The Fifth Season

Suppose it is a table or a house. Let us say a house for now, an enclosure. There are no doors or windows, merely dark spaces of entrance which make the walls between their cool toothless mouths seem like the legs of a table. It straddles the afternoon breeze. Its walls are smooth and white. Grey wisps play over them, shadows of a deeper purity. See there behind one's noticing the clumps of dying colorless grass. Its blended coloring is that of a dream, a place where someone dead or forgotten is met in those moments just before waking. Place it in a desert but it is not there. Speak of its structure and there is nothing but a murmur, no wood or mixture to speak of. It is a squat beneath an instant's lucid sky. An instant in which tender jagged notes are heard adorning a simple word. Because there are figures joining hands upon the structure. The area between these figures is as blue as backdrop. They are pink and faceless, inhuman with hope. Eyes closed, one draws yellow lines through the night air outside this house. Geometric webs trembling as the notes pass through each strand untouched. One's head aches and the heart is empty sailing closer just above the enclosure, never inside. The brilliant rectangles of light within, hung on the walls like paintings, are a memory. The notes descend like a banister embedded with scrollwork. This must have been in his head, this house, when he stopped thrashing about and sunk beneath the water. We straining our eyes and shouting. But all we saw, and this only for a moment, was the tip of his hair brushing the surface of the water like an eyelash.