The sky is in the water,
The water is in the sky.
Mountains are coming out of the water.
They probe through the frost lines.
The sun is shrunken and the wind expanded.
We walk the reflections with our eyes cast aside
in case there are really wolves anymore.
There aren’t, though. There are barely people.
Animals are long since faded memories and grim stories.
We are each others’ pets now.
There is nothing to eat, not even snow.
Not even smoke to smell makes it easier for us.
Eating each other does not fill.
Eating is not one of our habits.
Why our senses work no one knows.
Some call it a subtle torture.
A few say it’s a delusion of memory.
As the dark shimmers,
our march takes us even closer to nowhere.
All places are reducing to zero now.
Soon there won’t be a where to be.
Entropy demands it.
Slower, colder, darker: that is our goal.
Our fear is that we will still experience
after there is nothing left to stimulate senses.
What then?
Can we continue to exist in nothingness?
It is close now.
We feel it as a kind of mental chill.
It ices our thoughts.
It makes our hopes brittle and our terrors sharp-edged.
How it is we remain coherent, distinct to each other?
We do not know.
How it is we keep going when there is no where left to go,
No reason to go anywhere?
We do not know.
Discussing it used to take our attention.
Now we learn trance or Zen emptiness.
Time passes, or it does not, we cannot tell.
Marking the changes in our world, such that remains,
is our only way of gauging how much is left.
Presuming it all ends when places cease keeps us from madness.
Unless we are mad already, as some believe.
Locality shifts to nonlocality
upon the heat death of the universe.
So our smart ones insist.
Those like me do not know what that means.
It doesn’t matter, really.
What ever there is to experience,
these senses of mine will meld with it,
even if it is literally nothingness.
Being and nothingness makes for philosophy.
Trouble is, philosophy does not heal or help.
No comfort can be found in words and ideas.
Only dreads inhabit our notions.
We try not to have any.
We flee our own thoughts.
When I say wolves, as I did earlier,
that is what I mean.
How it came down to us no one remembers,
if ever any of us knew.
It’s questionable.
There are thirteen of us trudging through this wasteland.
It is a waste of water and sky and frost and wind.
We find no others.
We stay together because parting makes no difference.
I have wandered from the group.
Each of us has.
It leads only back to the group.
Without a sense of time it makes no difference.
So we talk, if that is what we do.
Communication is linear and incremental.
Each word adds a sound to the silence inside us.
Each syllable pushes the umbra of being
into the light of failing space-time.
There are considerations of comfort.
An example is the one who walks near me often.
I experience a she.
She is not I, and I am not she.
We are apart somehow in all this, but near enough.
That counts as companionship I think.
Sometimes I love her.
My passion waxes and wanes.
I direct affection and concern her way.
It is never returned.
What she sends to me is simple presence.
She receives what I give but there is no echo,
no returned warmth.
Intention is key when focusing will.
As winds clash and our senses swirl there must be intent.
With no goal intent is difficult to maintain,
so I focus on her.
She who is near me.
She becomes what I want.
Developing a desire after how ever long it has been —
have I ever had one?
It proves nearly impossible.
To be with her or to be apart from her is the same.
And yet the idea of her is in my mind.
It provides a faint outside goal.
Reaching her may give me more.
We walk endless tracts of a wilderness
as it begins to unravel.
Place gives way to singularity,
design fades to mere pattern,
then to a jumble of accident and chaos.
Still we remain coherent.
We sense each other.
Once there were others, we know that.
We remember rain and trees and crowds of people.
We remember wolves and elk and bear and fish.
We know of birds, lichen, molds, and germs.
We recall teeming cities and lovely parks,
a planet like paradise.
Sad apes caper in our minds.
Wild beasts and inglorious failures of nerve.
It came down to ourselves.
Oddly, there is no frustration.
We have only existence and this minuscule hint of place.
Vague outlines of matter offer ghosts of form.
Wisps of shape taunt our memories.
Still we stay whole, as whole as ever perhaps.
We have all asked why.
We have asked ourselves, each other,
and the nothingness around us.
Projecting personality does no good.
Pretending sentience surrounding us makes no difference.
Are we catchers or the caught?
Are we of this, or is it of us?
Do our senses stimulate our surroundings?
Or do we encompass what we think of as our world?
We are always slower, colder, darker.
We are never quite stopped,
never entirely frozen solid,
never darkness itself.
Perhaps that is life’s curse.
Like Zeno’s paradox, life must go on
with always a bit more to be sliced.
Always another increment.
Always a fraction more possible.
Always another half.
Finding the half makes us whole, perhaps.
She is near and I am here and that is all I know.
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