I am, I know, a rock
that dissolves in your mouth
—the mouth of the dead.
Your death was mine,
and I am your tomb.
I am, these days, a river
that runs uphill
—that returns to its source.
I am what was before:
a subterranean spring.
I am, still, in love
with your love for me
—impossible as it was.
So, I am yet impossible!
Time moves both ways.
There is a story that humans use to tell each other. It is a myth about a king who angered the old gods so much that, when he died, he earned a very particular punishment.
It doesn’t really matter what he did—what he did changes with the telling. It is the punishment that the old gods …
I let the river take the blood from my hands. I remove my clothes, and wash them in the river. In the cold river, I wash my face and my hair. The suns dapple the forest floor between leaf-shadows and branch-shadows; it must be long after noon. I let the river carry away all the …
I know what you are thinking—caught a sign of it in your eyes as the lights went out. And I know what it is that they say; they have been saying it for generations. I know what is there, behind the surprise—behind, even, the hubris of Why me? Why poor old me? I have seen …
My dear Chole,
Spring threatens to arrive—I saw a small flower blooming in the mud beneath the Forest Gate—but of you I have seen or heard no sign. Where could you be blooming? This city is not so large and egress is denied to even a person as respectable as myself. Believe me, I have tried. Every …
Dreams increasingly populate the city of my nights; “I am re-occurring”, as the writer once said. I see them, these dreams, these echoes, as I wander from one end of the city to the other: they are cheerfully locking up store-fronts, lit by the pink hues of dusk; they are slouching on their tavern stools, …
The world is a great, white field.
The world is a budding forest at dusk.
The world is cinders and ashes in the wake of a forest fire. I, on my mountain, watch birds nest in the charcoal trunks of trees. (When I was very young, I thought that mountains stood eternally, and that the rivers of the world …
Once, I knew a man—a Yarsinian—who owned a vineyard. It was a beautiful place, with his vines staked all in rows through the high, pale grasses that grew all over that region. They ran, these rows, across a gentle valley, and up one side of it—so that his vines would get even sunslight, he said. …
“Who are you?” she asked me.
They always ask that: Who are you? as if a name were a thing, and not a sound—as if one could carry only so many before one had need of a bucket, or a wheelbarrow. A person might be a person through other persons, but a sound is not a sound …
What is man but a chest of bone,
a jar of flesh?
Within his head is sewn,
hot with interest,
ears turned in tuned only on that which comes
from his own lips.
What can he learn, man?
Man is a beast who, mocking wisdom,
daily means to make a feast of his own paws,
declaring them delicious.
He gnaws his spit and fills his jaws with inhaled speech,
sweet upon his …