I remember, as the world slips strangely in a circular mugginess out my window. The times-remembered fall in and out of their boundaries, distinct cuts fracture and confuse and an already great murk of world.

I’m in an inbetween-place. Once, I was a child, and, standing at the threshold of existence, I contained the uncontainable with a lined and lifeless portrait of what-was drawn onto dirt with the sharp tips of my nails.

Then, the world hit me and, in a gust, stretched my starving lungs, as the congelation of dense air that forms the earth spread itself into my body. In an instantaneous, wordless sermon, I became another hapless disciple of its great passions and pains.

It seems that all that follows revelation is doubt. Mind and memory are muddled. But, the wind is blowing like when I was a kid and a train whipped through a curve in the gully at night, throwing down all my low walls. I just can’t tell if that kid died the moment the hours changed or if we’re still the same. If that passing train only split the world into further categories of then and now, or showed me for a movement, a truer vision of a united and flowing world whose image I’ve forgotten.

I sense my old self’s shadow, though, among this walking dream’s stone and mist.

That night, as I recall, there was the river, many-faced, rushing downward and urging upward. It was on the left. On the right, the mountains, rockfaced and absolute. There were other things, as well. Boulders and pebbles and such, there places well settled. Indentions in the dirt, holes in which to lay forever. But, all things split by the open rail. Except the sky-to-stare-at-sometimes, which, in its blackness or blueness, emptiness or fullness, contained confused reflections of all things on either side. That was split by empty. All things of this singular place were split and separate. Except the Train and the Wind that Blew beside it, When they came Whipping.

It was early in the fall and the first great chill was starting to creep into the air. You felt the cold in the day, standing barefoot among the clipped, dying grasses. Wind would bite your skin nicely, and your heart would beat because it was thrilling and strong and did not belong.

Then the growling grew and it was the dense breath of a maddog in your face, only, instead of a savage warmth, an iciness slipped forth from its pale lips, out of its pitless gut and onto your red cheeks and the ripping began. Back home, you’d come in at night torn with a longing for the blow of sharp, cutting gusts and for the warmth of the electric heater, whose false flames blew against false logs in the shivery basement of your home
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That night, though, we were away and in our tents, warped tightly in sleeping bags, like bees in their tapestry of combs.

Through thin plastic, I saw dimly the red of our worn canoes, so delicate and sturdy. It brought to mind downward wafts with the others. There was no recollection of personnel separation while on the water, only a forgetting of the existence of the world past where the river turned to silt.

Through thin plastic, you could see the swaying that was swift, black water beating against the bank. You could feel that, too. The beating, I mean. The movement of earth, and smell of cold, fast flowing water. Above, the weight and breadth of a high dirt bank. At least, that’s how I remember you feeling it.

Either way, the bank was manmade and housed a railway, and both the metal and the mud curved into the dark of the pines. But, I couldn't see this at the time, you see, since it was night and the bank leveled out about twenty feet above. I sensed it. You sensed it. You could feel the wind filling up our enclosed space among the cattails, and, with eyes closed roughly, this image of the world beyond the plastic barrier was brought about. And the pines, their whistle was heard. That too.

Then, suddenly, the train. Not its whistle, but its gust. A Bullet on the Breeze. The world shook and all that was sensible and right threatened to crumble and reveal itself as worthless and extravagant boundaries formed of patterned lies. The more sensitive leaves, hanging lightly to branches, were swept up horribly into a vacuum. A blackhole on metal mountain.

But before all of this came into full effect was the conductor. I can’t see him now but you sensed him when you felt the warm, yellow glow of light from the front car pass over. For a second, in our mind, the woods were brilliantly yellow and clear and the conductor was ancient, soon to be gone. He was a black silhouette in the window, a bentback aiming forward; but his eyes were seen through our closedlids and they were young and enchantingly crazed. His body shook violently, like the trees left screaming in his wake. To us, it was a wild rush, like a car speeding down a mountain with no brakes, the driver hanging on and twisting to avoid the stationary masses blocking a race towards weightlessness.


In this movement and roar of air, as I remember, you felt the splintered seams fall and reveal a world not divided into separate entities. It was all one. The Then and the Now and the Later (all hope or fear pulled from the Now and inserted into images of past and future, with the truths of the Then and the Later dictating the current reality that disappears to the illusion of past with every passing second). The steady falling and the sudden lifting, the strangeness and the harshness. Warmth and iciness. The rising part that was warm and longing, the falling part that was erratic in its desire to tear and rip past all stationary things. Another part that was a façade; cold and impenetrable like the rock that separates layered earths from the True Earth of inner spurting and sinking flames of great intensity. You saw this all in our entangled ripcage, also. I feel it less clearly now. But, at that moment, all things revealed as one in the gusting of gusting things, which in its honesty is itself the only thing that’s almost separate.

And the train was gone off to where it was going, leaving the serene scenes behind it, rippling and left to lie in wait forever. Something dark and terrifying was felt, as well. The disturbance of all that was supposedly natural seemed almost sinful; you feared the trains roar might be a great and terrible mechanical cry of meaninglessness. But, like all sinful things, it was enthralling, too. In its cry was rebellion and passion; a cry known best to the young. It was a breaking with all tying forces and a barreling though the apparent rightness and quite sadness of the world. Barreling through, crazy and lost, and driven only by passion and a mad rush to move before a roaring gust subsides to whatever form things that subside eventually take.

In our dreams that night, I remember the endless sound of the thudding of metal on metal, only matched by the wind that rushed alongside it. The only image seen was a glow of yellow, illuminating blackness to something else, before continuing on.

In the morning, I climbed the precarious bank and followed the tracks until I was out of sight of the camp. The sky was red and dripping across the west. Color was slipping slowly from the world, but leaving its stains to stay. On my knees, I pressed my palms and face against rusting steel, rotting wood, and the dirt underneath, and tried to feel where it passed, or the vibrations from it twins. All was motionless. And the tie was separate from the dirt and the dirt separate from the silence that surrounded me.

When we left the river, talk was heard at the filling station of a train crash. I hear the trains don’t go down that way anymore, and I say it sometimes, too.

Now, leaning against a window, I sigh with the wind. In glass reflection of eyes is me or an image of me and my eyes and beyond that the twisting of trees. I’m sick, since I can’t completely distinguish each thing and their reality or point of separation, nor can I take comfort in a unified view of myself, in this room, in this universe, reflected in the reflection of my eye’s reflection, along with all things around me.

This reflection on a messy dream leaves me with what I started, a longing for a view of the world that is steady and strong. My hand presses against wooden wall, which was once a rough cut, then polished and leveled, then warped and maligned through time.

Whenever a person comes upon a higher notion of what’s real and true, it always seems to slip back closer to what it once was, until neither the old way, false and mindlessly structured, nor the oncenew way make sense, and the only thing that’s known for certain is confusion. But, we long for the oncenew way, because, when it first hit, it shattered the heart and its veins and arteries and left them a mass of beating, red liquid, whose reality could not be denied. It gave a clear view, which was impossible to take in completely but provided a small sense of place, like observing the breadth of a mountain range from a high point, or arriving into a straight stretch of river after a sudden curve. And this sense sank into bone and mixed in with marrow, and makes the sensor believe it would eternity be in him. But, as I know from experience, time always takes good notions away with the bad and, after enough times, leaves you hollow as a flightless bird.

And I lean against the window and try to forget everything but the lifelong flow of feelings felt shaking through my senseless soul, which have, occasionally, made me air. I close my eyes, and try to be nothing. A pure nothing, unlike the weighty, wasted nothing cemented to floors I seem to sometimes be.

Feeling the wind ripple past the window, I press my head harder against glass and try to release my mind to the air, where, ridding wind’s gusts, ploughing straightaway though the trees, it can become free and boundless, till, the wheels that drive clarity slow and spark and smoke.

I press my head harder and strain to change the way things are. The spokes of my mind spur and sputter as I strain against the world and try to kill all sad stillness and eternal separation with the brilliant burning of my plain brain.