Stitch

The shallow bay, rippling earlobe of the 1000-foot-deep lake, pulled on itself like a clue in charades, tugged like boats in their slips. It scooped the quietest decibel out of midnight sky and eased it toward another darkness, where the brain waited to translate. At the bottom of the lake lived 100-year-old sturgeon hovering over broken tackle and aluminum cans, two dozen pairs of lovers, a lost F-9 jet. At the bottom of the brain, all these things listened to radio music streaming from the next galaxy.

The trees never spoke, actually. The car drove straight through their lives, what might have been the richest of conversations, but wind did all the talking around their surfaces, and over the curve of hood, and along the knife edge of window the man had rolled down just enough to hear the world’s velocity in its own language.

Whatever repose existed, falling rock always sought another, down the cliffside, in and out of the grassy borrow pit, across the shoulder, into the lane of traffic. All of this when no one was looking.

Just outside the city, night turned orange, orange as the light behind his eyelids on the brightest day at the beach. In the town square, the man turned a slow circle until he came back finally to where he began. In the movie inside his head at that exact moment, one of two women came into view as he finished. If he made another circle, the other waited at the end. He loved these two equally once, on water, in woods, over the long highway that took him anywhere, dodging the fallen rock. Now they live as compass points, single degrees of imagined reunion, points on a circle inside a square, breathing their orange air.

The morning he died throbbed in his ears until suddenly it was noon. Inside his chest, desert animals came out of hiding to drink. His eye, to the loved one, looked like a blue ring laid over an immaculate beach where, just last night, it had rained.

Along the banks of the estuary at that same moment, a plover turned its ear to the sand, listening for tiny crabs. The trickle of water, what was left of the rush down the mountains, walked quietly toward the crash of waves. A human being tried to listen to this. Not even the bird heard the whisk of thread as it was pulled from whatever had stitched the man to earth.