Kayak

SHARD TWENTY-FIVE [KAYAK] The curtain falls at last upon the tale of wondrous beings grown; demolished; and reclaimed by that-which-plays-with,-then-discards. It may have seemed the beasts' time was wasted, but Time produces many children and surrenders them in turn. The children are completely unaware of how it works – of how these parents have arranged it all. The beasts had disremembered whom they'd been before, and there is subtle play in this. Recall how they carried themselves throughout their common fate: as heroes trudging on. The layered thing that’s held in open hands or waits upon the shelf, this Butterfly of still-winged book you scan from left to right, is the only source of this conceit. Forswear the research you might otherwise pursue, the years of toil and labor spent in seeking signs concerning any part of this account. No shards of tall amphorae depict the intertwining forms of those confined in jail or placed in brutal strife of battle with a host of blameless foes. No volumes will corroborate the lay recorded here; none wait upon the shelves in long forgotten rooms. Behold, an only child. So come, unfold those arms, embrace this song, the slowly-ripened fruit of a walking Tree, that bloomed from bud of thought, was tended, pressed between the leaves of other, brother Trees, and spread across a thousand unknown fields, to keep that subtle death at bay. We’ve gone together (you and I) for quite a while; If you have read this story I am glad – whatever your reception, here it is: a child of words, as others have delivered. Now spreading mists and muffled sounds replace the sound of speech. But from the nascent void come queries still insistent: Why were the beasts saved? What changed them? Questions have an answer. A Cloud of dust that drifts and slowly turns defeats the shade of nothingness. The Cloud felt lonely once; it craved adventure, wished to hide and seek. It blew itself to bits

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so as to quench its everlasting thirst for stories and emotions. The get of that explosion may opine that World cannot display compassion; even so, this World of ours is child of Cloud. However harsh it may at times appear, this Cloud is grateful; will sustain us; shares a tool with which we all become the actors and the characters in a wordless tale. The love within us makes us each a knight upon a field, for that is how the Cloud, though scattered, harvests. It observed and understood the termites, and changed the dead as the sea accepts returning waves.

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