Читать книгу Pictograph - Melissa Kwasny - Страница 16

BEING QUARTZ

Parchment upon parchment. Hoofprints across the snow. A thousand cracks in a glassy ceiling. There is light there, the windows double-paned, the doors shuttered tight. Dirt can’t get in, can only scuff the surface. Even the most strenuous hiddenness must unfold and die. Is death then an extreme condition of exteriority? What is inside grown exceedingly out? The animals have come down. I can hear them roaming, though I can’t place them. A slow process, marked by indirection and great lull. I read that the path to the underworld passes through a region of ice. I read, “the alert and autistic ends of the mind’s spectrum.” The shaman’s cache is not in the cave but inside the rock walls, where she keeps her toolbox, her maps and set of instructions. Where she calls out the vowels, open and endless. Where she watches as her teeth and lips close.