It is interesting to drape yourself in the silence and darkness: home alone, a taste of the future… in order to experience it– to taste it and feel it– I turn off all the radios and computers and lights and sit for a few moments, watching for perhaps the first time the pale night-shadows of palm trees knit their fingers in bristling, patient folds on the wall opposite the window. The rain has deepened everything. Sure, tomorrow, we’ll all see everything as greener, but tonight– before the dawn breathes its gold and white into the spectrum– everything is denser, heavier, filled with its own shadows. I wonder what is casting enough light to throw the Cubist shadow-puppets into my home, but all I can see is the sodium glow of a far-off streetlamp, and the hazy corona of the strip-malls of Mission Valley.

I stand outside, in the last collections of mud, and let the earth seep up in gooey clots between my toes. I find it as beautiful as the silver-theater inside; I can still smell the rain in the air. It is not so quiet outside; or, rather, it is easier to let yourself hear beneath the level of normal audibility. Darkness makes all sounds and smells profound. I am reeling, dizzy with the deppening depth around me. I feel like I could fall into the pavement, were I to stare at it too long.

It is difficult to believe that, after this moment, I will go into bed, read a book, wake up tomorrow to grade papers, drink coffee, try and get to the gym: all the pedantic shit that makes my hackles rise and rise and rise, day after day. Oh, I know it isn’t that bad– it’s actually quite nice, and even a privilege of sorts, in this brutal world. But what if I were to fall in, to spend the rest of my days softly falling, like Alice down the rabbit hole, but down into the strange atmospheres and the heavy and infinite dimensions of inside? And, really, isn’t there some part of me that, in sheer and pure perversity, just hates my bed, hates my books, hates my job; enough to just fall back, eyes closed, and let the deep swallow me?

Of course.

But, before I make such a hasty plunge, I remind myself: there are other parts of me– many other parts. And there is always that Henderson voice, saying I want! I want! I want! until it becomes my pulse, my heart’s rhythm, and therefore my raison d’etre. And that demands a certain… mobility: an atmosphere of gaseous potential, all light and unrestricting and capable of filling the lungs with breath, which can become words or laughter or love– yes, love, as Mark Strand says: “When I say that I love you, it is my breath that I send”.

So I come inside, turn on the lamps, light the candles of life again– which, I see with a smile, in turn creates their own shadows. And I pick up my book– it is a good book– and start to read, and with renewed pleasure at that; for I can see this book’s words, they were once someone’s breath.