Morning, and a high bluff meadow, sun-saturated. He moves like a scythe through the tall, unfettered grasses until he comes upon an embankment of deep forest. The militaristic menace of boundaries, of light fading into the unknown. He finds a deer trail penetrating into the mysterious heart of the wood. He follows it until the meadow is a ghost, a fleeting glint of gold in the past, which is one solid mass. Moves further and deeper into the wilderness, recalcitrant, a fear germinating inside him that he has not felt before: he is not a self sufficient man. His world is tamed and orderly, every inch the domain of human presence. The ancestral earth has fled from his life, is not even an ember in his soul. Cultural artifice commands his desire. This fear compels him deeper, to where there is no striated drama of shadow and sun. There are no eddies or swales of brightness. It is submersion, and light is a mute whisper. The wind high in the trees is a primordial, monosyllabic instrument. Throwing branches clattering to the ground. The trees quivering like girls in the throes of first pleasure. The dancing trees like old lovers visited in a dream: trembling aspen, white birch, honey locust. Slender, tall and supple. Dreams of such darkness, such overabundance. The trail is faint and easily lost. His tremulous heart says he is being stalked by death. The wind is immense and mythical, it bellows and obliterates the sundries of his past, the minor affections of his terrified heart and obsessions of his body. How small a thing is love, it serenades. How fragile a creation you are. He is being hunted like a small animal. And then he emerges into the luminous fissure of an old, barren creek bed. He reconvenes with light. This narrow channel so crystalline his eyes ache, failing against the clear, ascetic effulgence. You cannot live a life of absences. Those vacancies and hollows come naturally enough. And yet this is exactly what you’ve done. Find something and hold it, wrap the might of your mortal self around it. He begins to climb upstream, seeking higher ground. Beginning to sweat, and his fear is a soluble element. It dissipates and settles like silt beneath a lugubrious current. He climbs until the earth terminates into sky. The virile sun careens down the chasm, shattering into the lake, coruscant and ephemeral. He meets the wind face to face. His body a brittle, foreign thing. He entreats the wind: move me. Move me the way love once did. Move me the way language once did. The systems fail. A communion at the precipice. The carnivorous wind so nearly divine. He lets it throttle him, throws his arms out and opens his eyes. The power of the wind is beyond anything he knows. It burns and stings and demolishes his equilibrium. His limbs and his hair dance wildly for a few measures with the trees and the dune grass. Sweet, tearful reverence. His body is not made to bear such gravity. It will fail. And when it does, he will descend that incandescent vein of sun, a roaring cataract of grief. Taking refuge in the forest. Solemn and sussurant, deep and lonely, thundering with savage terror.