No continuity, no incidents bleeding into one another with all the ease of open wounds. No wounds manufactured, but we will allow a blurring of effect, a moving from one space to another without announcing the move. What reputable mind, what disembodied nerve fiber even is going to follow our lead? Which mountaintop will leave open space to place one’s shoes? A presence enters, discolored from rage, her eyes rolling in her head the way thunder is said to roll by those who do not stand directly beneath it. You can determine a great deal by examining wavelength when nothing visible will suffice, by a kind of echo location, but my experience determining what is real and what merely the workings of some unseen mind not altogether separate from my own is limited to that which can be gleaned without trying, without examining each element in the room separately – the wood slats vertical and obscuring my line of sight when I sit for any length of time. The walls opposite like egg shell in their fragility. What I wouldn’t do now to populate the corners, to stuff them full of artificial beasts with startled looks upon their faces, if beasts and non-human creatures can truly be said to have faces. Perhaps that entity belongs to us alone because it is, finally, a concept. It carries with it expectations not just anyone, or anything, can meet. The enraged presence smears excrement on my legs and my first order of business is to determine not why (this question has yet to formulate itself even as concerns the passing of sunlight across and behind closed curtains, or the purpose of the words bubbling up on my lips lately in meager twos and threes like semi-sociable beetles or flies) but whose excrement it is. The possibilities number, so far as I can determine, no more than the number of the inhabitants of what I will later learn to term the home when I am encouraged to explore it. Certainly, indignation is called for and mine seems natural as flames or fungus on wood. It is that which does not follow from what precedes it -- as if the two had no prior relation -- but which emerges from the substance itself, is born of its various prior elements reshuffled and reconstituted for purposes no one can determine. Perhaps they were written out ahead of time, set down on something like paper so that whoever has need of them in the future will have access. Assuming, of course, he doesn’t forget where they have been stored in the meantime. In which cupboard. In the maw of which paired sock in which drawer. Or perhaps they just happened. They just appeared like light and we are stuck with them the same way we are stuck with light in the morning when we’d rather have (for a time, at any rate) the darkness, the impenetrable desolation of the cave.

Sparks demand attention from those of us composed only partially of flame. We glance and stare and chortle at our foolishness and then stare again until the retina no longer registers the thing we are staring at as other. It becomes accustomed to the intensity of light and treats light, at least until it can be taught to resume its initial naiveté, as that which is ordinary. That which is expected the way rows of corn are expected in the field. As are moles and lacewings. A locomotive green and bulky as a quantity of copper drags behind it cars, one loaded with faux, undifferentiated coal, and throws ozone onto the basement air where the hairs inside my nose take hold of it and (or so I conceive it now) fold it over, prepare to place it permanently in some drab recess of the brain where it will stay forever, dormant and piecemeal, something set to rise again, say, twenty years later in consequence of passing storms. We are reminded of those around us by the accident of objects placed in our way and then recovered, or stumbled upon in likeness. Rarely in words. Two balding men stand close within the circle cast by the bare bulb overhead, the one progenitor of the other and as alien to me as are the river byways of China, the reed beds and the fumbling geese overhead. Their rapport, obvious even to someone still stumbling on coherence, as it were, in his pockets, sentences strung high on light posts and out of reach, bears no resemblance to any I might have with the one I see most days and will later interrogate on occasion concerning the lesions I spy in heaven and the people apt to reside there and why water stops its movement at the boundaries of my skin. The train, barreling repeatedly sideways off the tracks when it has found finally the speed I desire, builds a hydraulic something inside my chest until I can no longer breathe. I race for the stairs and the blinding light outside where everything runs as it is intended. The sun consistent as the minute hand on your watch. The sidewalk motionless and white as bone. The air there is full of its own as yet undivided essence and I stand in one place and pull it in and endeavor to break it. To redistribute the pieces through the infinite concourse of my body. Light and air and body as one. This lasts maybe a minute, the time it takes to pull a fishhook from your flesh if it is imbedded more deeply than you might have anticipated. The time it takes to reorient yourself when you wake from a shallow sleep because someone knocks on your door or the radio plays music composed of little but abject familiar phrases repeated over the barest hint of someone striking a tympani.