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PICTOGRAPH: POSSIBLE SHIELD-BEARING FIGURE

To the phrase “We mean you no harm,” I have added, “We wish you well.” How the day trims the night with blue trade cloth. How the night offers long-distance bells. And the wine-makers appear to mix the waters. Lately, the rivers have begun to talk, in their loudspeaker voices, as if projected. As if they were speaking from a crack that opened deep inside the cliff, as if they were placed there like a feather in a book. Yesterday, I had one of the Old Days. As they say, my solitude was extended. An implied but un-depicted ground line. An abstract foothills tradition. The sound of rivers can lead me back there, to what I am being carried along to find. Their lives, this one, a kind of drowning. Imagine it summer. The rock shelter is dry. Scrape of chert. Chirr of insects in the fescue. The earth alive in ways I am not. Dead in ways beyond my reckoning.