TRUE DARKNESS

I crawled down into the South Dakotan Wind Cave; it was all decked in ancient stone scaffolding and a snowdusting of delicate crystals. In the depths, I reclined on the rock, curving my back around it, and turned off all the light. I had never experienced true darkness before; it seemed like something thick and moist, something dense and aromatic that held me up. I passed my hand around in front of my face, detecting no motion. I turned around and around, finding no sense of location, losing awareness of my body. Eventually, though, I could see an outline of my hand as I waved it; not so much where it was as where I intended it to be. I believe that I saw the extension of my spirit into space down in the Wind Cave. Up here I can't see my spirit for all the light.

What kind of light is a blinding light? It doesn't seem like light at all, just some powerful intoxicant, or maybe such an excess of a quality that it folds into its opposite. What is a light that does not penetrate spirit?

The rough hewn spheres on the path to Ventura hold a darkness in themselves. It is not true, but nearly so. I went wandering in the abandoned oil refinery - through frescoed echo chambers and iron rivers. I found rust cliffs to climb, and a vast globe of shadows to peer into.

The air was heavy and bitumenous; the darkness thick and impure. I gazed up into it and saw one subtle point of light at the zenith. My eyes would not see it, but I know that the entire sky was projected through that pinhole. The hole, the mineshaft into the upper world, pulled me into an ocean of sky image.

What is up and what is down? What is light and what is dark?

I seek darkness for its promise of light. I look down because it shows the way up.

SHOFAR

I walked into a room outfitted in ornate hammered silver. A glow that seemed almost sentient and breathing moved in the room. I looked over and saw, before a slightly tarnished silver mirror, a great curved shofar. It looked like ivory with tooled metal ornamentation. I picked it up and blew into it, and a woman walked through a doorway nearby. I don't remember what she said, but intelligence seemed to be crackling in the air around her. I was unnerved by her.

I dug a mineshaft into myself, the underworld, and strung a tattered line of incandescence to light the way. It flickers and sways, and lets off a feeble heat against the dark and cold; I know that it will be extinguished soon. I first came to the entrance of the mine in the lean hours of darkness, among worn down ancient mountains. A strange little family stood around me there, drawn to me for survival, repulsed by fear. I stood terrified at the mouth, unable to go down, but certain that I was bound to descend very soon. See the stars blaze overhead... will they burn for me down there?

A huge 3 masted ship has moored on the eastern end of the island. The wind always seems to pick up as the sun goes down, and today as I walked back from Elephant Seal Cove, I saw the night fog blowing in rose tendrils around it.

The crystalline iceplant bled vermilion as I descended toward the sea lions. Waves of pelicans leapt off the cliff and coasted in the updraft at my approach. I got to the bare ground of the promontory and found the audacious pinnipeds; their heads were regally lifted as they galumphed about. Disturbingly human coughs arose from the group, many of whom were lying down in rows looking like slick, hulking sardines.

I scaled back up the steep face and watched the bulbous and disfigured sun disappear behind the vapor wall. A sharp sliver of moon rose up through the coreopsis stand.

MICE

Each morning, I go to inspect the little boxes on the hillside, on the table next to the seedling forests. I hear the scrabble and scratch of the mice living their mousy little lives, so I haul them off and set them free in the wilderness near the campground. I hear the kestrel sometimes swoops just as they are let free, but I have never guided them into danger. According to their respective personalities, they launch energetically from the spring loaded contraption, never once looking back, or they meekly protrude a pointed snout and then make a dash for it, or they peer up to inspect my countenance before weaving around between my boots on their way to the taller grasses. The last class, I imagine, is affectionate, and perhaps even grateful for the exotic banquet of irish oats.

DREAMS AND SLEEPLESSNESS

I am on Santa Barbara island, alone. 40 miles from the California coast, fog blows over the far brown hill, trundles silently through the giant coreopsis groves, past my stiff hair and to the sea. Sometimes the sun, wherever it is, kindles a pink effulgence in the east. The sea lions wail and bellow in the wombish light. I hear the waves crash hundreds of feet below from my cradle in the precipitous basalt. It holds me, not in darkness, but in a sort of hallucinogenic ambiguity. I live in myself and sometimes in this little room, cut from a midcentury catalog.

Could not sleep. The dull glow rushed through the window in the night and woke me. I had been dreaming of her in the endless Annapolis shadows. A one time salvation and rival, and of course much more than I have ever been able to express. Coming, going, like the swell against the rocks down below.

Now she flies about the desert, the scorching unseeable. I felt her leave the ground... I felt her leave me, and so I dreamed of her staring into my eyes in the market at dusk. We looked into one another as lightning sees its path through the air.