When he stepped onto the littered shore of the loch, his lungs filled with the rank sea air. Each step he made sounded the crushing of crustacean skeletons, and looking down, he could scarcely separate shells from pebble and rock. Some were picked over by the morning gulls, and droves more were wasted in the noon sun, now wreaking in the orange light of the evening. His eyes were lured amid them by a sphere of sparkling granite, and when he reached for it, he found that it was right in his hand. He walked for a while, slinging it skyward at
Sometimes I reckon
the Creator made my hands
to grip her waist just so,
and the width of her ribs
to match my fingers
I stood ankle deep
in the water at Lyd Glaslyn,
and imagined I might
cut my heel on a sword
embedded in the shore
He scarcely felt the springs of the mattress before falling away, but dreaming was not to be this night. Instead, his sleeping crafted a vision beheld so audacious and terrible that he reckoned to trade all the sights seen for it to be undone, for fear the very act of seeing might force him to recollect it. He woke panting, fists clenched ‘round sweat-dampened sheets, and made his way to the fire in the stove, now reduced to smolders waning in the dark. His hurried breath made fog, dissipating in a rapid gradient from moonlit to black as it distanced from the
He contemplated the discovery
The petals begged attention -
a phantasmal white mass
trembling delicately upon
the air’s invisible currents
They parked the sedan near a sleeping residence and ascended into the hills. The two went there often in search of something that neither could define, nor entirely comprehend, only certain that it made each feel at one with the earth he knew. They moved along an animal trail by moonlight, without speaking - as if cautious to shelter some sacred state germinating in the air. It was an hour of steep uphill before reaching the crest, and they stood panting at the mouth of the meadow and peered down at the forested expanse below
Never had his knees weakened
or buckled under pressure
His stomach never hollowed
and he never lost his appetite
Told himself he was an oak
