if inside the light
lies an aperture
you can feel it
run your fingers
through the day
caress it open
reach inside it
further, further
until you fall in
and find the
something wrapped within its folds
was you, is you
the day is a cocoon
a haze is rising
it’s transparent
you become transparent
in the
haze that’s rising
up from beneath it

it all falls out
scatters, rolls, and seeps
over, into
the permeable places

you go down, too
heart of worms

it isn’t so bad
sometimes you carry
sometimes you drop
you remember
you forget

you are the dream space suspension

the haze between
how it was
and how it might have been
how it is and could be

you are not unique
you carry the singularly rare

your burden:
your making

some days are forgotten

what is it in you
that moves in continuity?

the end of you
tapers off
into the pale blue rising

you find your memories
along the riverbank
you collect them as you pass
and string them one by one
on a thread running through you

it tapers off
at your beginning

you tie the mountains together

“You’re sure, right? You’re sure she’s really gone? You’re sure it won’t hurt her?”

“Of course, it’s been two days. She’s gone. She can’t feel it. She can’t feel anything.”

I know. I know. But there she is. Fingers, hands, face, hair, skin.

Skin. Fat. Muscle. Bone. Chemicals. Components. Matter for recycling.

Brittle shards ground and blended into a fine dust.

Later, some will spill in the trunk of the car as you prepare to scatter it from a high cliff over the ocean. You’ll vacuum it up at the carwash. The day, too, was a little too windy for it. You’ll take a shower when you get home.*

*Disrespectful and morbid? Well, don’t blame me. It really happened. Except it was a grandfather’s cremains. And the ocean was too far away, so it was just a cliff over dirt. And I wasn’t born yet, or I would have taken him to the ocean even if it was a rather long drive.

—

A hollow place to hold a hollow vessel. A hole to hold it. Nesting dolls. Emptiness within emptiness, infinitely.

A hollow skull where someone once lived (metaphorically speaking). It isn’t hollow yet. It is inanimate. It is food.

“Does it make me weird that I find that comforting? That the worms and the bugs will be with me?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“I just get so lonely thinking of my body lying on that cold metal table with no pillow and no one to keep it company.”

“So the worms would be a sight for sore eyes by then?”

—

My water wasn’t always my water anyway. I only borrowed it. My water was their water.

My matter was their matter. My right hand was the horn of a triceratops. My right eye was the left middle finger of a stenographer. My tongue was a flower. My liver, a salmon. My tendons, vines.

My decomp: an alembic.

I am distilled. Transformed. Made ready again.

Through the work of heat. Through the work of dirt. Through the work of water and mud and crawling things. Through the work of bacteria and fungus. I become my opposite.

I will become my opposite again.

Alive. Dead.

Solid. Disintegrated.

Food. Shit.

Nutrients in soil. Nutrients from soil.

Inert. Animate.

My matter won’t be tired anymore. It won’t remember how tired I was. It won’t remember me.

This story is a part of the TunnelBridge cycle of stories.
Also see TunnelBridge

“Do you really believe that? Do you really believe ghosts are real?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. As real as dreams maybe. But it’s not like I’m taking it too seriously. It’s just a thought.” I hate how defensive I sound.

It was a long, steep hike to the top. We’re both sweaty and irritable. I sit in the shade of a small cedar, its trunk twisted by the battering winds. You sit beside me.

We take turns drinking cold water from your insulated bottle and snack on the mandarins I packed. The fresh citrus scent spreads. A light breeze picks up and soothes sticky, prickling skin. Two bees on a Blue Vervain. Soft clouds march across a blue field, and I realize all at once that the color of the sky is perfect. I lie back with my back against the stone and my fingers laced behind my head.

You lie on your side facing me. Your head rests in one hand, and the other hand fidgets with flowers and stones.

“The stone is so shimmery,” you say. “It’s like the mountainside is the side of some great big fish.”

“Hmm, yes, or a snake,” I suggest, closing my eyes.

“Or a dragon!”

And I can see it.

I can see them. The buried dead. Buried in graves and under waves. Buried in smoke, falling down in the rain. Seeping into the ground. The buried dead are rolling like stones on the undersurface of the underground. They are rolling toward the roaring mountain. The mountain is a dragon with shining mica scales and bones of luminous quartz and feldspar flesh. The mountain calls to them. It sings the dead up into its heights through the soles of its feet. The dead roll up and up through the mountain’s belly. The dead are digested in reverse. They flow up through the mountain’s throat. Up and out through its mouth. And through me where I lay in the mouth of the mountain. I can feel the dead pass through me like a great wind.

I sit up with a gasp. I strain my eyes. I search the perfect blue. A distortion? A shimmer to mark their passage? I see nothing. There’s nothing there to see.

“Hmm, what’s up?” you ask. Your voice is hazy and your drowsy eyes are already fluttering closed again.

“Oh, nothing. I just thought I felt something. I must have been dreaming.”

This story is a part of the TunnelBridge cycle of stories.
Also see TunnelBridge

a murmuration
a poem in the morning
a story at night

at midday
a speech of great glories
to rouse the tired

at the beginning of time
a warning
at the end a chant

song sparrow
swallow
crow
goose
heron

a word wakes the world
a song fades out

to fly
to perch
to swoop through
the darkening sky
to build a nest
and read it aloud
to a loved one

they know their way home

Already, this house is not her home. The one she spent sixty-five years of her life living in, most of them as a solitary widow. It was a place that in all that time had never changed. Especially the parlor and dining room, where I spent every Thanksgiving and Christmas as a child. The gold, textured carpet, the amber glass sconces, the teacups behind glass, the feathers and dried flowers in glazed pots, the old photographs of my dead grandfather in his uniform, and the dark wood furniture with intricate carvings under glass that I hardly ever saw because it was always covered by cloths to protect it. I remember when my mom and I would help pull down the curtains to clean and hang them back up on sharp metal hooks evenly spaced to create perfect pleats. I remember dusting the gold and green books in the shelf and the carved wooden figures of farmers at work and horses and carts and putting them back exactly where they were and would remain.

It was as if time had stood still around her. But the moment she was gone, time had been obliged to run ahead faster to make up for waiting. They’re selling the house and everything in it.

Maybe if my family hadn’t moved away when I was young. Or my mother hadn’t quarreled with her a few years before the end. If I hadn’t been too uncertain of how to reach out to her as an adult on my own. Maybe I could have known her better. Maybe I’d have something of hers to hold.

But ultimately, it’s just so easy. To never see someone again.

I dream of her instead. And her house. In my dreams, her house has many versions. One with a high wall around the back yard. One with extra rooms in the basement. And more. Remarkably stable from dream to dream for all their differences from the original.

Now, that house, which is no longer her house, is a dream version of itself. Emptied out. The carpet is gone and the wood beneath is worn. The furniture she got as a young bride and kept so perfectly has all been removed. But there are still traces. The gold and yellow backsplash my grandfather put in before he passed. Inexplicably, her chenille curtains still hang in her empty bedroom. In her yard, only two of her beloved blue hydrangeas remain. The hedges are scraggly and thin. The apple tree has fallen. The shed is rusty. The clothes line has snapped. How many things fell or broke the Easter morning her heart failed?

Her home, her life had been a bubble, a passage to another time, while the world moved on around her. The neighbors changed. Her old friend down the street died. The houses grew rundown. Her home held back. She held back time. How much older it suddenly looks.

I will never walk there again. In her home. I will never sit in her kitchen eating the popcorn she popped while she smoked cigarette after cigarette and told me stories from her childhood my mother had never heard.

The original is gone. My memory of my grandmother’s home is a dream like the rest.

This story is a part of the TunnelBridge cycle of stories.
Also see TunnelBridge

does it want to be held?

a dream chiseled in stone
does it become something else?

but it is a love half made of absence
that keeps the path from disappearing
that keeps us moving
and our thoughts from being
overtaken by invasive vines

a dream woven into fine thread
fine cloth to dress the world in
does anything of the dream remain?

you can look for it
and never find it

turn a corner
and it’s there
at the end of a while alleyway
waiting

it won’t wait
it’s already gone

an almost glow or glint
if you don’t look directly at it

two sunflowers in derelict grounds
forgotten behind a tall, wooden fence
mice, insects, birds, wind pass between them
something crackles

the somethings between anythings
daylight
night air
sprite of recognition
ghost of forgetting
a firefly, lit and unlit
there and not

the nothing between everything
bridged and unabridged
bridgeable and unbridgeable

a web in the branches

it is easy
in the undifferentiate
to forget the specific

the profusion
within, from, forming
the potential

it is easy to forget
the footfall
and the wingbeat

to forget
the updraft
and the downstream

that gravity acts on bodies
and the movers move themselves

what isn’t what it is?
who is asking?

time is made
and unmade again
from the same thread

Except this isn’t your world. Your world is not frozen. Your world flows. Your world has a name.

We don’t know its name to call it. We who have watched its lifeless surface from orbit call it Ice. We who fall into the desolation of its too-thin atmosphere and too-frigid cold call it Ice. Ice is the face it shows us.

Its true face looks only inward. It looks to you who are within it. You will tell me your world’s name when I find my way to you. If I do.

I have landed alone. My environment suit chafes. My pod lies behind me, a broken egg in a snow drift. A litter of countless other broken pods surrounds me. I am one of many and lonely as all of them. One at a time. That’s how it is. That’s how it’s done.

Like the others before me, I follow my compass to the nearest pole. It is no great distance through the unbroken blue of the ground and sky, darker than dark blue, hazeless.

It isn’t long until I come to what I came to find. The mouth of your world, big as the mouth of a hungry god. Do you have a god? The god of the surface is Ice. It has the power of stillness. Does your god have the power of quickening?

The mouth of your world is big enough to swallow me and ten like me again. But we come one by one by one. Just like you instruct us.

I sit on the edge of the crevasse, roughly circular. I take a deep inhale of my limited air. It is a little luxury I afford myself for courage.

This is all the air I have left. When it runs out, I won’t need it. Or else, I will. Either way, this is the only air I will ever breathe again. It’s old air, cleaned to sharpness. It isn’t the green air, wet air I can barely remember.

I let myself slip feet first into the darkest blue. I slide down a leveling slope, growing slower as I go until I come to rest at the base. Mechanical sensors detect an increase in gravity, which is not insignificant, but I barely notice it with my dull and stupid senses.

I stand upright. I check that my suit has no damage. All is well. My heart beats. I am in the antechamber. I will be changed. Either way, I will die. The question is whether I can be reborn.

The entrance to the passage is open just ahead. To my left and my right, the walls are covered in marks. Each one made by others who passed already. By others who went where I am going.

And there is the mark of the first with a note beside it. It says: “I am the body and blood of a new covenant.”

And each of us who comes after? Did you consent for us? Is it really you who calls to us in a tongue so changed we have to decode it? Is it really you? Or is it the hungry god calling out for more food? Did the god digest you whole? Even your memories? Is it really you who calls and who is wholly and inexcapably changed?

It’s too late either way. I am here, with my last few breaths in my lungs and my last meal in my belly. The taste of the familiar spices remains on my tongue as I take my first step into the ice labyrinth.

Another step, and I am walking. I don’t know how long the passage will wander or me within it. I don’t know how many branches it breaks into or which is the correct passage. I don’t know if there is a correct passage.

I am walking. You gave us no map. Each turn is as good as the last: left, right, asunder, etc.

I am walking. The mist has begun twirling. The air grows thicker.

I am walking. I see sparks within the transparent ice: red, orange, green, purple, colors with no names, etc. I don’t know their names, yet.

I am walking. The atmosphere has changed. The air is sticky. My body is heavy. My body has changed. Altered or digested. You didn’t tell us how we’d be changed or how the change is accomplished.

It’s all too unscientific. Still, the call urges us on. It is an urge as strong as living.

I’m crawling. Each breath is difficult and loud. It is an urge which makes trust meaningless, and truth, too.

I’m wriggling and wringing my way through the milky gelatin. I can’t breathe. I must be dying. A deep thrumming vibrates through the viscous matter around and in me. A rumble in the hungry god’s bowels.

I am gasping. I must get this off of me. This suit, unsuitable, unnecessary, unwelcome, distasteful. I unclasp my helmet. I unzip myself from the advanced fabric, so expensive and intricate, and I discard it.

I am drowning. It’s thick as honey. It chokes me. It fills me.

I am dissolving. I am becoming honey within honey. I am being pulled along by the undulating walls and unseen limbs within the opaqueness.

I am. Somehow, I still am.

I am flowing. I am within the thinning substance. The walls slip away swiftly.

I am swimming. I am solid within the liquid. I am breathing in an unfamiliar way. I move by unfamiliar methods. It’s natural. It’s intuitive. It’s instinctual, inherent, intrinsic.

None of these words make sense.

I am out of the tunnel. I am in your world. Your world is flowing. It is my world. I belong to it.

You’ve come to meet me. I already understand your language more than my own mind, which is slow to catch up to my alteration.

It is a tremble in the liquid, which I sense with new organs.

I am trembling. The name of our world trembles in my new flesh.

This story is a part of the TunnelBridge cycle of stories.
Also see TunnelBridge

When the sky was blue, I breathed. My mind moves my dry matter. The windless eddies are my family, who have forgotten all language but the language of dunes. I pass weightlessly among them mutually unrecognized. Matter of my mitosis or otherwise show no signs, raise no greetings.

How could they forget? All our great technologies of thought. All our knowledge of invisible geometries. Our grasp of the parallel. Our methods of moving between.

How could I remain? Alone on our mute planet. What fault or favor of endurance is in the bonds which hold my particles back from scattering into the windless afternight of my world? Why does the haunted dust of my formless being persist?

My thoughts interrogate themselves absurdly, knowing the answer already. My longing. A spark in my fine powdered substance.

Pebbles fall. They permanently scar my planet’s surface, noiselessly. No sound of fright or rapture shudders through my hollow structures. No song makes my atoms flow in intricate murmurations as they once flowed.

I am my world’s widow. I only want to hear it again. As I once heard, when our matter blew and breathed. When life moved on it surfaces, and life fluttered in its airs.

I may find it. There is something I can’t remember. A thought that has broken off somewhere along the backtracking folds of my meandering. I have a thought about the thought. I remember that I can’t remember. It’s why I drift like a stray word over the broken surface of my dead world. I move my materials over each stone and hollow and crater and rise. When I’ve covered every spot of barren ground with my infertile caresses, I may find it.

I may find it. I may find it. I may find it.

The crater gives me no trouble. Gravity is weak. I am weightless. Descend. Traverse. Ascend.

I may find it. I may find it. I may find it.

The plane goes on. On. On. The plane goes on forever.

I may find it. I may find it. I may find it.

The dry ravine winds. The moons dance across the narrow aperture.

I may find it. I may find it. I may find it.

The crest of the highest hill. Sharp enough to cut the sky with. Of fatal steepness.

I may find it. I may find it. I may find it.

A hollow in the highest hill’s side. Big enough to swallow a moon. I feed my ash to it. I fill its parched throat with my dryness.

I may find it. I may find it. I listen.

Silence. But in the silence is something.

A susurration.

The red spark crackles. It is my spark. My listening spark. And it hears.

I move a little further. Press against the hard concavity. Feel my way along the whispering wall to the invisible suture, subtle and fine. Touch the immaterial infrastructure the way my ancestors touched and taught me to touch. Press my listening organs to the curvature.

The thought I lost and found again. The Sound Well. An aperture where space becomes an abstraction. A hollow of fullness in the hollowness. Its curves an amplification across the vastness.

I remember what I remember. The Sound Well. The place of listening. Of hearing. Of speaking. Of song. The song from far, far beyond. The call from distant hill on distant planet where someone whispers into the curvature. Where someone speaks soft words in soft tones into the unseen arches in parallel spacetime.

They speak with great longing. With great longing, I listen. Our longing is not in vain.

I hear their story of their beautiful day on a green world with a blue sky. Of rising early to commune with the fluttering sublime. Of moving through tall grasses with a gentle herd close behind. Of watching silver-sided fish rise to the surface to sip the honeyed light. Of tending gently. Of soft copulation. Of looking up into the star-clad night and longing to tell someone far out there just how perfect the day had been. Of looking up and longing for some distant someone to hear it. To remember when they are gone. When time as a body moves on.

I listen.

This story is a part of the TunnelBridge cycle of stories.
Also see TunnelBridge

within the curve of an arch
beneath the atmosphere’s dome
in the mouth of the mountain
on an unknown planet
in misplaced chambers grown wild
where you and the formless are held
it becomes mathematically simple
it’s impossible to hold

let it change you
copy its code in your cells
let it leave you as you leave
carrying the formless in your form
as you forget it

in the nightfall
as i fade

i miss you
like the earth misses the sun
in the day

i want the light
as it warms me

you are my last ray
you will be my polestar
through the night

and in the morning
your name will be known
by the left wing of a bird
by a wild violet bloom
by a worm
by a mouse’s tail
by a fingernail
by a leaf, by a pen
by a grey cat’s ear

you will be on the tip
of many tongues
at the edges
of their vision
they’ll hear you
at the edges of sleep

i will haunt
as i’ve been haunted

i will make a hand remember my love
as my hand remembers
old loves

i miss you
like the day misses the light

love makes life
a natural part
of the death cycle

i don’t mind

the river that flows down
from the mountain

the cataract over the cliff’s edge
the voice of the waters

a murmur, a hum,
a roar

in the distant downstream
in the afterflow
a whisper on the shore
a song against the rocks

clouds, rain
mountain snow

how many times
can we fall?

I can’t see it. I know it is there. It lies low across the water, stretching from bank to stony bank.

No one can see it. I don’t know if they know it like I do. If so, they don’t tell me. I don’t tell them. None of us know what words to use to explain it. I don’t know how to explain it. So, I do as I was taught and remain silent.

The birds know it. I’ve seen them perching there, suspended between the blue above and the blue below.

No one passes beneath it. Too many rafts have sunk there and too many have drowned in its transparent shadow.

I stand on the bank and look out across its absence. If I stand and look too long, I will have no choice but to step out across it.

What would I do then? How would I go on knowing that such a thing can happen? How would the others go on, knowing that the sun could stop rising and seasons stop turning?

I turn away. I walk upstream toward home. I hear them talking while they work about the big ship floating down. Their voices are tense. Tomorrow morning. That’s when it will pass.

In the morning it will pass the place where the path is that was built before it was built.

I lie down early. My face turned toward the dimming and toward the flowing. All goes down.

I lie awake for a long time. Inevitably, my inner face turns toward it. My thoughts on quiet feet go down to the water’s edge. To the path across the river where spiders build their webs in the unstable air.

I step out. I join the bats and the night birds and spiders in the solidity without form, which hasn’t been built yet but will be built and already is. I walk across it.

I go out to the center. At the center it’s different. It warps the space around its absence into a different pattern. It is a pattern unfixed.

It is movable. It is a gate. I look for the latch. I run my thoughts like fingertips along its length. For a working or a tool I don’t know the shape of. The night is passing. I know the shape of it when I come to it.

I move it. My hands remember the future. The future which is already present. All rises up.

The sun rises. The bird rises. The center of the path rises up to let the tall boat pass.

In the morning, I am exhausted. The task has made me heavy.

Later I’ll walk down to the river and hear them talk about the big boat that passed safely downstream. How tall and grand it was. And what a shame it was that I missed it.

For now, I lie back down. I fall asleep with my face turned to the firelit horizon.

This story is a part of the TunnelBridge cycle of stories.
Also see TunnelBridge

the gate is ajar
and the way open
your hand is on it
a push
almost hesitant
forbearing
a creak
a sound of assent
or protest?
there is no time
the green tumbles out
over you and out
across the barren plain
you came from it
you of fallow land
the green is on you
you are the green
the green falls in
through the gate
between silent hedges
over the stones
and grasses and herbs
by many turnings
tending always
toward the center

And me? I’m lying in its mouth. The metal bird has swallowed me. I squeeze my eyes shut.

“R̃EU RAU R̃EU RAU RUUUUUU RAA RUUUUU R̃EU RAU R̃EU ROOOOOOO!”

Metal bird wakes the world into being. The primordial dark is stirring.

They weren’t kidding when they said it would be loud. Even through the headphones they gave me, it’s like being at a drone metal concert.

“WRA WRA WRA WRA WRA!”

“Are you afraid of small spaces?” they’d asked, before feeding me to their overgrown pet or offering me up, perhaps, to their god.

“I don’t think so,” I’d said. Then the image of being put alive into the cremation chamber had assaulted my consciousness. “Maybe a little,” I’d added.

They said they’d talk to me over the speakers.

“WRA WRA WRA WRA WRA!”

It might be a mating call. Do metal bird gods mate? The metal bird god mates with a flaming world. Magnetic seeds implant inside the planet.

“KRARARARA KRARARARA KRARARARA KRARARARA!”

“You won’t feel anything,” they’d said.

Oh, sure. Just my lower back seizing up, squeezing, throbbing from laying straight, stiff, unmoving. My damned back! It’s the reason I’m here in the first place.

And my arms cramping. And my legs. And everything quivering trying to stay still but wanting to twitch, to bend, to dig my way back out.

And something else. A subtle strangeness. Has my body always pulsed like this? Is this the feel of my atoms being disturbed, manipulated by the magnets? What of their bonds? What if they fall apart? What if I dissolve? Am I being digested?

“KRARARARA KRARARARA KRARARARA KRARARARA!”

I can’t keep my eyes closed any longer. Pale, textured plastic. Only a few inches from my face.

Yes, I think I am afraid of confined spaces. How long has it been? Five minutes, ten minutes, an hour, a day, a year? What if something happened? No one has said anything. They were supposed to talk to me. Did they forget me in here?

The plastic is the surface of a strange planet. My plane has crashed. I’m falling toward it. I squeeze my eyes shut.

“UUUUR UUUUR UUUUR UUUUR!”

The great metal bird god is enjoying its dinner. Its throat squeezes tighter, pushing me down. Its crop is filled with me. I’m not little. My hands are squished to the sides of my thighs. My chest touches the top of the passage. Is it getting smaller?

“UUUUR UUUUR UUUUR UUUUR!”

My organs are becoming liquid. I dissolve from the inside out. Magnetic digestion. Has the planet been doing this all along with its magnetic field? Softening us up for burial time in its belly? The earth eats its children.

“RUAAAAAAH RUAAAAAAH RUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!”

My eyes snap open of their own accord. Pale, plastic landscape with a smudge. What from? Who comes in to clean this? What if there’s a fire outside and they all had to leave? What if there’s a war broken out and they all ran away and let me here? Rapture? Zombies?

“RUAAAaAAAAAAaAAAAAAAAAAAaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaAAAAAAAAAH!”

Am I already dead? Is this purgatory? Has anything else ever existed?

Did the metal bird fail? Does the world refuse to wake?

But no, I am alive. My atoms shudder. My heart pounds. I am the singularity about to explode. In the next second I w—

“Hello, you doing ok, Hon?”

“I’m good,” I answer, inexplicably.

“Ok, I just wanted to let you know we are about a third of the way through. So it will be about twenty more minutes. Ok?”

“Sounds good, Thanks!” My hand involuntarily twitches to give a thumbs up, which I immediately abort.

“RUAAAaAAAAAAaAAAAAAAAAAAaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaAAAAAAAAAH!”

Metal bird screams.

This story is a part of the TunnelBridge cycle of stories.
Also see TunnelBridge

wait long enough
and every story is tragic
wait again, comic
wait again, a romance

wait forever,
suspended in belief
or indifference,
a tale of winter
past winter’s keep:
a forever winter
or a return
by subtle channels
to a stranger spring

wait long enough
and what is felled may rise
what stands may be razed

i watch a tree fall
the rocks will see me buried

it is natural to feel sad in every season
as it comes, as it passes, as it ends

try for a certain kind if you can

some sadness is the twin of love
some of anger, some of lack
some of overflowing

which is which
and what is what?
does it matter?

the spring allows itself
to be cut down

even so
i would kiss a leaf
and not pluck it

its twin lies on the ground already