David Mason

Mine, said the stone, mine is the hour. I crush the scissors, such is my power. Stronger than wishes, my power, alone. Mine, said the paper, mine are the words that smother the stone with imagined birds, reams of them, flown from the mind of the shaper. Mine, said the scissors, mine all the knives gashing through paper’s ethereal lives; nothing’s so proper as tattering wishes. As stone crushes scissors, as paper snuffs stone and scissors cut paper, all end alone. So heap up your paper and scissor your wishes and uproot the stone from the top of the hill. They all end alone as you will, you will.

His muddy rubber boots stood in the farmhouse mud room while he sat in the kitchen, unshaven, dealing solitaire. His wife (we called her Auntie) rolled out dough in the kitchen for a pie, put up preserves and tidied, clearing her throat. They listened to the TV at six, he with his fingers fumbling the hearing aids, she watching the kitchen clock. Old age went on like that, a vegetable patch, a horse some neighbor kept in the barn, the miles of grass and fences. After he died his boots stood muddy in the mud room as if he'd gone in socks, softly out to the meadow.

The fence was down. Out among humid smells and shrill cicadas we walked, the lichened trunks moon-blue, our faces blue and our hands. Led by their bellwether bellies, the sheep had toddled astray. The neighbor farmer's woods or coyotes might have got them, or the far road. I remember the night, the moon-colored grass we waded through to look for them, the oaks tangled and dark, like starting a story midway. We gazed over seed heads to the barn toppled in the homestead orchard. Then we saw the weather of white wool, a cloud in the blue moving without sound as if charmed by the moon beholding them out of bounds. Time has not tightened the wire or righted the barn. The unpruned orchard rots in its meadow and the story unravels, the sunlight creeping back like a song with nobody left to hear it.

The fence was down. Out among humid smells and shrill cicadas we walked, the lichened trunks moon-blue, our faces blue and our hands. Led by their bellwether bellies, the sheep had toddled astray. The neighbor farmer's woods or coyotes might have got them, or the far road. I remember the night, the moon-colored grass we waded through to look for them, the oaks tangled and dark, like starting a story midway. We gazed over seed heads to the barn toppled in the homestead orchard. Then we saw the weather of white wool, a cloud in the blue moving without sound as if charmed by the moon beholding them out of bounds. Time has not tightened the wire or righted the barn. The unpruned orchard rots in its meadow and the story unravels, the sunlight creeping back like a song with nobody left to hear it.

Colorado turns Kyoto in a shower, mist in the pines so thick the crows delight (or seem to), winging in obscurity. The ineffectual panic of a squirrel who chattered at my passing gave me pause to watch his Ponderosa come and go— long needles scratching cloud. I’d summited but knew it only by the wildflower meadow, the muted harebells, paintbrush, gentian, scattered among the locoweed and sage. Today my grief abated like water soaking underground, its scar a little path of twigs and needles winding ahead of me downhill to the next bend. Today I let the rain soak through my shirt and was unharmed.

The loneliest days, damp and indistinct, sea and land a haze. And purple fog horns blossomed over tides— bruises being born in silence, so slow, so out there, around, above and below. In such hurts of sound the known world became neither flat nor round. The steaming tea pot was all we fathomed of is and is not. The hours were hallways with doors at the ends opened into days fading into night and the scattering particles of light. Nothing was done then. Nothing was ever done. Then it was done.

Like fossil shells embedded in a stone, you are an absence, rimmed calligraphy, a mouthing out of silence, a way to see beyond the bedroom where you lie alone. So why not be the vast, antipodal cloud you soloed under, riven by cold gales? And why not be the song of diving whales, why not the plosive surf   below the road? The others are one thing. They know they are. One compass needle. They have found their way and navigate by perfect cynosure. Go wreck yourself once more against the day and wash up like a bottle on the shore, lucidity and salt in all you say.