Mapmakers' Dreams

“done” while listening to Bloch’s 1st Piano-Quintet




There are sounds which come from other worlds. There are winds that blow from under the earth, where time does not go. Wishes hurt your skin. Singing bends your outward soul into blissful pretzel-shapes. Saturn rings its way around the sun, seeking its own starlight within fractions of birth which are done by multiplications of split-times-tables from every classroom placated by juicy, downtrodden minds of men (and such) from the very first. These drank deeply from the rivers of mystery and set up shop at the top of the galaxies, before there was the need for hope. Before the glass of misery was fired by every lidded gaze that fell on all the whithering shapes of moon-minded, forgetting beings stuck out here in this outer realm of yellow and red.

These wisps of roaming shape cloud down from air’s vestibules above the space of scent, where eyes cannot even go, and risk their way down into the breaking ground until the upward furnace relishes their reliquaries in the blue upper continents of Canada and the other northern lands. Where the sky is brittle and a fractured blue, shaving the light from the sky in thin swatches a flower could not even wrap around itself like a blanket. And all the people turned, as one, into this condensation of mirrors, and sylphed their lidden stares into all the upward stairs facing the hillsides of Norway and Finland and Canada and Greenland and the arctic ocean, roaming with ice, taking time prisoner within their complicated sisters of southern ambition and pride. The grass grows greener here, but with an elfin lightness that cannot be breached by the land of the sun-away. The sky floats above Easter.

The bastard tribes from out of Carolina bring with them all the mixtures of bright red living hatred and war, sending it on the land in growths far from the levels of freedom which they want at heart, far from the laughing mouths of the always-eating universe. This company brings down from without its particular haze of forgetting, stirred into a soup by directionless passion and eddying anger, but what is this, a ship from the east? It catches the light like a cut in the fabric of time, and sits on the water, idly watching the silly wars of men that do their own colors to the water and lead into unknown territories better off not smelled. The blood of birds drifts down out of the zoning sky, and the water of all the fishes’ blood smears into even all the smiling smurfs let out of their cages this side of the ancient battling grounds raised by Paradise before even a word was spoken. And exotic birds trail the sky, falling over each other in their race to own the flotsam and frothing jetsam left by the cracking pirates of all the owned lands which are free before everyone’s birth. Those tribes dance out the night into spots that are so bright and level and spiked with dark that they cannot even be thought about by the Carolina bastards without their eyes bleeding into the ground over all those northern countries. And the sailing ships continue to rise, and the birds continue to fall, north and left and hither and thither, until all meet at one place neither sky nor ground, and form a new and powerful, enigmatic entity previously unshared by the sun, whose home this is. And, strangely, there is gladness in the air; the scents of barley and hay, of earth-wood and oaken cabinets, of feathers and pine and the mists of sea, drift to level down, lighting all into shapes heretofore unthought-of except by the pearliest of precision-mapmakers’ dreams, when they sleep apart from their creations and in that space untouched by direction and lived by the alabaster mystery done up in ribbons and not, all at once, for the sky has turned white and I can see forever.

And there are birds upon birds, sanctifying the sky. The dome has been breached, but by love. This sound comes from under the earth, under the whole earth, itself, which has no top or bottom, which is only round, only round, spinning its green-edged song louder and quieter all at once.

I listen with all my ear of listening-heart, this story of love’s own breach of time. It has sanctified the wilderness, loving it to be as wild as the universe, itself, the mad, endlessly-creating-and-destroying One that can never not include every seeming-single one of us. My hands are finally happy: the map has been folded. I listen to the sky unfold. My heart skips no beats, at last, but can be heard to resemble the flapping of wings.