In the story you and I stand together and watch nets lift from landscapes, holding dark clouds, centuries, weather satellites, fish, shells, birds, bees, twigs and drums. They seep with song, humming, buzzing, howling. Static, silence heresy. They float around the room.  The nets are made of strands of all of our hair tied together end to end, connecting all of our backyards.

We wander into quarries that contain ladders made of the softest rock and the softest metal, limestone and pure iron. Each time one of us climbs around, the rungs mold the weight of our hands and feet into it’s surface, our set after set of our hands and feet. Limestone and pure iron, clay that passes as other, soft that passes as hard, holding and molding the habits of our hands and feet. In this place we can always see where we all have been.

The smoke tree I used to lie under is no longer there. Its tree houses and clouds of perennial castles exist now only in my memory.  Maybe it only did to begin with. But I still hear its spiny fingers typing storied songs and I still hear it whisper to me when I ask it which direction to walk. I still hear its concert halls, the kings sound like coins dropping, each a begging musician with swarms of queen bees surrounding them. And in this place where you and I stand, we open our mouths to speak but there are no more words, not now, not anymore.

We are not their size.

All things
are too small
to hold me,
I am so vast

In the Infinite
I reach
for the Uncreated

I have
touched it,
it undoes me
wider than wide

Everything else
is too narrow

You know this well,
you who are also there

– Hadewijch of Antwerp