It is late night and in his hand Gao’s Soul Mountain is cradled, a phantasmal weave of nightmares, fables, dialogues and those old memories that he rather not recall. He nevertheless presses on. This perseverance is to develop a taste for fire, to be the observer of the crucible in which one might be cooking in. All that talk, that voice in particular, appears surreal now and not quite false. Is it then the passing of time that amplifies the hidden false notes and brings their frequencies into the auditory range of one’s clear eyed judgment?

The untruths, not lies because lies require a studied deliberateness, piled at the door like snowdrifts and when the time came to leave, he had to dig through those words, like a sniveling dog, to get back to the surface. He had to lick each word he wrote with his tongue. First was the word love as was the last, with that sharp sound, eeee, now quite blunted with too much overuse. It now lays in the morgue of words, with a fate of being bloated, useless, meaningless, a bone with the marrow sucked out.

…

The moon, last night eclipsed, now exhales occasionally, white plumes (or are they clouds?) that make it fall away from sight. Last week’s rain meanwhile, compacted the golden brown leaves, thumbprints of a summer sun, into another fraction of an inch of hummus; that thin layer from which everything powerful, the oaks, the hemlocks and the maples, spring forth. Death has to be danced by Nataraja, god ringed by flame, for Brahma to create. Time is cyclical.