THE GAME IS SET AND THESE ARE THE CONDITIONS

He said: 'You know the last scene in the movie Fight Club? When the set charges go off in the night and the cleared financial towers drop into the darkening city where the night sky is newly able to be seen for the first time in decades? That is the promised land to me. That is the promised land.'

To what
Should we liken you, autumn's taper
Fireweed
Flourishing upon scarified ground
Upon which we ought
Remove our shoes to stand?

"It does not do to approach the sacred without care. Perhaps I brought to bear too much care, as it took me a lifetime of listening to music to seriously pick up an instrument and start to learn to play."

Sounds themselves---their texture, and to the quieted ear, not well-used to the nattering of radio and TV, their implicit passionate intensity---bespeak of the sacred, are themselves sacred voices. I know that I am most right in the head as I go along when I am listening and I am hearing.

The scrape of the sagging outer door in going outside to get a sledload of firewood... the jingling arpeggio of the windchimes on the porch as the breeze thrown in the wake of my passage moves them... the crunch, crunch, crunch of boots on the hard subzero snow as I carry the empty sled down the short trail toward the firewood ricks... the song of a sled dog from the yard next door... the hoo-call of a Great Horned Owl... the click of the snaps as I fasten my coat to the collar in the deep cold...The whoozing hum of one or two vehicles on the highway passing by, after which the no-sound of the road silence once the vehicles have gone out of earshot... The drum-like thump of the splits and small rounds as I load them into the orange plastic toboggan... The rustlely scraping sound of the full sled sliding on the packed snow of the trail on the way back toward the house...

"I have just come inside and have said to you, 'I don't know how to be, anymore, but I know that you'll always be there. It is a daily comfort wherever I go to know you are in the world and are there.' You just stand there looking at me with an expression of profound puzzlement on your face, even shock. Finally, you speak. "Where have you been? Where'd you go? You can't just vanish for days without saying anything to anyone!'

YOUR TURN.

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