(no subject)

In 1970 new technologies became available enabling us to build further upslope, on the terrace that had been set up to block rockslides. The few giant trees had been cleared long before but had been replaced by significant younger growth. We chased one another over and around these runs of toy or paper forest. We went sideways as much as forwards, less after one another than before ourselves. We spilled across our soft new rug. Camilla caught me by the belt, pitched me down-forward, sat victorious on my backside. We shared her last cigarette while the others panted back and fell about us like a tidegrant of starfish. The rules were hashed out right there in the 3 p.m. clearing. By late summer four pregnancies were in progress, and I wasn't alone in feeling the whole progression pregnant with ensuings. Our homes were low, the walkways strings of stones, but they too were workers, not just works. I insisted all walls toward the cliff must be chiefly glass. Even before we could greet one another we would meet the work of the morning. Would look down the steps that had led to us. They were steps we had literally climbed, bringing news and materials, but also reminded that this step was us, not just ours. We had fallen upwards and pooled here to conspire against deeper skies.

Here I might be expected to record our setbacks. I won't. That some occurred you'll have already guessed. Would you even believe me if I said there were none? To dwell on the shadow, or the fact that others do, is nothing but that shadow's extension. It's a rolling down great tracts of ascent, as though the point of all of this had been to feel how small and soft we are, over and over, pebble and thistle and clod. It's a parody of what we do, our famous race with gravity. The scream screamed into the whirlwind doubles back not to reinforce itself but knock out the wind of the screamer. Know only what you need to know: that that which drags us down is more we pull up with us.

A fortune-teller told my father I would never set foot on the mountaintop. I know it. This is my mountaintop. The cry of that completion is my own as much as that yet unborn crier's. It is as cold in my lungs as in his. Or hers - they tell me it will all be women then, that only they could bear that air. But that air is this. I touch its hem, spin in among its folds. Gently as it breathes this morning I feel up where it goes. They say it thins out as it grows cold so as to not fall frozen, but in my dream it becomes the coldest, clearest water, its stillness rippled only enough to prove it is there, to invite the endless upward swim of those come purified of yielding.