I’ve Seen an Image.

I want to write music like a true poet. Not just words, drifting black and white across a blank canvas, never to see colour or cadence without a musical mind to untangle it. I want to paint obsessively. Not just kiddish attempts at watercolor and sketches I give up on halfway through, the image lost with my thoughts flying far too fast for my hand to keep up. But I can't keep up with you, true artists in this vibrant world. I can't bring life to my words like you inspire your brush, your strings, your whittling knife, or your voice. I create vessels for abstract ghosts, patterns of coded sounds in further coded shapes that only work to move information from here to there if the reader knows intimately the same magick signs. It's a gated art form, this inkcraft, and though beautiful in its way---filled with the fragrance of aging leaves, saturating in the context of its library or bookstore, musical when recited by those with greater skill, recreated by each amateur, ever evolving in every iteration---it will never quite match the passion of the colored and shadowed oils on the canvas drying on Rabbit's wall, never dance through the air to the keen vibrations of Grandfather's strings. There's too much mystery here, too much concealed, and what a name means to you is different from what it means to me.

I want to dance my stories into life---no fear here, no fear here---like a restless graveyard filled with morbid boredom, inspirit old bones with movement they've long forgotten, passing strength from my growing muscles to their atrophied and consumed limbs. No more envying the dead! I want to tell stories like an old man with a captive audience, not caring that my voice is shaky and so are my hands, or that I have to breathe twice as long as my younger counterparts, intent instead on illustrating in the softly drifting air before me invisible patterns of smoke for my listeners to inhale, seeing visions of bygone days and uphill-both-ways roads and loves so sharp and beautiful and gone, gone away, gone far away, that they begin to travel through time like I do, forgetting their wyes and woes, no choices to make, no terror in the results, standing like tall trees through contradicting air currents. I want to love like a child, playful and free, to say 'hello' and 'do you want to be my friend?' and 'goodbye' when it's time for lunch, to let it all in and let it all go and let it all be and not once think of my self as something needing or lacking or twisting up at every change in the cast of beautiful faces around me.

And though my words contain worlds that I cannot share any other way---why am I wearing clothes?---they spin so far out from the Sun that I fear they grow cold, lose their atmosphere, forget their water and their heat, and life abandons them---or they abandon life---as soon as they are set into motion, whiling away their unending shorter-than-earth days like so many dead things floating in a mountain lake, brilliant in a confused and fearful way, waiting to be eaten up by fish that will never swim there, content instead to be bounced around by spiraling children passing from life to death to life again in a game of who can swim the fastest?

I don't think I'm finished though---oh, how simple!---I don't think the lack of senses means a lack of colour or sound or feel or smell or taste; even the blueberries burst all the more sweet at night, and the stars shine more boldly in their gentle way, fall through a too-broad-for-the-eyes canvas with more invisible colour than any painting can contain without turning to mud, captured only in our silly little magick-eye contraptions we call cameras. We walk through worlds each day that cannot be traveled to again only through snapshots; we need many and never enough.

I'm creating now alongside Rabbit and Grandfather---the wind is my friend---the one painting and writing and laughing, the other touching keys and strings and singing out, and I draw faces in leaves and flowers blooming behind closed eyes and write, a volunteer insomniac in the minutes between the hours, sketching out in digital glyphs impossible geometries that fill the sky and pattern onto our ceilings, collage the musings of other souls into a little container, which opens onto a little world being created above the waterfall, a bed of moss and a sun-soaked field in the wild mountain country hemmed in by wildfire.

And I ask myself now, seeing this world---Time unwinds its coil---can you walk upon that forgiving water? let your storm be roused and calmed in the same moment, the same rhythm, the same pattern? You won't drown, I promise. But you may very well fall, singing in tune and grinning through a thousand illnesses, into an impossible, ferocious love.