The wind scrolls through its clichés: cracked whip, exhalation, the dead’s turnstile, aftermath of a moth’s flight, wake of something too big to see….A blade of ducks skins the blankness.  All ants wear elegies on their backs.  Hatchlings find their pond to drown in.  The world is so casual: it presumes its attrition.  I envy a self-cleaning apparatus.  And the wind pushes another load of used light over the horizon.

Exit cabin.  You walk the woods as if in a hospital ward: noiselessly, with some sense of guilt about being whole.  Silhouettes rave in the backlight.  I ask you a question and you let it blear across the silence.  Exit sun.  Your snared attention flails in your gray eyes.  When we reach the lake, there are elderly couples walking like incurables taking the air.  We walk in step with them.

I wonder if there are other places as knotted with light and shade, as scarfed with burnt mist as this acre.  I wonder if the next lake’s man is home free.  I wonder if I ever believed the darkening wood answered me.  It didn’t.  I am starting to believe in the next lake, the other acre.  Come sanctum.  Come along strict witness.  Look.  The eye of a leaf is all.

My own unsoundness has a strange history.  It started at school when I was young.  A man said, “Heartily know, / When half-gods go / The gods arrive.”  Which was I?  If choosing, I would’ve been the second: effortless, regally sad, clothed in ancient light.  But I knew better.  I felt as transgressable as anything.  And I still do like dark little sayings that cleave like salt to the tongue.

I read, in a book meant for children, “What is sadness?”  The mall light holding its mosquito note.  The greed of the white moss in the crabbed heart of an oak.  The mirror interprets my face as a fact that has been in dispute for years, as the original meaning was irreparably damaged and the prominence of its placement now seems like a desperate attempt to add to its validity.

Don’t you get sick of decadence?  Even if these woods were bare, they would be overwhelmingly pure.  Their white would be wolf-white and would not dissolve when you shut your eyes.  Do you ever feel like description is a filibuster against emotion?  Today is boredom and the scent of cedar.  I used to chide myself for being satisfied.  Now I watch the lake’s mirror etc. and I sing etc., etc.

I always had to calculate the square root of my father’s speech.  He would answer questions I didn’t ask.  As in, when we were in the fishing boat and, after clubbing the radiant muscle of a trout to death, he said, “I can be proud of you.”  Or, on the way home, floodlighting the moccasin-sliced mist, when he said, “Huge animals leap away into darkness.  Now you tell the story.”

I read: the dice of God are always loaded.  If you see His hand, there must be smoke.  If you see His limbs, there must be fire.  If you see the cave of His mouth, the fire is yours to see by.  If you see the churning white field of the inner-working of the All, your eyes are stripped of fire.  You walk blind: your rage to see is heaven.

The high tide is the symptom of a boat.  A boat is a symptom of human hunger.  Human hunger is a symptom that the apparatus at the base of the skull that churns out prayers that only articulate themselves through uncontrollable bodily urges is running smoothly.  Hunger as a way of whispering to God.  So my stomach like boiling water translates: Imagine us, Sir, as a symptom of your absence.

Let’s play storm metaphor.  The lake gone grand mal with lightning, florid scrape, sick hands, sulfuric hair of wrecked sisters.  Now your turn.  Light akin to breaking skin.  A shower of Xs.  A sword down the mouth of the sky.  You win again.  This is the Chapter in which I can’t stop shivering.  Your face is lit by pure exhaustion.  The light rends.  God help the whites of our eyes.