Think of it: shoulderblades sliding down in concert with your sigh, the sentence departing from its husk of hesitation, growing vivid for a moment in the wind. And like all things, the words tumble with their miniature gravity, spilling over the desk or the grass, only to spiral into silence. In the aftermath, your calculations quietly undress themselves. Syllables trace the whelk of your ear. Conditionals unfasten their brittle wings. Yet off you go, yielding to a semblance of continuity, so swept up in this current you almost forget the way you’ve been sitting here, shifting from time to time. Soon, the diagonal bones will unfurl their sails of numb. But I do not have the time to wait for that; I scarcely have the space to catalog the trajectories of banality and grace, scattered like so many rays across your torn, vast

heart.

I went to the mountains. The green rain unraveled in staircases down the green slopes. In the river, fish swarmed a sunlit boy, forming a kind of skirt around his stomach, the fabric of scales twirling slow, clockwise. A man lounged in the teeth of a cliff, clothed in a smock of light, his chin lifted towards the canopy. Insects announced their metallic desperation. The waterfall pummeled the pool with its crystal fists. A pyramid swathed in moss is dedicated to someone royal, someone loved, someone dead. And there, a pagoda poised in the trees like a brilliant, forgotten remark.