the halogen fraud lamp.

Willie had never encountered anything like
this when he made a 5 euro deposit once a
month to his savings account.

He enquired of the manager as to why he
was holding his fish and 100 euro note up
against the bright light.

The manager responded,  “ It is the policy of
all banking systems to check high denominational
notes for visible water marks “ !!

Vernarth leaves and articulates in them to guide and accompany them with this imperishable itinerary, coming from the undivided becoming that was normalized with its evident parapsychology, creating certain polycellular substances in the accentuated multi placebo effect by injecting them with clinical blindness, to then reactivate them in the ejido of Bethany as a path of going and death, back and Life, with whom they revived from the anginal dizziness, that even some faltered when they saw Bethany full of Borricos who led them with the allegory as if the real world had just been made in a variety of towards a speculative problem and its limitations. Vernarth could glimpse with his glances certain affected areas of some who were with the entourage, essentially in the wear of their pancreas, hormones that were launched with radiant flashes of celestial suns, with extracts of muscles varying with irradiation in super stocks, inhibiting radioactive parts of Cinnabar that finally brought them all together when the phase of Cinnabar that was deployed as an aid to the cutting of the heads Speleothemes or Speleotomies, becoming radioactive by generating concentration in large eminences of snatched electrons, in order to begin to open the layers of the bathyal zone at four thousand meters of depth without light, up to the Neritic where large cemeteries with whale mammary arteries flowed back, and together with toxins from sea snakes. The hypnosis that Vernarth exercised towards all those who absorbed aspiring to have enough dynamics, and generate prayers of all kinds for when they reached the Metelmi tunnel of the Profitis Ilias. With the management of the visualizations of her emotions, meditation and prayers were rewound after a neat trajectory of wealth and well-being Venusiana.

The power of their unified minds has been successfully adhered to for hundreds of years since they were fostered. From the first hypnotic third with the mesmerism of the chiroptical, rather of the four species of Vlad, Fruit Chiroptera, Vampire, Indiana, Egyptian, which would mainly be the carriers of fertilization of the lands of Patmos, and their pollination together with the Lepidoptera, also gave them the magnetism in this way:

Says Vlad Strigoi: “Eventually it suggested to me from the hypnotic trance that led us to varieties of suggestion in the dermis, which it branded us as suggestive ectodermal. Under the keys of the nervous system if I have to have a conscience or exquisite wisdom for all the blisters that in frugality it is convenient for my species of chiropterans to shelter them, and not my human comrades. So I got over the death of my older brother, and then I succeeded him, where I went some time to moan him on the Danube. I was exiled in Edirne, and from there in my second reign, I went to Wallachia, many episodes happened and early in the morning I was visited by the rest of the Boyars' bats, fleeing from themselves, there were thousands and thousands I had to take care of from them. Later I went to Valdaine, Chauvet. Welcoming me to Wonthelimar so that one day we would regain the true kingdom of manumission in the darkness of Wallachia with my monastic brother Vlad Calugarul "

The blisters of thousands of Vlad's Chiroptera burst when he referred to his brother Calugarul, beginning to fall from the upper angle into cheesy leagues of flying animals, who wanted to control the pain of man, all protected by psychic mental waves emancipated from the presumptuous angle of Vernarth, and of the laziness of his spasms, and migraines that we're frightened of some by the entrails of the physiology of the platform. Upon reaching five hundred years, there were four hundred left to approach the quantum borders that the Souls of Helleniká transferred to them, the entire timeline was covered with a tunic that was moistened by turbulent water that appeared from overseas, producing dramatic conventional meteorologies, where The line of sight of the horizon lay three times where it was, to indicate that the humid plain of the tunic was in concert with the setting Sun. From this regulation plan, the prime time was counterpoint, for a link of half an hour before approaching midnight, before reaching the Profitis Ilias, specifically the Metelmi Tunnel in the Raedus Codex. Many species were unable to tolerate the immunity of such an event as they emerged to the surface and began to collect cells that revived engulfed in themselves, to later become impregnated with Wonthelimar's entourage and then predisposed to enter the geological cavity.

The collectivity of time was dissipated, all the nature that was of a coherent past was beginning to visualize itself towards a state of immunity mechanism, due to the trances that deprived it of hope of living in a new beginning before reaching Patmos. From Agios Andreas, expulsions of malignancies that were expressed with the Apsidas Manes were still felt, being very well alternated by Marie des Vallées who deconcentrated conventions and individualities towards the lacerated that still did not form outgrowths on their bodies removed from Spinalonga, while she continued as always In its most absolute darkness and exile, only portraits were enough to project itself on a populated island, which would be rescued from involuntary excretions and depopulation, being a human settlement. More than a hundred experiments were missing to scale the island to a superiority that was far from a medical shelter site, which excludes it from knowledge of prevalent and invalidated concepts of a miraculous life that was beginning to be written in Agios Andreas. The power of Faith self-healed in the bodies that had yet to be awarded the healing intentions of collective minds that flowed among all, when they were guided by the Saint of Normandy after having clear evidence and for how long they would be on this islet, for also rejoin the investiture of the Himation of Vernarth in the Áullos Kósmos, indemnifying the intervals of the Vas Auric and the Cinnabar. All prayed inclined towards a transformation of the permutations that inspired a quantum healing, that moved the waves of the seas in unison with their prayers, that creating a quantum healing atmosphere in all channels, and for all their atoned intentions. Telepathy apprehended all their emotions, prevailing the vital energy that contemporary in the prayers of the new earth field that greeted them became at their astonished feet.

The hospitality of Agios Andreas had Theus and Vikentios defined to be with her, to have total compassion with the Saint and to recover their ancestors with a focus of energy that were invaded by hyper healings similar to an ultrasound, which emanated from the hands of the Santa, for each of the individuals who remained to be definitively healed and then redistribute them in the new spheres of execrations, which hung from the indigenous Manes on the island, which delimited the improvement of many human beings who lived long periods here, overcoming dimorphisms in the reproductive organs of ancient cavemen, with leprosy in the ***** of their ******, but the testimony of dimorphism motor skills will lead to species totally free of this scourge of the ***** bacillus, to perfectly synchronize a field of healing energy, from the magical thought of the Saint who assisted them permanently, to prepare themselves in the new regions before they had what to make the last decision to integrate in Patmos. The membranes of the nuclei of the sun that healed them and reconvened themselves from the molecules of an energized level of matter celestially congruent, with the sensitivity of the affected organs, until some cells imprisoned in the cells of lost morbidity, hypnosis was reinstituted bilocate de Vernarth who assisted them from his eclectic Portal before superior hypnosis that led them to mutate their bodies into astonishing birds, which were retransformed with the Birds of the Stymphalus.

I crashed into love
My ship had been lost at sea
Map was torn to shreds
And my compass had mislead me
Lied to me and abandoned me
Brought me to the wrong island
To hell and back and back again
I was trapped there on that Purgatory Island
Afraid i'd never make it off at all
I escaped-
Returned back to my ship at sea

My anchor was lifted
I let the ocean carry me away
Simply drifting through
A torrent life
Aimlessly floating by
Island after island
Too afraid to land
Too afraid it would be
Another perdition in disguise

I closed my eyes after staring
So closely and longingly at the clouds
How they danced in the sky
A song of freedom and carelessness
While I was chained down to earth
My heart anchored in the lonely sea
I closed my eyes to escape reality
To for just one second
Feel as careless as the clouds in the sky

I let my ship be wrecked once more
By a tiny islet alone in the ocean
Such a hard ****
Such irreparable damage
From such a tiny island
I felt helpless
Distraught and terrified that
My carelessness brought me back
To that devilish island

I was shipwrecked by love
Afraid and alone
I had no clue what to do
Other than brave it out
And step once more
Onto a foreign land
A tiny island
Not even on a map
A tiny beautiful island
The more I let go of fear
The more I longed to see
The deeper into the heart I went
The less afraid I became
I didn't want to leave
And to this day I remain
Home on that Heaven Island

The sea no longer calls to me
No temptation on the horizon
No doubt on my tongue
The angelic land is home to me
Holds me in a devoted embrace
My Elysium hidden away
From erroneous judgement
A tiny islet in the sea
Yet home to a thousand Nirvana's
Just for me

Vernarth calls Theus, Etréstles calls Vikentios, liberation is near! Dyonisius has to leave for Spinalonga with Wonthelimar and his entourage. Particles of liberation were divided with the immortality proposals of Wonthelimar and Marielle Quentinnais, transmitting ribs of the Speleothemes that harassed them extraterrestrially, until they became theologized in Theus, Vikentios's brother, committing himself to Elefthería or Freedom of praxis, before the gold, in their own alienating chance, are distinguished in the centers of knowledge of Spinalonga, as an entity of the five crosses of Theus, for the conceptualization of this human islet as a sentimental skin of the plague in Vernarth's parapsychology, through Wonthelimar for experience the intersection of Theusiles in honor of Theus with his comrade Vikentios for a priori and a posteriori, with events that will take place in this leprosarium. Kalydon bears a strong similarity to Kalidona in Messolonghi's Koumeterium. Being multi-assigned to Elounda northeast of Crete, like northeast Gethsemane, or the affliction ***** of the right lobe of Golgotha. Volume VII, is the compendium of Wonthelimar twice VV, with its double iteration, that is, VII, this acronym would facilitate access to the area of the future Leprosarium, a posteriori near said peninsula, and ditched from the continent that knew how to distance it as its adopted daughter Spinalonga "Long Splinter" who was now divorcing the peninsula. The fortification of the Venetian raids before the attacks of pirates.

Wonthelimar is seen in the mirror of the Chauvet lagoon, and before the prefixed arch of the Manes Apsidas, when they took the island in advance before they entered this artificial island flood of luminescence in 1578 by the Venetians who presumably feared the meddling by the Apsidas to seize the island, then leaving Crete plunged into a hostile coastline elevated in the foundational cavity of the Essene crewed vessels, they fit into the ship's bow that will be placed on the opposite side of the peninsula, thus avoiding that the ships would list by the low bottom that fluctuated between both portions of earth separated prematurely. The Greek impregnability did not bow before the otomanians by hiding, like Markos Botsaris in Messolonghi with themselves thus subduing them, considering more than sixteen hundred years of the chronological gap that separated this grievance that transcended under the ramparts, putting the settlement of the Tome VII, that is, from the acronym of Wonthelimar and its parapsychological union, which finally came to the aid of the Christians who fled from the Otomanians when they were empowered from the island, with the revolt of 1866, here the rebellious Christians pressed for the Turks to leave the site of a siege in 1903. Specifically from Lerapreta, the Kyrios of Vernarth appeared opening paths from Lasithi, the purpose of this a posteriori parapsychology of Vernarth, would bilocate with their expedition masters, preparing to welcome their ***** relatives on the island from the migration of the ottoman us. Forever as a ***** limen, to be bilocated in the Profitis Ilias, after burying all the lepers commemorating them of restored morbidity after forty days, just as it was in Jericho with the Mashiach, and the Apsidas Manes escaping from the Mashiach.

The eschatology of liberation is confessed with the mythological and parapsychological transformation of Spinalonga as attempts at the misery that evaded the wretched custodians of the Christians who organized themselves from the apocryphal prefixal German or acronym of Wonthelimar as Wo "where, and Thelimar, from the Greek Tou Limar, which would mean "decompose." Finally pointing out the hybrid imprint of the appellation granted by the Manes Apsidas who had stayed on the reef since it was abandoned by a priest. This Tou Limen was an appellation that was provided to weaken them from all the deprivation of Faith in the Christians on this island. The schematic parallel stretched between the two stages with the smallest concatenation since the first century AD. C., until 1600, making this quantum leap the Christian science that understood the democratic causality of extemporaneous events, without having any dimension or category of thought for those who differ or not, especially when the bodies and souls of Christians are They pirated everything, and of themselves, generating condemning existential stress as a source of static synergy, and of God-Mundis in the sketch of science that leads religious man to unite with existential cavemen, in the utilitarian health passages in Jerusalem, specifically in *** Bei Himnon, as a bilocation base in Spinalonga on the face of the leprosarium that was created as the first holocaust or body dump in 1900 without the ápsychos (without a soul), asking for compassion towards the praetorian militiamen masses of the remote past.

The dilemma is create-destroy since Wonthelimar had been moving rapidly through the intraterrestrial slabs near the Kalydon peninsula, before reaching the Kyrios entrusted by Vernarth in Lerapetra, Lasithi. Here they would join with Theus and Vikentios, two Orthodox Christians who were waiting for this procession to later return to Kalydon. The coordinates were alienated in the dilemmas of an anxious Anthropokairós or psychic fear of a past that was three-dimensionally present, towards a future between two different temporal quanta. The entourage was united with a great will to move great tons of time that were intertwined with the almost extinct nature, but noble in resisting that so many fools fought in lands that will never belong to anyone, especially when the storm of the apocalypse thunders the primeval. that Atlas sustains so as not to sink us with his pole, and save all unconverted humanity, making servitudes towards the land of putrid leaf and not the other way around, after so many failed attempts of a Hyletica, or usurpations of matters that are alien to him. certain improper uses such as the mantle of the precious ozone of Eden. The enthronement of the creator will be on the created and will be present, and yes it will be! De Spinalonga with his holocaust of matter will magnetize the mutuality of perished matter in the paw of evils that could not understand his soul matter.

Theus enthroned in Kalydon, here he waited for Wonthelimar before crossing to the islet. His brother Vikéntiko was objectifying himself with his spur scientist in the opening of a new rebirth, in this navel that will seek to untie the aphonia that was difficult with the smallest ellipsis that it implies, by intimidating the miserable prospect that nothing will be redeemable, even later to raise the standards of truly real and not virtual freedom, when the Vexillum that Wonthelimar brought to institute the Genius Loci of Spinalonga appeared. He came along with Marielle, Dyonisius, and Vlad Strigoi. The ethical debate from now on will focus on how to exalt the lepers and *** Bei Himnon and Spinalonga after the Manes Apsidas disassociated themselves from the ethical debate on the island after the departure of the Otomaniacs. The critical evolution will be for the hopeless of a definitive residence that conceptualizes the abandoned, and totally destitute of the chamber or convalescence session, taking them to the Mysterium Ecclesiae, carrying in themselves doctrinals that have supremacy and predominance of the relief of the drama of an existence gray and dark, of those who lie under dire diseases, with advanced duels and an exempt dogmatic formula.

The astrophysics of Spinalonga shows here a universe that distances itself from inextricable nothing, and nothing that alludes to navigating or discovering the point of a ba-ab point, with astrophysical interlocutors that emanate from the realities of stories, which occur more prone to whom be able to resist morbidity with total Christian doctrine, although still asserting itself in coming cycles where Christians are observed fleeing the formulations of a great theologian astrophysicist named Mashiach, who will unite them with the lipoid of Orion, or with the two quantum bracers of *** Bei Himnom and Spinalonga. The quantum record can be cited with immaterial alchemy that emerges from a retrograde biological evolution, for those who believe in archaeology as a state and complement of the logic of the omnipresent-bilocated God in Vernarth parapsychologies, going back to times that passed, passed and they will pass in any dimension of the common man, and whoever is added in the impersonal value in a dynasty of Christian thought, which accommodates the Lodging Ghost of Theus, together with the Mashiach, for a holistic with new body prototypes and souls, which would redesign a paradise definitive. The gaps will give guessed…! And the whole will be to create supposed voids under the law of the conjectured whole, here the continents will pilgrim, containing the same Rabbi co-responsible for all dualism that is ingratiated with divine omnipotence.

Low are freedoms as a final cause, an efficient cause that brings together greater merits of acquiring the personal vote, by acquiring inimitable tenors throughout the cosmos and archetype of man, which does not end with its used prototype substance, relating as one created after the creator told him that he would never abandon him, perhaps being Theus? Spinalonga, a city of the leprosarium, was distinguished from the apprehensions of the Anthropokairos and from the privations of the Apsidas Manes, without pain or fears that will redouble the rudders that unite it to this geomantic duplicity, uncreating mutations that would not appear in the limited collective imagination, rather in the existence that everything is at once, especially when the verb recovers the creative act, towards divine infinity, in Vernarth's kenosis or empty will, purging all of humanity ... It will be more meat on Patmos.

Bruised and beaten in the salt swamped oceans
burnt to crackled skin, unbarked, floating
highways in the waters racing, warm
blanket of currents, tossed in the tide
of reaching places, far off shores
infested by man -eating sharks
piranha fish,  electric eels, the boat of misery
finds its channel to freedom
on some strange islet that leads
to unkempt land.

Not wanted in their own country
scratching for existence
watching nirvana on Channel 52
each scampers in the dead of night
to find a home in other unwanted countries
abandoned on the beach of mercy.

The war on poverty will rage
around polished tables of policies
and the rich will get richer
while the poor get  children.

We are driftwood dressed in a society
with new bark-like skins.

Author Notes

immigrants.Watch as the world disintegrates into driftwood.
© Marshall Gass. All rights reserved, a month ago

Wisdom permeated all over Spinalonga, needs were supremely supplied, Wonthelimar was together with Vernarth in the endeavor to honorably defer the Manes Apsidas converts who evacuated the cells of the leprosarium, after the Ottomans and Orthodox priests had left them, the custodians arrived at its end. Now everything has the life and the will to touch the lightning bolts of the blue sun, with the personal image of the Saint's devotion from the origin, and the new lives that rose up through the complex of the sectional rampart. The Palmario Apófisi de la Santa was made of a great awakening semblance, with the Panagia Theoskepasti, in Kimolos. From this labyrinth of the skepazo or "velar" that the Saint smudged from afar the counterweight pallets so that they are not returned through the axon tube that will take them far to this region of purgation, in the Cyclades and Dodecanese. In the bay of Dekas the archpriest of Kimolos would wait for them, receiving them near the small islet Agios Andreas, similar to Spinalonga, where they will live until Vernarth goes, after speaking in Kimol and Milil. To arrive at Psathi with his entourage to exhume them definitively in Court V of Elleniká, seeing the extreme longevity of the fallen of Spinalonga and their leprosy cloistered in a fleeting substance.

Iteration of Marie Des Allées: “The Vas Auric will rotate in all ellipses from here to Elleniká sprinkling crumbs of the purest bread of Arcadia, on a gray Monday with hummus and bobota, to attract the vinegary souls that were in a catatonic state, thus doing more esthetic or in Aisthesis in the reactionary when reincorporating them in the three courtyards in magnificent concordance with Rhodes. At the beginning of the Archpriest the talk derives the prayers from him to the semi-inert matters that were made in communion with the oratorical dyes; with worms and with the distractions of larger snakes that were planted waving, being, in reality, Vermes that were amazed at the exhortation of the Archpriest and the protocol, who circled the universal destination of his elegies to be celebrated from an ambo or pulpit, in classical Latin to propheir the archpriest the form of Era Dies Lunae, mutating it ****** to dies lunis by analogy with dies. On a dark Monday, but full of grace for those in attendance, they would give sermons, to interpret the alabaster courtyards that would lead to Tsambika. The first worms were chased by Kanti, believing that they were games that emerge from the eternal ground. Of whose ecosystem the earth was beginning to ignore them due to their annelid metamorphoses, appearing to increase in their texture, more ultra hadic than the same remains of doubt without sarcophagus, turned into sharp intestinal curves that were depressed breathing autonomously over massive folds of the acquiescent dermis of the oldest caste of the subsoil of Helleniká, further away from all sub-divisible organic matter of finite mortality towards the eternal other, contributing to a neural complex of tremors, and in veiled sensations that are lost between itself and that of its own bodies being able to take them with their own disorders "

Vernarth indicates: “long are the hours, and doubt overwhelms me, only my instinct follows me, and then I follow him. Khaire everyone and may the light of Mashiach be with us "

Etréstles reiterates: “my spirit has met Marie des Vallées, my spiritual hers, and my mischievous spirits play with them. Divine thanks, O venerable St Marie, here we are to honor the labiernago that have brought her Marian lattices, their dark green that blends with the layer of her attire, in margins that are found out in their change of shades "

Wothelimar answers: “what fire will extinguish the similarity of the Labiérnagos with the Astragali of Vernarth, when they meet those of the Santa Marie?

Theus replies: "We have been redeemed by his spiritual fire, whose conscience has placed in us in the Apophisi that reproves him, under the joint weight of beatitude"

Vikentios answers: “the Matakis of redemption will filter the doubts of his third person for an inextinguishable, to the degree of the second character that could divert his prerogative. Thanks to the spiritual fire that burns in the brambles that result in martyrdom by already being free from the torment of *** Bei Hinnom and Spinalonga fully expiated "

The protocol is broken and Theus, once freed from the last link of the Apophisi, goes to hug his brother, together they hug and kneel down the rough *****, after the ghostly chairs run wild for a prebend of Mother Marie that from The sky presented them weightless, with the effective of the marvelous Logos of God, and the Rhema of Vernarth, who would make the plate in the aromatic herds of Myrrh, Myrtle and Marjoram, to aromatize the appearance of the Saint and to bat the world of the Howls Kósmos with this triad of balsams for the foreground of the bigamist horizon in bloom, which sprinkles the talc of the resinous species when falling from the serene on this great day. They all looked at each other for more than three days in a row without moving, nobody did it from where they were. Leaving sticky resins, deserting the greased bodies of eternal days, some looking at each other in the infinite time that anointed them with different minutes, and monuments that released their souls moistened with Myrrh and carmine for the muffins of a Hellenic piece, with properties healing for mythology that was reborn in the sub-mythology of Vernarth and the essence creators Myrepsós. Or creating essences for the Saint, condensing from the perfume on all the alabaster containers, smelling of the insurmountable effects of Alexander the Great who appeared before everyone, to support and even in the ferrous breath of the stratosphere, and the island that was reconverted by the trampled waves, which were made to fall on all the megatons of Hellenic incense, which does not lead fights or disputes, only entertained everyone here united in the order and temperance of the frenzy, which follows the fields of fragrances directed towards everyone, also for the Manes Apsidas to Theoskepasti. Supremely Marie des Allées poured Rose concoction, ordering them to have their mouths open to receive their fragrances, and then to be able to expel them to the nauseating winds of the east, where the Beit Hamikdash was free of Gehenna, transferring the Apsidas to Dekas and then to Helleniká.

Deep beneath a pillowed sky, there
A restful restlessness abides
Nestled in a perennial hill
Whose sentinel trees raised their hands,
White with subtle deference,
They do not usher the world flowing ‘hind,
But show me an islet high above time.
I sat there in ponderance at the stagnation of clouds
Holding on one end a gold string of a kite
My thoughts tethered to those ghosts,
Those wights, sitting amongst me, those by-gone eras
And down, on me, some vague horror weighted
To them it was the Stones that made them feel dated
I thought I could feel slippage, some loss of traction
They? They bore a whole lifetime without
Satisfaction.
The breeze smells of gossip and Jaeger on their lips;
Everything is on point: dances, romances, localist quips.
Whoever would have guessed
Memories ablur could be the most vivid?
Such, I suppose, is an art form insipid.
I had to step away from this field of time
It had overtaken, that shadow of mine
All the trees now, bow and they bend
Prostrate, like a weeping willow.
When they step out into the world,
A bath of gold in the dusk of their lives
Shall fall before their feet, denude from their shadows
To run on ahead.

echoplex
once obscurantist
now scrutinised in headlines
i'm beginning to feel ok
chaser after chaser to wash down sour sentiment
eviscerate the taste
turncoat
is there an origin?
split your infinities
shed your non-essential claws
embedded deep
broken umbrellas
my eyes look different
atlas falls in amongst the spectrum
lack of character
efavirenz, whitewater in apex
prophetic undertones
cold diffusables
soda left to evaporate
poured over CMYK
through tabloid idiocy
nonsense on stilts
into wormwoods faded muse
yellow collapse
there is a feeling
living game theory
a thought of paranoia
god send the dream
anechoic
salivate the ebb
neo-conservative laden draped production
phenobarbital
can't stretch for a smile
temporal need
bizarre cognition
i feel sorry for me
suffrage, occam's swollen belly
polish fear with a sum
the way of all flesh
shadowed contents entitled: from a to b
from point to point
you want to shift the position of power
there's no one there in the morning
at the foot of the bed
or in the mirror
believe your own fabrications
dial in doubt, dial out everything
we're exactly where we want to be
moulded in consumption
ivory and elephants
the right place
stark lines
compass to televise
triangulate our complacency
shower heads dripping with aspirin
floating corpse
burning ruins, stretched moans
agony suffice, burned out
stick to the skin
all i see is rebus
face bursts with allusion
ear full of maggots
a better tomorrow is a better today
talcum meditation
underhand rhetoric
you are an idiom to fundamentalist greed
partial differential
ignorant and flabby
you can catch me headfirst over a toilet seat
working for kowloon
red ties
men of lethargy, motivated voices
islet of langerhans, shock therapy
anosmia
niche downfall
an arc structure, waste product
halftone mnemonic
lick up my words
capsule, strict reflux
wretching on disappointment
i feel faded
my skin buzzes
tonguing a molar
push it apart
flashes of light
cramps
vestige of fragility
welcoming boredom with open forceps
i don't recognise myself
sponge fed schism
sleeping pills and ***** bath water
cotton tongued peristalsis
egg shells, nodding and a pint of clotted spit
verbal copulation
sprouting flowers from my dead body
feeling like a frayed knot
desolate compendium
shooting pains in my arms
no foresight
i can't get up
i'm busy
i just won't

"As you are concentrating long and adamantly,
As the gust sails of life’s empathies upon us,
That billow through our daily lives my dear,
Those elations we have to decide for imminent,

If this is the sail of misery you bequeath to me,
Than please my dear leave me at the shoreline,
The islet where my roots are that embrace me,    
With the wind sand and my tranquil waves afore,

But remember what you have done on this day,
I shall lift up my spirit here among what I know,
And I will set out to another land an islet of my own,  
If of every hour of a day realize that I am your destiny  

With all the implacable palatableness and love derived,
Each day a flower for her from the valley of flowers,
As our lips clung intensely to seek one another,
To share two lives as one is everyone’s fantasy,

An endless undertaking of understanding and reverence,  
Both must understand the different aspects of one another,
It is a dream of allocating one’s life but remember always,
Choose the sweetest drupe from the top of the sapling"
  BY AG 06/14/2018 ©

Etréstles parapsychological regression in Kímolos:

Theoskepasti church, due to its position, could easily be recognized by invaders during their raids. However, according to a legend, the church was veiled by dark clouds of fog and became invisible as soon as the raiders approached. Due to this legend, the church received the name "Theoskepasti" from the Greek words "Theos" and "skepazo" which mean "God" and "watch over" respectively. So the name is 'Veiled by God'. According to another tradition, when a stranger once managed to enter the church and tried to steal the golden candle, divine power cut off his hands. Also if it is veiled by God, so it is divine for Creation that will begin with the synchronization between both latitudes of the Cyclades and the Dodecanese.

After staying with Kanti, they went from Theoskepasti to Hellenika, located in Dekas Bay on the west coast of KÍmolos. Here in the necropolis and ruins of ancient tombs, they would make up part of the new humanity in the creation of the Duoverso, which will exist from Mycenae and Cyclades next to the small islet of Agiоs Andreas, also being part of the city. Many ruined tombs can be seen from the hill on the edge of Ellinika, with some ruins still in the sea between Kimol and Milil. In the proximity of Psathi, on this island located on the southeast coast. Kímolоs Chοrá is 1 km away on the hill above the Psathi port, from here you can see the foreign ships that try to come to the Bay towards Hellenika, for the advent of the Cinnabar and the scapulae that holds the Gates of the Necropolis, for effect of the avant-garde Trisomy, regenerating souls that will resurface with mutated more universal chromosome dyes, but with extreme longevity.


In the homily, an archpriest of the regional deanery will make pastoral criteria for this gesture, by virtue of the eminence of guiding them through the orthodoxy of the chapel to the Episcopal organization of the Vas Auric procession. It was already dusk and Etréstles was putting the homily utensils on Kanti's pony. Before incensing and lighting fires of laurel and rosemary from the fords of Leto and Koumeterium of Messolonghi, he would rotate in ellipses sprinkling crumbs of the most pure bread from Arcadia, on a gray Monday with hummus and bobota, to attract the vinegary souls that were in a state of catatonic, thus making it more esthetic or aesthesis to the reactionary reincorporation of the three courtyards in magnificent concordance with Rhodes. When the Archpriest begins the talk, you refer his prayers to the semi-inert matters that were made in communion with the chromosome dyes; with worms with forgetfulness of larger serpents that were planted waving, being in reality only worms that were astonished at the Archpriest exhortation in the ritual, that they circumnavigated universally with the destination of their elegies to celebrate from an ambo or pulpit, with classical Latin that uttered the archpriest the form was dies lunae, mutating it ****** to dies lunis by analogy with dies. On a dark Monday dies, but full of grace for the attendees, they would do the sermons, to interpret the alabaster courtyards that will lead to Tsambika.  The first worms that were chased by Kanti, believing that they were games that emerge from the ground. Of whose ecosystem the earth was beginning to ignore it due to its annelid metamorphoses, appearing in the increase of texture, further beyond the grave of the same remains of doubt without sarcophagus, turned into sharp intestinal curves that were depressed breathing autonomously over massive folds of the acquiescent dermis of the oldest caste of the Hellenika subsoil. Being of distant origin from the Arcadias and its dissection, which silently followed the hummus and bobota, not to digest them with its suction cups, rather to surround them and delegate them to explore the surroundings that would encapsulate the soil with the proximity of the universe transfigured to the Duoverse of Vernarth, to phosphorylate and emit the wispy nitrogen fires before the Archpriest, Etréstles and Kanti disturbing by an arcane movement. Being a full act of herbaceous phagocytosis, they continued to ascend in the curvilinear procession, with their traces weaving together a timeless moment, which added to the sub-mythology and a finite sub-time, like single-celled procreating others that accelerated their physiognomy detached from their immateriality, towards a longer intake of organic material on the hummus of the bobota bread. Dropping with only clears wrinkles of the digestive world, what no cell has tasted ******, but rather, directly when breathing from Hellinika's lung lobes, comprised mostly of alabaster sheepskin, which were suspended even the bottoms of other colony of worms that sailed, to peer out towards the surface of the altar, where they regenerated the flow of the annelids.

Archpriest says: “The framework of the Vas Auric, arises from the nuclei of the medallion, being pending of a high presence of isolation. With high mobility between the tissues of the annelid amino acids, as new basal cellular functions, even though they are visible to Etréstles, and not totally for everyone yet. The image of the medal, in the classified functionality offers concrete, but microscopic information in a chronological way, possibly being the first in the function of the icon in its justification with the religious symbols and the manifestations of the divine and in the semantic even of the self-iconification , reading it in the Vas Auric, "What two men do not see, a man sees who does not see ..., what the creeping animal sees, a prisoner of its lack of vanity." Being epistemic images that provide knowledge beyond the sub-divisible organic matter of finite mortality towards the eternal other, contributing to the neural complex of tremors, in the veiled sensation that is lost between itself and that of their own bodies, being able to take them with their own emotions”

Necropolis of Hellenika / Kímolos
Tsambika / Philo of Alexandria

They passed each other on the outskirts of Archangelos to go to Tsambika, going to the Necropolis of Helleniká where he was waiting for them more than 400 kilometers to the west of the Cyclades, precisely in Kímolos where they would do the colloquy with to do the channeling with the Necropolis. Etréstles had traveled with Kanti the steed; on his back, they saw the distance before they arrived at Mandraki in Rhodes. They all headed down the coast towards Archangelos, but Etréstles went to Helleniká, the Vas Auric was landed on Mandraki for the purposes of the Creation of Vernarth together with the Apostle Saint John. Kímolos, it is on this island that the famous beginning of the procession towards the outskirts of the cities was to deposit their sacred remains on the way to a better one, here were the martyrs who were used to Etréstles since he cohabits in delay with Drestnia for the new millennium (His female of hers) with which he resides in the Koumeterium of Messolonghi in the ninth vertical cemetery. Having a chapel and altars this place was propitious to create between Kimolos and Tsambika which was so many kilometers away, so the meeting performance between villages would be seen in its entirety to be resurrected and worshiped between the Cyclades and the Dodecanese with pious exercises between both latitudes precisely in the chapel of Theoskepasti, while in Tsambika it would be in the Panagia Tsambika monastery. Etréstles carried in both hands some matches of some population dowries with laws of affability and generations lived there without knowing each other between the two islands and tabernacles, arguing canons of burial and exhumation. In this case of performance refer to the Vas Auric of Limassol that brought the construction of a world of the right angles for the neat reconstruction of multi polygonal spectra, adopted for the first time in Kímolos to be retransferred to a logical philosophical-architectural division seeking to enclose the perfect plans where the new Christians will reside, between Rhodes and the west of Kímolos re-installing themselves among more than a third of the venerable ones who rested in Helleniká, in syncretic neatness with dissimilar populations and creeds.

Saint John the Apostle with Vertnarth, Raeder, and Petrobus plus Eurydice would bring from the rubies of Alexandria the incorporeal honor of Alexander the Great, turning both island sites into palaces of the Muses of Helleniká for the scholars who would be at the canonization of Vas Auric. Being the precursor of the chapel of the Theoskepasti, this performance of erudition will be endowed with the new status for Philo of Alexandria present here, now being a co-demiurge who will convert this necropolis city into duality with Tsambika for distinctions of the rituals and homilies, reducing the inputs basics in ceremonies. Philo of Alexandria says that only God protects the Jews, adding to what Philo wrote in La Legatio ad Gaium, the Jewish delegation had trouble meeting Caligula and when they finally met him, the emperor declared that he wanted a statue of him to be built as Jupiter in the Temple of Jerusalem, which sowed desolation among the members of the delegation. Finally, this purpose was not realized thanks to the intervention of Agrippa I and the death of Caligula, Philo attributed the happy ending of both cases to Providence. This divine letter of these translators with Saint John the Apostle and Philo of Alexandria will make this homily the spiritual custody that will be preserved in these two cities and then towards the world of Vernarth of the Duoverse, so that invisible winds blow from the chapel of Kímolos to Panagia de Tsambika, in the frameworks that feed the Hebraic and Hellenic boundary “translating Greek into Hebrew, but in two universal sites of creation in the Theoskepasti chapel and Panagia de Tsambika, about the magic of the meeting of omniscience and grace. Says Vernarth: “with the interpretation of Philo of Alexandria and his exegesis, I will rub the tract of the successions of infinity legitimately stored the creation thought of the ZigZag Universe with the Parapsychological Regressive authority now circulating in a sniffing universe with a Verthian genealogy, tempering with my Falangist disciples but being biblical when it becomes the occasional emaciated mob of a world that falls degrading with its last pieces and challenges of the world associated with an allegorical spirit, contracted to wings of ethics and doctrinal rectitude. I have two candles in each hand, similar to Etréstles in Kímolos and in Helleniká, making delights of pleasures in these ceremonies to create the world’s ignored in the office of the super compassionate language, in more than seven days that add up between the Sun and the Earth, in a sub-mythological world being ourselves our own executioner established on the ***** that falls from the match of the wick of my Lucerne in its own mood. I still have a memory of who and of each one who will always be in my prayers, reopened in a sacredness less than my own end, here I will not continue to be stored. Rather I will continue to fall, exhumed from the very storehouse and from the struggle of the thistle that falls from itself rounded up to be competent to explain himself biblically as if he had never before been read ad limit of the doctoral, and sacred in the work of Philo of Alexandria here with us leading and there in the Necropolis on another thorn; as a perpetual creeping species growing here as an unvarying summer plant in cooler climates, which would usually be prostrated on the Helleniká slab with radiating branchy stems extending the fractal distance between Kímolos and Tsambika in thistle´s ceremonies. The hirsute silts will come from the genesis of their spiritual temporal being the same wool of the whirlpool of all the weeds attached and oppressed to the lamp of the gargoyles that are tuned together with the Gulpers of Archangelos in a happy diet following patterns of even, and odd thistles spring in the Cyclades and the Dodecanese. The Parapsychological regression XIV century - Saint John the Apostle says: “from Filerimos a sidekick monk of Philo of Alexandria has come with the image of the blessed Immaculate ****** and painted by Saint Luke the Apostle. The Knights of Saint John built the Monastery of Saint John in Rhodes with this image; everything comes from there on the Miraculous Hill of Filerimos, and the temple of Athens Polias was converted into a proto-basilica with a three-bay nave dedicated to Her. The church is known since then for housing the figure of the ****** of Filerimos (Our Lady of Filerimos). In the fourteenth century under the rule of the Knights of Saint John a monastery was built here surrounded by cloisters cells and a series of chapels, that is where the figure is the miracle worker and is reverently guarded. Being a Capuchin order after the Ottomans destroyed it; it was rebuilt by the Italians. With this image we canonize the Vas Áuric in the homily prior to the spiritual link with Etréstles in Kímolos, before every morning they illuminate the sacred Earth of both latitudes in the mystical house of Saint John the Apostle with the herbalists on the wind to fight for the Somnia in Hortum et Flos Herbarium in Kímolos, Garden of Flowers and Dreams in Herbalist in Kimolos. Knowing that the Universe is approaching the Vernarthian Duoverse, Saint John the Apostle decided with the Birthright to establish a Duoversal Garden in Kímolos with the aim of laying tremendous foundations on the base of the pre-Christians and apostolic who enlisted in the Greco-Hebrew world with the addition of compression, and medicinal valences for the herbalist of Kímolos, in such a way to reissue it in the monastery of San Juan in Rhodes and the Panagia of Tsambika. Since the grains grew and germinated they became thickets of great predestined forest in Rhodes, aspiring to continue being a well-known theology in Greek also being sufficient testimonial about its Aramaic originality, being addressed to the Sanhedrin, 37-42 AD Before Caiaphas and redirecting it to his brother-in-law Theophilus of Annas. The Aramaic Apocalypse, also known as 4Q246, is in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, found at Qumran, with notable early messianic mention of the Son of God. Saint Luke says in the voice of Saint John the Apostle: “4Q246, we are children of God…, the Highest, the Messiah as a messianic voice, being able to be confused with the Beast or the Messiah but Philo of Alexandria will be there saying “I always ignored with the most blessed indifference to Satan, because therefore in this Aramaic manuscript he only has, and will reside forever and ever in his Messiah” Given this situation, the commanded expressions were those of astragals mysticism in herbalist and botany in this manuscript, since the unfortunate leftovers are the freshness and splendor of the flowers caressed by the wind that arrived at that moment; in regard to the wind of the Anemoi being eight gods that correspond to the eight cardinal points from which they came and were related to different seasons and meteorological phenomena, but he heralded the excitement of the Cyclades, like Sound of Sounds between Narcissus of Sharon and Lilies of the Valley. The audio-images were avocados forming the deep thickets that will move according to the inclinations of the planets, each time the Universe approached Greece among all the cisterns with water for the flower meadows that Vernarth in litanies was assigned to the paths that lead to the Vas Auric.

Vernarth says: “With these titles “Vas spirituale, Vas honorabile, Vas insigne devotionis, Rosa mystical, and Regina sacratissimi rosari”, I have to transform all the astragalus, and shrubs into the consorts with the presence of the jacaranda vase of living human nature in virtue of the meeting of the Universe-Duoverse, for the herbalist of Kímolos now imprisoned in the Vas Auric of Limassol. "Sweet Nectar of the dying, eager for eternal hunger and sweetness in withered flowers"
The end of Parapsychological regression XIV century
Saint John says Apostle: “Helleniká and Tsambika, will be the lily, the saffron, the rose and the violet but also new ones, like the marigold and the chamomile making of all a diadem crown to place the world of the Duoverse in all its radius, for the star that illuminates par excellence as a white planet without thorns, which is perfect among the perfect, anti herbicide of language and of incarnation as in the Empyrean the medieval sky in the highest of heavens. It is likewise in the place of the physical presence of God, where angels and souls reside in Paradise between caltrops and Rosas towards the alimentary plane of conventual voice, and tonics of the glycogenic Milky Way sipping third-grade milk to curdle in the children who have not been a Messiah yet. Paths of thorns will guide visitors to this gallery of flowers and plants through the Panagia monkish for the holy homily with the Lilies and through low valleys, where no more Lilies can escape from their chains of the Liliorum genome in the valleys of the galactogenic virtue. Like Mother Rosette and son Lirium, being the mother of everyone and of that…, there… your son, “Myself in the path of the three Mary’s”. Over there in the desolate place, a columbine carries me imprisoned on my heels as a bond of a son who makes my steps with the Columbine of my saving feet” At 320 meters of altitude Still, Life appeared concealed behind the Vas Áuric descending…, here everyone approached the auric circle of Moral that made them authors of the proximity of the Universe falling on Greece, and the Herbolaria that fell with all its reliable structure in the foliage where many more species appeared such as thilts, Laurel, Olive, Linen, Grenade in a simple and nuanced devotional with the pro status of the delegate; the same Hexagonal Primogeniture to make the cinnabar fistulas that were elemental by the different associated colors, and by Grail tutorials that looked indigo on top of some Rhododendrons. If it is eschatological, it is in the mystical nets of the Empyrean further from a form that is said to be called a form of antagonism, between Cardinals and their dead Lilies. As first among the last, the bulbous and clayey Tulip of the orbital and basilica symbology, peacemaker and philosophical Eritrean for spiritual quests that toil outpourings from the Empyrium, reaching the Messiah on his Colt on his way to Bethany. Around the Monastery, everyone could be seen as they arrived to the beat of the cymbals and aulós, among lyres that prowled tickling the inquiry to rest their fingers, or perhaps dressed by some Trojan villain augur in those of "Daedalus". Being the latter, here a tulip with flames of a true seeker trying to sacrifice subsistence daring over the risk of the resole of salvific death or perhaps dressed by some Trojan villain augur in those of "Daedalus".
Daedalus says: “After the incident with Perdix, I Daedalus was expelled from Athens. I then went to Crete, and in the kingdom of Minos I was placed in the service of the monarch. One of his tasks was the creation of Thalos, an animated bronze giant who defended the island from invasions. By order of Minos, I built the labyrinth to enclose the monster; the labyrinth was a building with countless corridors and winding streets opening into each other, which seemed to have no beginning and no end. Minos locked me up with my son Icarus, whose mother was Naucrate, a slave of Minos in the same building. The reason for the confinement was the collaboration of Daedalus in the escape of Theseus from the labyrinth, I have to lament for the ****** of Perdix, now turned into Partridge who now carries in his claws the creation of the Universe-Duoverse, turned into his own, and myself in envy neither harassing me about my endings, and neither starting nor finishing. That is why I appear here coming from Crete, to wrap myself in the garden and its mystery closing all the madrigals and hedges, like a world that has created me, in its splendor, seeing the humility fragrant with violets grafted onto lavender with my soul now, of a somewhat syncretism Hebrew-Hellenic and Mythological sub-Mythological, like a nobleman who walks free and without chains… passing through the Parthenon to put on tiaras in dresses that are adorned with Linens, but of evangelical lineage here in Kimolo.

In Kimolos; Helleniká Necropolis, Etréstles was suspended in a columbarium equivalent near the lapidem of the necropolis. There was a great amount of accumulated air enclosed in the musty cinerary walls, with the translucent specters that fluttered through other metropolises that transited inconsistently in their proto-masonry, and some resembled pink jaspers on some grooved slabs, letting pale dovecote rhizomes slip away under an oblique columbarium domain that manifested itself meagerly on an unstable podium of Folegandros. Adhering to this enormous exteriorization were Kanti, and Etréstles in their hydrothermal genesis, lying as a petra forms at a wide range of heat towards periodic effluvia of their Devonian geology, manifesting discreetly until a carbonization of sedimentary rocks attributing their curiosity when they continued to remain in areas favorable climatic conditions, simulating to be exordiums on thermal hydro sediments, leading to the carbonization of the surface of the necropolis with micas and serpentines, to cool down in the selfless natural fields that resisted the effect of the heat generated by the ZigZag Universe, etching each other on pyrites and graphite’s with the compactness that increases, and extends the widening of the mournful enclosure attentive to channeling emanations and traces, that will be the first loads of exegesis from Tsambika for prompt elucidation from Mount Hymettus in Athens, and continue to proliferate in hives of bees libating in its thickness towards the good-smelling necropolis causing its magnificent flowers and herbs to steam; so much so, that from the paved lipoids of honey astragalus and spectra will come out deposing to be toxic, yearning the strigilas or curved striaeons (reverse or straight), imitated from pagan sarcophagi.

Thousands after Thousands of Centuries after centuries, adorning themselves in the lapidem glossaries on the exterior fronts of tymbos that were embedded in the tholons, almost as in outright Constantine-Hellenic brilliance towards an unarmed cenotaph with their flat covers, pouring over them the devastated trisomy of Kaitelka, of whose diploid organism extras, aberrated by being parity triplicates of their greatest chromosomal and homologous hereditary complement. The vestiges of fossil whales here were generating disproportions of execrable variation, being destined to the patio of fall on them in three additional courtyards of marbles at the rate of inverted strata, revealing only some of their extremities appreciating them with semi-covered figures, and on reliefs filling again by genetic trisomy for gentile practices and lead them to the Christian Vas Auric. Faced with such a famous disproportion of fossil reliefs, they turn to the scourges of the Universe.

Panagia Theoskepasti Parapsychological regression Etréstles in Kímolos: The church of Theoskepasti, due to its position could be easily recognized by the invaders during their raids. However, according to a legend the church was veiled by dark clouds of mist and became invisible as soon as the assailants approached. Due to this legend the church received the name "Theoskepasti" from the Greek words "Theos" and "skepazo" meaning "God" and "watch" respectively. So, the name is 'God Veiled'. According to another tradition, when once a foreigner managed to get into the church and tried to steal the golden candle divine power cut off his hands. Also if it is watched over by God, so it is divine for the Creation that it will begin with the synchronization between both latitudes of the Cyclades and the Dodecanese. Etrestles After staying together with Kanti, they went from Theoskepasti to Hellenika, located in Dekas Bay on the west coast of Kimolos, here in the necropolis there are ruins of ancient tombs that would form part of the new humanity in the creation of the Duoverse, existing since Mycenae and the Cyclades next to the small islet of Agiоs Аndreas, also being part of the city. Many ruined tombs can be seen from the hill on the edge of Elliniká with some stones still in the sea between Kimol and Milil, in the vicinity of Psathi on this island located on the southeast coast. Kímolоs to Chοrá is 1 km away on the hill above the Psathi port from here the foreign ships trying to come to the Bay area sighted, for the advent of the Cinnabar on the scapulae that hold the Gates of the Necropolis for the effect avant-garde, and regenerator of souls that will resurface with more universal chromosome tints mutated from trisomy, more of extreme longevity. In the homily, an archpriest of the regional deanery will make a pastoral criterion for this gesture by virtue of eminence, and guide them through the orthodoxy of the chapel to the Episcopal organizational procession of the Vas Auric. It was already twilight and Etrestles was climbing onto Kanti's pony clutching the utensils of the homily, in the customary ritual before incensing and setting fire to the laurel and rosemary in the fords of Leto and Koumeterium of Messolonghi, it rotated in ellipses sprinkling crumbs of the purest loaf from Arcadia on a gray Monday with hummus to attract sour souls that they were in a catatonic state making them more esthetic or aesthesis, of reactionary rebellious natural aesthetics with nuances, then reincorporate them into the three courtyards in a magnificent concordance with Rhodes. When the Archpriest begins the talk, he derives his prayers from semi-inert materials that were made in communion with the chromosomal dyes; with the worms with absentmindedness of progenitor snakes that were grafted undulating, being in reality only worms that were amazed at the exhortation of the Archpriest in the ritual, circulating universals destined for his elegies and celebrating from an ambo or pulpit with classical Latin pronouncing the archpriest the way it died lunae, mutating it ****** to dies lunis by analogy with dies, on a dark Monday day but full of grace for the assistants doing the sermons to interpret the alabaster patios that will lead to Tsambika. The first worms were persecuted by Kanti, he believed that they were scatterings that emerged from the ground, such an earthly ecosystem was beginning to disown him due to the metamorphosis of annelids which seemed to increase their ultra-grave texture with the same remains of an irresolution without a sarcophagus, turned into sharp curves intestinal that were depressed breathing autonomously on consistent folds of the dermis of the oldest caste of the subsoil of Helleniká. Preexisting the distant origin of the Arcadias and they're dissected that silently followed the hummus and bobota, not to digest them with their suckers, but rather surround them and delegate them to explore the surroundings that would encapsulate the ground with the proximity of the transfigured universe to Vernarth's Duoverse, to phosphorus and emit the will-o'-the-wisp nitrogenous fires before the Archpriest, Etréstles and Kanti disquieting by an arcane movement. Being a full act of the herbaceous phagocytosis, they continued ascending in the curvilinear procession with their traces weaving moment without time, which was added to the sub-mythology and a finite sub-time, like unicellular procreating others that accelerated their physiognomy detached from their immateriality, towards a longer intake of the organic material on the hummus and exudation of propolis rhizomes. In this way, they resign when falling with serious cramps cleared of the digestive world, which no cell has tasted ******, but rather direct when breathing from Hellinika's lung lobes, comprised mostly by the alabaster sheepskin that was suspended to other colonies of worms that sailed to lean out towards the surface of the altar where they regenerated from the flow of the annelids. Archpriest says: “The frame of the Vas Áuric arises from the nuclei of the medallion, pending a high presence of insulation. With high mobility between the tissues and amino acids of the annelids, new basal cell functions even being visible for Etréstles and not totally for all yet. The image of the medal had a classified functionality and concrete information, but imperceptible chronological possibly being the first function of the icon in its justification with religious symbols and manifestations of the divine, and semantic still removed from a theoretical auto-iconic. When reading in Vas Auric, "What two men do not see, a man sees who does not see..., what the creeping animal sees, self-prisoner of his lack of vanity..., He will see it". Being epistemic images that provide more distant knowledge of the sub-divisible organic matter in finite mortality towards the other eternal inorganic, contributing to the super complex neuronal development, in a veiled sensation that is lost between itself and its own bodies, being able to take them with its own differentiations”

Panagia Tsambika Monastery - Channeling Cinnabar: Vernarth commanded the three architectural courtyards of Tsambika for the Cinnabar layout. They climb the steps that lead to this monastery at the top of one and to the very connection of the homily with Helleniká. In this monastery they will have to censor three courtyards, all pointing towards the west of Mandraki Bay, on some pine trees all surrounding the virtual stained glass window of the portal that joins the main avenue with the ascent of the monastery, until very close to the Virginal Marianus icon and very close to the dividing wall from where Lindos can be seen. The Tsambika Monastery is four kilometers from the city of Archangelo, the height of the monastery is leveled with pebbles on its bare floor that led everyone barefoot, towards the three nearby patios. Cinnabar as a polygonal crystal would be specially used for the perpendicular ceremony of Mercury, to sensitize the climatologically the variation that would be appreciated once it began to sponsor the bones that would spread in the extreme longevity of annelids exchanged from the moldy alabaster arcades, and carried by alluviums of crystallized mercury, granting together with the Panagia of Tsambika fertility, and parental conception for the new Universe-Duoverse of Vernarth, extending life farther than the first-born descendant's first ancestor, being the cinnabar the diversity of versed uses now been given in the upright channeling with ultra vital extensions with Helleniká. The alabaster and the three columns of these sulfated stones form compact would dare to hydrate in the silos where the windows will be poured, this is where the sub-mythological specimens detached from any temporal dimension will be used, leaving sapiens annelids free will recombining the diploid chromosomes, and profiting from molds of exact erratic aberrations to be vindicated in the dispensaries of Saint John the apostle. Thus adorning the perfumed areas intervened three cinnabar patios, for the sermon of the Vas Áuric. Thus inspiring the chair with the verses of Saint John on the immanence after the fifty days of the Messiah in epistolary verses and the evangelizations, elaborating vessels of the low rank of Faith to opt for expectations of moldings with new consciences of selenite clay, and refine them in messianic faith. Middle-range pebbles were subtracted for the interior and extramural floor of the Monastery, being rather Biblical Calcite for the Egyptian-Hellenic Alabastron psalmody praise perfume. This typology will be the quilt for the magistracy with a canopy glass exhibited near the tulip lamps, and ceiling lights of the monastery for the use of the diamantine sphere of the opaque panels that flamed from the intersection of the arachnids re sprouting from the current wind of cinnabar. Vernarth says: “Suitable for our consciences, we will open the channels in Kímolos before our subtle bodies that will make us divided just as we parabolize ourselves, before the airs of St. John the Apostle in the headdress of mediumship to reach the wavelength to Helleniká, the interactive vibrations will leave with the expression of deep reasoning after pontificating the Mandylion with the Vas Áuric, for the effect of its icon and idiomatic monologues for the edges of San Judas Tadeo and Veronica, for such a faced event in foreign forces before the Messiah, a coherent gadget will be made in the intermittence variants. The channeling to the Cyclades will go from east to west wading the Aegean and Mediterranean waters, through the channel of the Universe-Duoverse for inter consciousness between the Hexagonal Primogen in Tsambika, and the triad of Etréstles, Kanti, and the Archpriest in Helleniká, with high degrees of the light consciousness and conclaves between both synchronous homilies. With drowsiness before the Anemoi winds that will be crossing near the voyages of the Trojan chthonic ships, and before the fateful chthonic divinities for such deities in the Mediterranean substratum identifying more obviously with Anatolia which since prehistory has followed to the site of Troy, in a cheesy union plan for Agamemnon's loyalists, to defeat Hector between farms and revolutions of agriculture, and Akkadian worlds b.C., in peripheral outposts to influence the central regions of Greece and its maritime trade. Hydro-physical influences, for the cycles of the solstice and nature with life and survival after death that is at the center of concerns that are not translated. In Crete, the supposed cult of great Gods is transformed during the second millennium BC as new actors appear: various animals, plants, etc. Given the consciousness, it will be the channeled light in the three courtyards of alabaster and between the cinnabar by bending the re-fertilization of the Cyclades channels, which go from Rhodes and Kimolos, for discernment. Sometimes it is more gratifying to hear what you want to hear and not the real message, the egotistical mind that does not come from a series of daunted egos..., or signs of the technological shamanism, intervening artificial intelligence from maniacal administered consciences, being shrill for worlds of appearances and illusions. I Vernarth with our own Khaire Fíle…, in my mind I go to the vessels that sail through the landscapes of the elusive identity, trapping her in the totemic stratum, and tracking psychology, but a seer of her present ego. Today I will wear my Leonatus cap, to separate his anger from such a shadow that clouds my grief, and my own victimhood of reduced and meekness which spurns violence, blaming it on a ruthless kind of depression and excluding shame from everyone's own fear of everything. I will bandage my eyes against diseases that will heal after three days, to straighten the ecstasy that thickens towards the scaffold, staying in Golgotha with nothing, I will create the framework of cinnabar for the pain of the skull that trembles in my claws, until sleep becomes vaporous with anger and the harmless destroying itself before your egos, colorful throbbing towards your alien beings and scarified host. I will be waking up from my subtle and anthropomorphic subconscious dreams, with sentences that hurt my worst self-destructive delinquencies before the new memorial, on the veil of Theoskepasti with its science sheltering itself by giving in on the vanquished springs and inaugurating new miraculous courses where I will surrender, full of forgiveness and more distant from the veil that does not act as a viewer.

Duet time, Duet space, one with the other illusion unreal elements and epistemic images ignoring them in expeditions crackle my Duoverse, and temples of Tsambika with the decoded annelids mutating in trisomy with flat doors towards the Olives Berna. We look at what gratifies basting and plotting the positions of the stars of the universe that are attached like sheets worthy of almighty serials, and redoubled humor on the chthonic embracing tridents, before skewing Xyston as an original replica of the dream of a night in Tel Gomel. The counterweight of the message of light lagged behind the high astral like the little bear, bustards, and her angelic breath retreated in dissolution..., now if diva emotion I have my daring, and courage towards the binge of my omniscient prosopon, similar to omniscient telepathy, my soul lies and my emotion too because in this way I will treasure the value of panic by surrounding myself with the fears of resting, against the poles and sights of a peaceful energetic confrontation that will make them in Rhodes and Kimolos, channel the consumed human finitude and not eternal ad portas of his Áspis Koilé.

Unconsciously they will continue halfway with their bouquets of flowers for Valekiria, and may they never really take the time to tell her what time of eternity will make them more crowded for her, and her reliquary poem bursting into flame with its insidious outbreak and fear of telling him that if they revive they will be other Hellenic Hetairoi towards the vermilion light of the embodied sacrificed loop state as a "Being of Light". Oh ghost phenomenon that doesn't scare me... rather disappoints, clinging to the skins that die in the unexpected female muses in Gaia, with my burning and hypertensive ballast, still frequent in me... As conjecture and presence of Greek life..., having to be promoted and involved where they should be tempered to the contribution of biodiverse, and species for island life and its balance in the Aegean. The theorem will enunciate in the image of the Vas Auric as sounds of homeostasis in classrooms, properties of intervened annelids consistent, capable of maintaining them in a certain internal and stable condition, compensating for the changes of the explosion of the intervened patios, towards an environment through regulated exchange of matter and energy with the outside towards its (comparative metabolism), in the case of a form of dynamic balance with properties of Cinnabar brilliance, as a self-regulated biosphere in the conditions of the planet to make its environment (especially temperature and atmospheric chemistry) nobler with the species that make up life in the compass of two unmanned islands by beings from Gaia, rather as entropy in physical magnitude for a thermodynamic system in equilibrium, inhabited by dynamic beings that associate nobly for adaptations of worlds that are not born. It segregates them towards a departure measuring them from heightened numbers in states of zero compatible with the laws of that physics for the purposes of watchful guardians if Gaia's engine is turned on before this psychic and spiritual combustion. The laws of this system with closed circuits and brought will tend to maximize the entropy expiring inhibitory reactions for the traces of oxygen and nitrogen of the worms, making a sign of the levitated carbon dioxide to take it from Tsambika in two converged energies of Leviathan and Saint John the Apostle in moles of carbonate dioxide, battling surviving the impostor necromancers adverse to their conditions and reproduction, keeping these habitable for many who do not they enjoyed the life-death-life cycle. Greece, as it will now look regenerated and appropriate of laws and extensive fibers concerning moles of molecules said to be equal of said Vernarth hypotheses by way of sub-mythology, rather perching on the growing ivy and strangling the signs of satiety of life with properties in consonance with severities that hurt even to the sound of the rattles before the passing of the millennia! Fear, insecurity, and frustration did not fit because they will cut the Diospyros abenuz, with its stamens usually sixteen more hypogynous or inserted at the base of the corolla; as female flowers being greened or being converted into staminodes, Diospyros with generally tetra-locular ovaries or with eight locules due to false divisions, will make us channel by inseminating Itheoi demigods, under the staff of sub-mythology with Zefián, before the migrations in Helleniká begin, just as in this pact with silence and meditation and a burning flame, below the vulnerable and high insolated frequencies..., waking up in Gaia as a dozing fairy. Shamanic vested will grade synergy and simple science.
The Homily in the natural lassitude of the created, the Duoverse presented IHΣ, falling in the eighteenth letter of the Greek alphabet and in the duo hundred changes of physical remembrance. The PH (Hexagonal Primogeniture), is conceived in the presence of the Crismón, more Hellenic with the Vexillum banner and the Kantabroi to rescind the tired depressed zephyrs, since the quantum of memory was lost in the integrity of an earth acrophobia for the subsequent it would be air-water for this reason, preceded by the ceremonial that begins with the trimming of the abenuz Diospyros with its stamens usually sixteen plus it's hypogynous or inserted at the base of the corolla; like those of the female flowers having part of the gynoecium in the part of Tsambika, and of the androecium that will be of the Diospyros in Theoskepasti; usually tetra-ocular ovaries adapted to be inseminated for the raids of the demigods Itheoi and Duoverso, with the monogram HDD (Horcondising-Duoverso), tracing the bifurcations with Zefián; the chaos ordering up to modulated Theoskepasti. The changes have to be reborn in the stamen, being almost sterile and aborting in the chronicles of Galilee personifying the pollination benefit of the Diospyros resprouting in the same stem of the whorl even more so in each stigmatized part of Vernarth and Etréstles, carrying the IHS candles with the monogram and the Mandylion-Vas Auric, pointing to the Olives Bern. Before the seams of the carved heels and the canals of the annelids rise up through the alabaster up to the calyxes with the Chrismon hat. Filling the warehouse of Anemoi himself struggling with the roof, and forgetting his deposit of the breath on synaptic abbreviations continuing to argue with Saint John the Apostle in the network of Rhodes and Kimolos, in the bark of the sensory past and consequence of fallen gushes, and affecting being restored on the basis of oxygen-nitrogenated Nemo-genetic activation to summarize loss and gain of channeling between the Cyclades and the Dodecanese. The memories of the stuck Vernarth cerebellum will be loaded, trembling towards the marsh of the hippocampus where Zoroaster led the Magi to the end of the span and first-last border in the vicinity of Ein Karem. This evolutionary scale fluctuated in weak air masses with the increasing rise of the Meltemi over the Aegean taking them to Dekas Bay, on the knees of the colossus that cursed to avoid some delirium that could replace it's joint, remaining like this on a scale of reminiscent and unspoken emptiness..., it continues to be stated and not occupied and not, but raised towards the colossus from the ground of Vernarth which had unfolded bipartite from Rhodes to Kimolos, by way of the Verthian neuroscience whose prose emanated in the submissive glaciers of hyper-intuitive meditation (as a technique of knowledge and abstraction for functional links of improvisation, purgative discernment and yogic memory). All the nonsense is alluded to infringing the rationality of the Vas Áuric ceremonial in its phenomenology making curvilinear pauses to re-captivate phraseological, and diminished keys in the condensed equivalents to approximately ten terabytes from a homologous half surrendering almost when exhausted before both scholars, and their debts exchanged by driving..., thus recovering wave descents before reaching the bay of Dekas; Kímolos and final in the necropolis of Hellenika..., and vice versa before re-climbing in the middle of Mandraki, Archangelos and Filerimos to finish in Tsambika, Rhodes. As a parallel response to the archpriest not to alter the IHS monogram of the homily and the association in remembrance can affect the conduction of the mediate trance, almost prostrating it in the house of omission and frenzy, if it has to recover unstabilized. The sulfurous mercury component of the Cinnabar, came acidifying from the essences of the Vas Auric, already prospering in the tutelage of each auric conductor..., Archpriest and Saint John the Apostle, each one with the sulfurous of the Greek mountain and the arch of the Aegean Sea as a former karstic foundation for its diametric towards a change of reaction of chemical prisms up to the multi-angular of the topaz that Saint John the Apostle carried in his bag near the reliquary, hanging off some fringes of the Vexillum that had been placed near Vernarth. Immediately from the banks of the monastery, Raeder was walking with a lantern looking for those who might try to enter, he believed that it was his father from Kalymnos who came on another mission to be taken to the cinnabar, more on top of an encourage observing the quarters stationed in the sandbanks of Rhodes, Petrobus the pelican circling the ledges of the monastery, marking out the apparent slackness of his body and entreaties in case they ventured into Kalymnos for a good portent, in waters for tenth seeds and for all the rodines. From the cloister with one of its necessary dependencies, all were with white candles aggravated between the steps of each cell and attached friars they made an antechamber in the nave near the church on the hexagonal floor, being screened by the center of the garden where everything was dominated by the limits of the alabaster arcades, which only now pointed to the closet of the books, this time with plenty and saved voices with devotion. Chapter by chapter it was won..., for each cell, identifying each portion in identity up to the scriptorium and refectory, where this ceremony books were distributed to the infinite world of the Duoverse near the locutory to witness where Saint George and the Dragon raged, souring winepresses for the missal wine.

Sequence shot in Kimolos, Panagia Theoskepasti- Etréstles says: “according to what has to be said in this dimension, the word will be the Duoverse. Synchronically it will be aligned with the monastery in the Tsambika for the third hour after noon, reflecting on the unrevealed walls of the chapel on all the radiosities of the cinnabar, entering in electromagnetic lassitude through the trusses of the pulpit anchored in the Vox and mystical vortex, towards those who entered and left thousands of times through the counter shutters of the chapel, which collided crashing many times until by the glow of Cinnabar somewhat sulfurous, was mixed with the interlocking of some novas which also acted as a decoy for the Chrismón that Kanti carried the steed adjusted in the saddle on his back, as a mount in syntactic esotericism speaking with intangible brown colors of the Cinnabar.

From what is known of the antiquity that occurred in optics, it is in the divine anger against the apostasy, towards the interval of the elliptical of the signal that became phenomenal, and it figured in eternal natural causes that feverish the world that is not held. From this refraction, morality overcame the ambage of delaying the dominions of divinity, and its order that delegated the centralized perspective of taking seconds away from creation, which became antagonistic to its own substance. Men enclose themselves in their cracks that are parts of their mistakes, and their roots evoking changes that are the sequence of the Peri Kosmous, as if our sins were dimensioned with the reference that the individual lives in a transferred meteor, and not in Gaia herself, who became unbalanced even in the psychic movements that unleash the wrath of earthly earthquakes. Clairvoyance embraces the meteorite and the earth emits cries, almost mooing that are comparable to Vernarth's Mycetias that he announced to them so as not to be hypnotized by the scattering of the cobra, which enveloped them with its epithets.

The reaction was triggered by the prognosis of Marie des Vallées, even the impossibility that with this transfigured fire of Hephaestus he would make the architecture of a new Áullos Kósmos, before the possibility that everything would succumb under the seal of a premonitory sign and not of a real one. event or hecatomb. Divine historiography points out that the prodigy of a Mega Seism is the epitaph of attracting sufferers in a Parnassus, which is the true Gehenna that carries the higher ranks of the Delos Seism, comparable to the minuscule physics that squared the beneath the moon ones, of the Propylaea of ​​the world where the earth was dressed before being element and delimited in its borders. The earth was packed over forceful and fictitious mountains that became simplistic and naive for this foundation that had no reversible cause coming from rains, which filled the deep steam chambers re-expelling gases intermingled with high-ranking underground heat waters.

The seismic shaking of the rough land begins, which was withdrawing from the empty places where the water that came crossed from the high seas over the smaller ones that were churning on the semi-flooded coasts, to then burst the torrential rains that did not stop falling to the sink into the crevices from where the exhalations began. The celestial spheres rotated in the opposite direction and their friction exerted electromagnetic changes before the hydrosphere that was weathering behind the Kosmous before the irregular voids of the impassive stars. The assertion of hyper relente was contrasted with the hyper fieryness, making the reactions of the inhabitants of the isolate faster than the final action of the phenomena that emptied from their interior with the great fury of the Metelmi, which took the forms of fireballs. gasified. The continuous blowing of Wonthelimar and Vernarth managed to give them the time to confine the exhalations of the currents that filtered through the middle of the islet, already totally flooded, leaving the cavernous pores, given by the Eoloanemoi, winds which brought some floating species from the Hellespont. The narrowness of will became porous before the recent winds, when the divinity urged them to save themselves by the suction cups of the icy cold that made them hold each of the hands, then follow the flows of the free spaces without being damaged by the cavities that were seized by the palpitations of the new aftershocks, after the rigidity of the spasms that softened the earth and the hardened mass between clouds that were announced to the interior of the earth, to give a stumble of time to approach the stymphalos. There were thunderous noises that were increased by the force of the aggressive wind, carrying solid objects that compacted the masses into multiple unrecognizable shapes as the earth roared at the speed of the blink of an eye. The epicenter was carried from the seabed to the surface, making the authorship of ****** earth hit by unknowable and inextricable flows, to the point of an orbit that was already exhaling airly, to abandon its spent ****** in the unfractured that detailed the Peri Kosmou by subtracting from their degree of intensity and then regressing their intensity in rows of smokes that managed to see themselves from the top of Profitis Ilias, when they saw them from their apparent comparison.

"Odoriferous fresh gardenia flowers fragrance was she,
Her beauty will be cultivated forever amongst and beyond,
How does one know if it is love it is more than just a word?
It is a feeling soul bound that fervor’s beneath the skin,

So how do I know it is love if it isn't as the words are procured?
A sense of rising tide a rapid undulant river of a woman,
One cannot be a troglodyte in life when love arrives,
My love has arrived I have felt all the above and much more,

Sheer thoughts of her sends a billow enliven rapture within,
A rush with consternation render’s fervent fracas of piquancy,
I have heeded in life these depictions of the fluttering gusto,
As long as I live this tectonic emotion of this naiad will remain,        

Restraints of the days is this prologue to exodus to enclaves,
I turned my back on the capricious sea the euphoria and somber,
Where with a strain and a ****** on the banks of islet sands,
Beauteous day slips in night as the sailing foam drifts afar,

Although I am where I am I will never be perniciously charmed,
Stars will burn for all time as I lament in demanding sadness,  
Cursing as a cavalier of false hopes with untethered regret,
For I am not a troglodyte of ages but just an aesthete in love,
Beauty is Culture!”
By Andrew Guzaldo 03/02/2019 ©

My mother,
is strong like an island.
Her stretched islet arms
merges with my waters.
She comforts me,
when my sea world is rough.
She stabilizes me with grace,
giving self a place to land.
My mom,
strong as rock loves me.
And I love her.

StarBG © 2017

"Bring me to elysium as I feel warmth of within,
I beseech your lips your voice your integument,
How can I alone bare cumbrance and stifle burdens,
Fresh outdoors my islet will cool my burning desires,

I wish to be her fantasy and make our love complete,
I want to eat the sun as it searches your body,  
That redolence exists within intangible feelings,
Tangent the wallow hunger inside depths of your soul,

Echoes within call to me as waves to the shore,
I travail as she groveled into my percipience,
I would no longer stay defiant to your touch,
Touching upon your impetuous palpable body,

Apprehensive of what your loving me might doth,
The ichorous in her eyes that echoes within,
Bellows in a delineation of abyss of passions ardor,
Deliquescing into each other’s arms unfolding in,
Elysium amorousness”
By A. Guzaldo 06/12/2018 ©

“Coastline and the ghost mirage as I sometime see afore,
Seashore of such perfections that linger into the morning,
Shoals in the distance I imagine things we once dreamed of,
I beseech to thee come and join me from this place of ours,

In my alluring may you fall on me from wherever you are?  
Secluded aft the deep inside where emotions stay hidden,
Occulted enigmas of love and secrets can no longer obscure,
Reverberated nucleic flow deep within my soul where you remain,  

Dubious poetry gives a sense of affinity to ones love torn soul,  
Celestial cosmos and is a sense of beyond the feeling of pain,  
As the ocean once whispered its breath sand across our bodies,
Perhaps best to have you belong in my unknown sentiment in life,  

Perhaps one day we shall meet on an islet that we cannot assent,
You can whisper your words of amenity as you epicarp my agony,
Cosset fervently in your arms as I’m washed of my indiscretions,
The last cinders of the autumn air will spend nurturing the winter,
I as a sybaritic will follow you in this our silent observance,
  By Andrew Guzaldo 03/03/2019 ©

I checked into the lobby of her one room apartment,
darkened corridor filled with paintings of Jesus.
The fountain throbbed in the hall of this hotel,
shuttered windows,
subtle innuendos,
three knocks.

The night was hot and black,
clothes stuck to our shirts.
The story is about summer and you,
and her dark little island of a room,
and all of her crooked roads,
that had their footprints in my odes.

She was born under the star of Venus, three stars above me.
Her light blue eyes, filled with humbleness, softly saddened.
Her painter's eyes, mercury mouth at the biblical times.
Hair that was colored like wine dark sea fell down on her breast,
on lips that looked like bare roses,
blushing with blood, eating themselves with desire.

I was a wounded soldier, long afloat on a ship less sea.
Deserted and displaced from the war.
A war between the black and white,
A war between the man and the woman.
Utopian infant, Eutopian mother.
Born into this life, thrown into this world.

We entered the darkened room, and purposely didn’t turn on the lights.
She through her house keys and bag on her bed, lit a cigarette.
Offered me one, however he took some of my own.
Looking into her eyes through the smoke, where the moonlight floats.
Lit lamp that was hanging from a distant boat.
Now I saw, there was a painting by Arnold Bocklin hanging on the wall.

spoken word:
A small rowing boat is just arriving at a water gate and seawall on shore.
An oarsman maneuvers the boat from the stern. In the boat, facing the gate, is a standing figure clad entirely in white, a lone loon dives upon the water. Just behind him, there is a festooned object commonly interpreted as a coffin. The tiny islet is dominated by a dense grove of tall, dark cypress and willow trees. The Mephistopheles is just beneath him. As siren grabs him from the of the edge of the boat, underwater.

And she wraps up my tired face in her hair
And she hands me the apple core,
Two birds in a cage, drinking lovers wine and eating bread.

I'll stop in the middle and skip things between me and her. (It comes to us all, soft as a pillow)

The oarsmen has gone
And the loons have flown for cover.
And me I am on trail, in the funeral of my lover.

The persistent air pushes upon the pebbled shore while the sun warms every breath
How manly of me to ponder of every man’s proper dream even when there is no man left
He silently thinks to himself as the tiny stones stick to his feet upon every stealthy step
I will travel to bear witness to this mistress from the bare islet.

Lady luck will guide me to the lovely lady if love is luckily true
If the spirit of the island is in the land she will lead me to something new
An experience so inexperienced even the experienced never knew
What terrible terror for the townsmen who never truly took to

A relationship

Yes, that’s what he forever never-forgetting wished for
A beautiful girl in her beautiful world to walk with him on the shore
A soul to simply grow old with and solemnly swear to love to the single core
A hope filled heart hopefully was all he needed for the other half to adore

The man curiously gazed up and saw he had completed the end of the coast
He had been walking all day wondering about a woman that he barely knows
To him she seems like she is standing in his way but to her he seems a ghost
He looked out at the riptide, smiled, for he maintains the memories he had engrossed

“When a poet will romance a subject,
One will never die for their words will perpetuate,
The way he or she carries themselves about,
Of one's eyes of their hair their skin all components,  

When someone is irate at the subject,
And that leer of resentment when troubled,
As subject sways with authority from a kiss,
Without their body touching someone else's,

How the habits never wrinkle pages of a book,
Poets in love will find all the words of significance,
The Poet may see subject as they were on an islet,
On a waterfront near a small town of recollection,

Their words of passion penned on longing paper,
They will know when and why you can't sleep,
Poets die but their words do not they live eternally,
Explicitly graceful from the ink drafted on paper”
     For a POET MUSE KNOWS”
By Andrew Guzaldo 08/05/2018 ©

From Lower Normandy Marie came barefoot, still, Agios Andreas but this time to be reborn in Coutances with everyone embraced and revived by reconstituting Saint-Sauver Lendelin. From here in this parish similar to the electromagnetic ubiquity of the Beit Hamikdash, all walking girt only for a few leagues in the transit of conversion and silence that was only interrupted by the shutters on the coast of the islet. Her humble appearance of a farmer from the meadows of Carentan, cheered her healing hands that would add another servant without letters and numbers that represent the wisdom of a holy woman, who loved her neighbor, going back from the Porta de Betania to revive with the return. of his blessed drizzle of holy water from the stigma of the Lord. It illustrated their faculties by presenting them in a new beneficent world free of transpersonal, rather it was linked to the guarantee of extremes and their evil debaucheries that would abound in humanity now and always, showing mercy that made any living being confuse by being in the middle of the heavenly sprinkles of holy waters. The fields of salvation for the lacerated ranged from extremes, and points that babbled to the Olympian gods, giving them the abandonment for some time the apostasy that raged their disgraceful powers, Ignoring the subjectivity of ancient poverty with the young woman who was from the same roots inherited from archaeological substrates, which did not allow it to find its roots, redirecting what the pilgrims do not know that illumination takes without return and that great works were the participle of a verb that would never be reborn again. That the examples touched the bottom of the ionic crowded with icons that were left infertile there because they could not dive into polluted waters. That the Sirens shrunk in the salt of Aphrodite, not being able to temporize in the indecision to grant them plenipotentiary powers to make man a being with gills in the tender flesh, and of the great works that save the man who prostrates himself anointed from his defects in not granting themselves extraordinary early days, with directions to save themselves from the catastrophe and sinister ones that speak of the same thing; of the Man who breathes and does not make an effort to breathe, so that when at the end he is boiled in the apnea of ​​his stubbornness, he can make sure that he needs clean and pure air, to see millions of kilometers in his three hundred and sixty degrees, and also can that sub mythology makes of mythology; seeing in millions of lustrums without ending more lines that support it, nor who closes the doors to you from a first second or third degree of evolution of itself, renouncing other points of those like Marie de Vallées and Bernardette de
de Soubirous the visible particularity of the good of doing his Will. The Lord instructed them for herself from childhood as it is led to the Lapse, The earth, and The Universe decreasing chronologically so that she would be Logos of Christian Virtues. That what was accomplished will certainly be accomplished even though they suffer pain from the wars on their backs, and lead them to the most adorably perplexed fidelity of God.

Marie Des Vallées speaks to everyone: “I Kyrié Mou, oh my Lord, I am your medium and the grace to do it in what makes it available in a few minutes to stay alive! I am your obstacle so that you do not disenfranchise me from the Horror Vacui ..., disturbing the emptiness that puts bands on my idle eyes by validating and embellishing more your work and its mathematical fools, in the dense wastelands that lie in the static of the ship that can never help to Prometheus! Or the late morning that the martyrdom of Good Friday changed to rescue you! Oh, what ostentatious luxury is argued by the evergreen of your olive, lanceolate in some like sacred stingers and green glabrous, which stand multi-floral and become scaly by my arid and fatal mouth. What a wave of the myrtle will be thrown by the wild olive that is ignored like the thistle! or that a black hawthorn for a thousand years will be flashing the iris of my paternal sets, like bushy palms in soft and hard mothers, like the sawdust of man's discernment, whose rusticity becomes sensitive in what he lived, and does not live in Bethany! Except for the one who is just in the hands of death and who receives a mastic or seedling that closes the lips of the frozen morning. Just as in the tripled auroras where the pomegranates will continue to find the apse with Ruthwell's cross "

When the river was young,
he'd often sit on its banks of sugar sand
smoking a cigarette
lazily watching
the slow, languid, eddied
swirls that Time made
as it made its way,
rather clumsily.

Sometimes from the far bend
a tree branch would come afloating
like a bad memory,
twisting and turning in the current
with some silly bird trying to balance
and figure it out from all angles

Random voices from the far shore
cicadas chirping in the lazy afternoon
from the thick undergrowths
overhanging the flowing waters
an occasional splash by some bored fish
a silent bubble bursting
cackling waterfowls
And yet he would hear his own breath,
joining in...

The waters were slightly warm then
and gentle
and caressing
when he went for a dip
and a few strokes took him
to the little islet in the middle
and aimlessly back again
to break out in little goosebumps
from the cool breeze on his wet skin.

The river's old now
muddied, wrinkled and scarred
no more voices from the far banks
no waterfowls cackling
not even lazy cicadas
only his own breathing
heavy with the sighs
of longing.
of loss.

“Perception lost in this coppice of desolation,
That has been enthralled into my soul,
I no longer know where to find her,
I harken her voice in the gusty gale,

In my hours of sleep I feel her under my skin,
Now months seem as years ephemeral,
As time passes its cataclysm is episodic to you,
As I sit here in a trapped incubus of remorse,

I no longer hunger for that daily bread of entity,
My starvation is deeper and more adherent,
Feeding on the memory of her and love once was,
Meander fragrance of her ascends through psyche,    

Captive in this refuge of love once past me by,
Dream journeys lead me to the islet where we met,
That day I remember her smiling beautiful face,
Seems if it were miles and miles away yet so near,

As she moves on in her life may she be strong,
May her prowess be all that it can be afore?
May I take the pain of a broken heart instead of thee?
Initiating in the new dawn my desolation shall begin,

To once again start bleakness in sunrise refuge”
By A. Guzaldo 06/27/2018 ©

I know where I put them        
that small pile of lovely
underthings
in the back of a drawer
Stuffed away
from my every day
not fit nor fitting
anymore
for an evening
or...

Can't bring myself
to throw them out
Hope is something
you just don't...

'Cause ya never know
when life might pick you up
spin ya round
where it left off
so long ago--

or something like...
that

But anyway--
I came across them

...on that first  
truly warm day of spring
splayed across the mountains
of New York on my way back to PA

Driving through those
Scalloped edges not quite yellow
shy of green
Lace in layers
close to shedding heaven
or from storm's
oblique winds shredding 
that sheen on the foothills
from the humid cool
of earlier that day

Spring knows
right
where she put them

Spring knows exactly what to do
with golden light
...and songs'...
preposterous possibilities
of bloom

Frothy silver
creeps amid the white
reflecting light
in every threaded islet
between the mountains' stream
of silk voile
sheer
and overlain mauve and pink
Those French knots and ribbons
thrill the edges of the road
reaching through the heated veil
longing for the gauzy air
Dogwood hands
sooth the swelling
clouds
above—so pleading—

Please...

to touch that dark
of naked woods
below

...where I left them

...apparently

“If there is one thing that I can tell you,
Let it be you are at your home on this islet,,
Your body is your only house your temple
Your dreams sit along the shoreline waiting,

There’s no pleasure in the impassable coppice,
There is elation on the lonely shore afore thee,
There lays a civilization where no one intrudes,
By the briny ocean and its symphony as it roars,

One must never love a human any less,
But nature is to be cherished even further,
Where the love all blooms day and night,
Be not afraid of the cacophony on the island,  

Sounds and sweet air that will not hurt you,
At times sounds of a harmony of instruments,
It will allay your mind into the calm of the night,
And awake to morning an exhilarating new sunup,
Sweet spring flower and the sea that surrounds us,
At Symphony Island”
By Andrew Guzaldo 10/23/2018 ©

I experienced experience
I witnessed experience

Swarming like wild bees
Swimming from the brooks
Of outer Marina
Racing into the fountain
Of Islet of Lagos.
Our Lagos,
Their Lagos.
Diverse religionists
On spiritual missions,
Raising up hands in supplications
For open heaven,
For praise and worship.
Some on mundane missions.
Spivs, urchins alike

But this congestion suffocated
Spaces wept for control
Sea breezes searched for outlets
From outer Marina

And wants of oxygen waves
Hands for recognition.
Both faithfuls, penitents , miscreants needed air for survival.
Protestations appealed for audience.
Legs spent and tired ,
Craving for rhapsodic attention

Where are more seats?
Where are more spaces?

Helpless ushers uncaring.

But from the stage roars
Songs of inspirations ,
Songs of supplications
Like war cries.
Sounds from desk to dawning,
Music from dawn into deskiness.
And seat glued me till cockcrow

Night broke into day.
Fading music expelled adherents
Out of arena.
A loud silence now reigned.

Freedom from the fangs of stampede.
I experienced experience
I witnessed experience

“The long day abates and the full moon rises,
My bleached islet does all the more for my writing,
The ghastly imagery that haunts me in my somber,
Can I forget of all the distortion that was to follow?

As I easily compare you to a lustrous brilliance,
Meanders of her invading my mind of the days,
Thinking of your precise grandeur fills my days,
Meadow flowers and butterflies on summer’s day,

Immersed inside nightly dreams a new perspective,
Our heated toasts the past frolics of seasons,
Our summertime on the sleepy hollows cosmic,
The sounding furrows for my purpose holds,

It may be that the gulfs one day will wash us down,
The prudence labor of love procured slowly once again,
Whisking our rugged ways and through softening civilities,
Wishfully subdued them to the useful and the good,

I will one day taste the sensation of your desperation,
Closing my eyes I am transported to another dimension,
Of common duties decent and never to fail afore me,
I hope to gain the images scarcely make any sense,

My voyage continues unabated as I go forward,
No ballad or acumen can be found as I am drifting,
Unfettered and confused from days past in life,
I now sense slowly drowning immersed in my tears”
By Andrew Guzaldo 12/15/2018 ©