Drenched in darkness. Driplets of water sinking across smooth flesh and scraggly hair, leaving long lines on a long face. Scraping of rough hands against thighs, the recupping of tap water, a shaking off of sleep (young ancient at a spring in the night, shedding off furs and seeking renewal, looking to be reborn in the indescribable movement and change of a storm) Whites of identical eyes staring from across the tap and random flashes revealing a strange face, unmasked and naked against the black of the bathroom.

The strange man in the mirror looks back insolently, animatedly. What are you looking at. Not much. (smile)

The night breeze is cold and fresh. The scent of rain fills my nose and taste of rushing air fills my mouth. Gusts are pouring in through the window, sweeping across my skin and bringing my temperature to a state of equilibrium with the night. (outside, spirits released from chains blow absentmindedly in the endless, unseeable transparency of black, sighs of relief carried by wind are heard) Great drops of rain splash with passion against the windsill, bouncing through a screen mesh and entering as unceasing mist.

The mirrorman seems less strange. I recognize the movements and thoughts behind dark eyes as my own. Reflected clearly in the glass is me, a body and mind melded, with no signs of seams. Each movement made is in the present, the suffocating powers of past and future have no dominion; each leaf blown from its tree is blown free, carrying only the memory of the fond branch from which they were taken, and no disposition toward the place they will fall.

I cup my wrist in my hand and feel the pulsating rhythm with two callused fingers, see the narrow of the labyrinth of blue. (blue, like the color of the sky that evening after the sun fell from its high point and a blue dusk slipped off the earth for its daily coup of the dry and stable sun, as the songs of sacadias rose to meet its ascension) God, these veins are the same color as the twilightcurtain that came this evening to cover the splatter of red and yellow that soaked the sky. And outside the rain is falling.

And here I am. Here and over the tap. In reflection, my hair, black and solid, hangs in waves across my eyes. The scent of woodsmoke in my hair and under my nails and staining goldend skin. It smells thick and sweet, but I'd rather be the wild rain. Moving my fingers from my veins, I grasp my wrist and move across my forearms, feeling the prickling of sunbleached hairs. Movements of flesh and the sinewy muscle underneath; I have recollections of deer in the fields, their hides wet, muscle rippling. Body stretches tall, as fingers feel hard ribs under skin. Hardy hands pushing against chest, feel reverberations where greater things beat. (thump, thump, thump). This proves it. I'm alive.

And the smell of the storm, so thick in the air. How I long to step from beside the hearth. Oh, god, to lay in the field somewhere in damp grass with the sane ramblings of trees surrounding me. To listen with wonder at what’s said, as the storm breaks through the pit of the Earth. See the fading of stars and moonlitclouds to black masses occasionally brightened by sparks of sudden and intense illumination.
A burst of desire rushes through long legs and carries me through the hall and out the screen door, into the damp grass and air. The sky so strange, almost orange, burning with something that cannot be easily described. The trees seen clearly, their trucks steady and arms dancing intensely, instep with the flow of the storm. (crack, craaaack, booom)
Rain rolling over soaking shoulders, ushering me into the night. I'm moldable as mud. Body as sturdy and frantic as trembling trees in gale. Oh, and the smell the whole of the earth in each gust, as the world bursts and settles. (ripping up plants from anchoring roots, scouring them over the earth) My backyard is alien, an echo of a half-remembered dream. And the storm is swelling. In a bubble over the sky, lightning whips and flashes. A tree burning, a burst of red, and flame unhampered by rain. Bursts of white flashing off leaves. (crack, Craaack, BOOOOOM. Fans twirl to a slow, a stray TV fades to black)
I hear sounds of family rumbling in their beds, awakening into a new world. I step back inside. Light flashes again and I see a shadowman against the woodpaneled wall. Tall and broad, standing stable and leaning forward against a violent backdrop. (Silhouette of a Greek statue carved from flesh, an incarnation of a halfbreed deity; a young hero from myth, who, with natural grace and ease conquers demons in a rush of blood and fury). I turn to face it and it turns too and melds into me.
Is it really me? So, at ease and sloping, standing soaking, after such a long drought of desperation? So, different from when I was hopeless again, fallen to a deeper depth than usual. Living in one dank instant, stuck in a still body with eyes that were blind and boiling tar pits, sinking deep in my parchment skull. Dreamless nights spent like a bug over a great void, sleep fractured by worries over oncoming deaths of everyone I care about and every sad stranger I’ve met. (A mind wandering aimlessly in vast plains of grey. The only variation, - a nightly fall to complete lightlessness, as the sun sank and darkness followed to strangle him in his sleep. And in the heart of the worst nights, the unflinching constants of sleeplessness and knowledge that he was helpless to save anyone from fate, would turn him mad with grief and he’d fall to the floor, staring blankly, or muttering imagined songsphrases, like “Everyday I become Less defined” or “life’s just my knife’)
Sounds of someone stepping in an adjacent room, a beam of a flashlight as my sister enters the livingroom.
“Powers out. Did see how everything lit up with the last? The sky looked yellow.”
“Looked orange to me, it was neat, though.”
“Why are you so wet?”
(smiling) “Because it’s raining.”
“Okay...” (watching the storm) “I’m going to sleep, I got scheduled for work early.”
(plooooosh, phlooosh, crack, ect)
And the orange of the sky turns slowly to red as I stand their alone, filling, like the empty space of my mind, with dread. The strangeness of the sky is the same color that covered my eyes several weeks ago when a fever made me delirious and instigated the recent fall into numbness. A spider, sneaking across a cut log, discreetly bit the pale underside of my arm. Several days later, I awoke to grotesque swelling and sweatsoaked sheet. (the sweat that surrounded him felt as oily as the holy water he’d last felt at baptism. Before slipping out of sense, he laughed and decided that someone was out to screw him and that his life was one big, boring Big Sur. And he dreamed dreams of vultures picking at his flesh as he scoured a vast desert, until he stumbled face down onto a pit of conical shell and trilobite fossils and woke with start. Deciding assuredly that he was about to die, he remembered how his faithful, old dog made sure that she died outside, facing east, away from the new day and back at the old. He, too, could think of noway better. Crawling down the shaking hallway, he passed a blacksteel image depicting some ancient, hideous machine and a painting of a snow-covered and indifferent landscape, until he finally reached the porch. He sat trying to remember which way was east, and turned to the woodpaneled wall of the house where old family farming equipment was nailed. Seeing a sickle and sythe, he laughed insanely until he collapsed and woke up sane and unreachable)
That bite and the fever spoke to me of comic indifference and emptiness. It came as a slap in the face after the week before when, while fishing on a lake under a mysterious formation of clearblue clouds, I thought long about finding hope despite the world, and the importance of accepting the reality of perception. I decided to live life as I choose to live it and live it well. What I thought was not bad, though often nonsensical and too sure of its uncertainty, but I scorned in all in the redness of my nihilism, even though the lake provided as equally powerful and imperfect view of the world as my nightmare. (he was on the water, in the birch, and saw branches touching twin branches in the reflection world, continuing on forever. Maybe not in reality, but it looked that way and he decided he could put his trust in nothing else. Thinking, he wondered that if the only thing that was certain was his thinking affirmed his existence, maybe his personnel view of the world was the only way he could view it. When he dreamt, the ground he dreamt on seemed real and when he woke he woke into a world of equal reality and confusion. He decided that reality is not a rock that, warped, we see falsely through our eyes; perception of an observer is everything because an observer is the only thing that can give rock meaning and name. He examined the movements of green leaves and wondered about the forces that gave them the strength to travel on windless waters. He paddled past green reflections of Asian looking willows, and past waterbugs twisting like triremes on a distant sea. Skeletons of trees, half sunken, and snakes, were passed, too, with equal ease. He thought about when he was younger and tried to look into the face of the universe. It scared his eyes and what he glimpsed was enormous and either empty or the opposite. Navigating it seemed impossible and daunting. It was filled with endless ways to find a life or to mess yourself up beyond belief. On the water he decided he’d find a way to justify life that would never go away. He’d live independently and find an amorphous and unclear God in the lines of faces he loved and in a flock of geese dashing with purpose past a bursting, bloodied sky.)

But, deliriums and decisions on lakes, don’t need to be deeply reflected on now. They are just parts of a cycle. The sun falls hard on the water, and suddenly all that is left of an ocean is desert and dead stumps, until rain falls, filling it again. The rain and the change from one thing to the other is singular and more incredible than either environment, its arrival just cannot be predicted. And, when it’s over, everything rises, the same, but different.
Now the storm is whipping across the hills, it blows all the parts of the earth in turbulent circles until I can only feel it spinning the Earth on its oval axis and mixing my breath with the breath of all other wandering creatures. This storm has been a long time coming. I realized, in the longlight hours of the day, when I felt the winds pick up, going through trees with a loud whoosh, as the branches bobbled and the leaves revealed their white underbellies and clashed against other leaves (making a noise, which, in spirit, was not unlike the beating of a drum in preparation for a wild and unified ritual of the deepest meaning) And I smiled lightly and made up phrases and sang to myself “I long for a storm, To tear up the world, I don’t know why, But them black clouds get me high”. And the clouds were coming in, with great darkblue blotches, and bringing to my bones the sensation of static and oncoming rain. And wanting to be part of weather, I removed my shoes and walked lightly to my grandfather’s old apple tree, to run blotchy and browning leaves through my fingers before picking up a green, imperfect fruit and crushing, letting the juice run down my hand. I brought it to my nose and inhaled deeply (like he used when he was five, and like he used to inhale the sickening glue in a washcloth when he was thirteen and hated the touch of the world) and it smelled like oncoming fall and it smelled like passing summer, but mostly I felt in it the great rushing of life.