something old-ish

"volant"

The dial face of the sun takes its hands and scrubs my scalp, chestnut filaments burning into hot wisps of gray, indistinguishable from a fog that tumbled out of trees one morning that stumbled and choked in the haze as it caused a luscious trainwreck, lathered in oil and rendered fat from weary travelers.

They were all fine. They stood up and shook their britches off and dusted off their shirts. Took their wallets out, from pockets they forgot they had, extra purses they packed for such an occasion, and dumped the contents out on the gravel, reclaiming only their cash and a business card for an attorney.

Without too many words other than cranky “that’s mine”s and “oh, beg pardon”s, they took their slimmed down lives and wandered into birchtree groves; shirakaba, said a foreign traveler, who then decided to make that his new name.

They all left their shoes behind, which I thought just a trifle odd.

The sun beat down on the groves as Rinzai would a pupil all too clever; I watched from a cell a mile or so up the line, a clear direct path illuminated for me, but not for me. The roof had been sold back to the monastery, you see, so I then had an obstructed view of a ceiling by looking at some haze-smitten sky, endless, terrifying.

The cycle of humidity has taken to putting dental floss impressions in my forehead. I never remembered it being such an object of topographic interest to the authorities. My eyes look like pale cinders trapped behind folds of leather; my nose pitted and getting more lopsided with each UV burst. My hearing is starting to wane. It’s getting fuzzy, so the expression goes, probably from the fibrous shellac, tangled kitten hairs, covering my pinnae.

So this room sees me sitting, looking, pausing. Over what, I couldn’t tell you. I asked to be placed here. Not precisely: I asked others about where I ought to go, where I ought to go, where I ought to go; what I ought to do, what I ought to do, what I ought to do: I ended up here.

I’m probably 135 feet up. I started at 820 millimeters, then worked my way to 831 inches. I made it as high as 167 feet or so, but those damned beavers. I should mention I reside in a well-crafted cell, with no ceiling, a plexiglass floor, and a wide window overlooking the railway. I built it myself, for the most part, with some help from some key personages. Too bad none of us know what we’re doing with a power drill.

I spit into some clay, let it harden. Try to build it up too quickly. Snap down young red pines and complain (forever) when they leave me with far less than the constructive result I’m seeking. The non-union crew showed up whenever it felt like it, which was part of the problem. We’d have planks and 2x4s, made out of tapioca, frozen. We’d have nails and woodscrews, made out of dried arteries and sparkplugs, respectively. We’d wrap the thing in Styrofoam coffee cups and aspirin bottles, try to balance heavy loads on Warsteiner bottles, half-broken from a contractor we never remembered meeting.

We left a debris field right under the window. Miraculously, this spindly trestle stands on its own piers, although it isn’t quite so aerodynamic as to withstand mighty blows or gusts in the shape of a cat. I look down over the pile of ragged, jagged tin cups and soap wrappers and broken clocks, ringed and flanked by tarnished silvery-gold hubcaps, and soiled once-diamond-bright knives, all at attention, Marines on parade. I pretend to know what it’s like to fall 12 storeys, survive, and do it all over again.

I only wish I could convince someone to jump with me, or four, or nine; I’d rather have someone break my fall in case I ended up in the birch grove, emptying my wallet, seeking a new realm, footless as a slug.

According to the skywatch, it’s nearly evening. Any leaping, caressing of gelatinous air, tender embrace of the soil at 25 meters per second only to splash through a mud puddle and emerge a vagrant somewhere in Newark, to be thrown into something else, fused into the gearworks of another name, will have to wait until I can see precisely where I’m going.