Where only the wind goes

Cracking open an egg, mixing the pigments and oils until a painting, once conceived in dreams, nips a hole in its shell and breathes in, at once, the first dawn light. Eggshell the clouds scattered over the heavens, yolk the horizon where the denizens of the heavens dwell, whites running over these peaks. Four compass directions from which to choose, and I chose up, higher, where the air thins and silent doldrum-air thrums serenely in my ears, alternating with the swift jet breeze which with freezing chills streams cold fire into my bones. In this icy world, my bones are merely stacked stalagmites shivering up from the powdered floor, icicles the mountain absorbs, glacially slow, into its own.

Here, the world's at peace; no fight bloodies these chill lands, though it is for such high places we struggle, and bravely die - for such a serenity. The prevailing winds subsist as I subside into the mists that run down this infinite slope into nowhere, quick as an osprey. This mountain's an orca of our countryside, breaching, beautiful, frightening in scale.

Have you seen the ice, the frozen lakes, the puzzles of cracked mirrors sitting in our streets? People walking over and under the mirrored nature-glass - which are we? Is this the reflection of the other world, the shadows of above, or are both worlds too frenetic to notice that, looking down, you can share a smile with one like yourself, only shattered into a thousand tiny fissures, and remember we were born, first, from warmth into cold, and we ache for the warmth again. But not I. I fell through that fish-eye lens, that hole between our worlds. Nothing remains in my reflection save a cloudy sky, and that is mine in each land - the silver-grey everlasting.

Some losses were born into the lines on my thumbs and fingertips.

Where only the wind goes, I have followed,

and I know that none save one may meet me here

There are whispers of whispers of names in the wind

The owl calls one, the thrush another, sola
though each snowflake is a kiss hardly given

unique as the next, as the next,

as the next falls and I give in

to a susurrus of surrender unnoticed

in the blizzard - and a triumphal entrance

I wave my palms and the sky falls

it is love, it is love I ascend