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It's obscured by necessity, but it's there,
small and overtired, trembling in its
new arrangement, cold and weary of the
constant need for awareness of walking -
if just one limb skids, the balance of
climbing is gone, and descent becomes
a confusion of curses, not all of them
fully understood.
It's a waiting, lost in the movement;
it's half hope, half a knowledge
that the meeting it anticipates
shouldn't happen, that there shouldn't
be a meeting here at all...
There's not exactly
ice and snow here, but it helps if one
imagines that there is, and that the hill
he climbs (he's not, of course, climbing
a hill) is glassy; it also helps if you
imagine that a wooden structure, roughly
fashioned for a murder of some sort,
to imagine that this structure's
carried on his
back - try to see a
figure, bent beneath the weight
of wood it drags, walking down a
path that's lined with very distant jeers
and insults, walking upwards, maybe
crawling on all fours towards
a line of voices he detests,
but knows are destined to
affect this pain.
He's slow, he's left to
climb, left to the cold thoughts he accepts
(and yet denies the value of). He is unsure,
unsteady, tired, and very empty - he has
no reason for this ascent, only the
knowledge that he needs the distance
that the journey can afford. I am
not convinced that this journey affords
distance; there is a set smile seen sometimes
when this or that one sees a
joke I've missed. I see that smile now, see
it in the black hardness, in the properties
of the climb he's making. I see it in
lakes and the meanderings of hawks (do you
see it in me? I feel the first stirrings
at the corners of the mouth).
Have you seen the meanderings of hawks?
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