I carry this shadow within me like a senseless newborn animal clinging greedily
to its mother’s milk, and yet I despise it and would like to cast it away,
and watch it bleating softly into the receding night, like an infant that
is dying. I wish to travel, I enjoy the idea of it, I wish I could travel
with my house and my heavy redwood wardrobe and these fine china teacups that
are as thin and fragile as glass, as my own eyes that look back at me through
their myriad reflections. I wish it were not me traveling but my body, this
inconsequential husk, and then my thoughts would be free to remain in one
place forever. Sapling, take root! I have spent eons with you, rooted to our
common destiny, quivering under this selfsame silt and topsoil. I am fertile,
I grow under compost. Friend of mine, won’t you come and decay with me? It
is a sweet decay, I feel my senses going, I feel my body frozen into this
land, this earth. Soon it will be my soul that shall go silent into the night,
and it will be this body that plants a new tune, a new morrow, sweet morrow,
look at me in all my shades of growing and decaying -
