Downloadable PDF: Chapter 6
It gathers – not the mist, but the momentum.
I move on down the sloping side, the slight hill to the river, where a straggler, struggling, wont to waiting, lets slip its dream – recuperation – into the wake that moves it, no longer moved through in return. Larger than an oared pilot boat, it’s yet small alongside many others, and it leans into the land and me; we observe up close.
There, where the mast splits, splintering, and the wind wears, weathering the wood, perches a pool of amber made solid as a globe, encasing in a bug and encasing out time – the cascades of a frozen river. The life, suspended, lives nonetheless inside, its mind in the past, its present; my mind in the present, my past.
The insect’s ink and the page is amber; I touch the globe and leave it living.
william altoft 