The Path and The Dark Shed

You're walking down the long path to the dark shed. Against the darkness, you read a story of snow. It's a story without sound; one you're convinced will reveal the greatness of the dark shed; will illuminate it in the midst of its darkness; will bring you to its door. You're walking forward. You're looking ahead; you're looking. After a time, you grow sad, knowing the dark shed has somehow, once again, managed to move beyond your range of sight. Don't keep looking. The dark shed is at the beginning of the path.

You never felt the snow disappear, felt the dust reappear. The dust is the quiet spreading down the path with its fringes of moss; with its bed of shadow, darkness, light, moisture and all that has flowed from the open dark door of the shed; with its reach, where the dark shed rests after it moves. 

The moss under darkness is pulling the darkness away, as if the darkness were a silt pile on a blanket of mold. You'll stand on the path; watch the darkness grow smaller as it's drawn away. You'll see, a ways down the path, the lost shed, where, as you know, the lost things cluster. But the darkness will already have been pulled through the shed. Far beyond the range of your vision, it will have come to the end of movement, where there's loss and no place for loss. Looking for place and finding none, darkness will fear and fear again.

How do buttons, cut loose, sense lost holes? Even you, viewing the scene squarely from the corners of your eyes, see only the merest hairthin hint of hole. How then does an unbound button swing ever closer to a hole, to what is lost inside and outside the hole, to the loss where each part of the hole is loss, to the lost darkness hidden in the hole — a loss whole and dark even in the bright dust of the path? Buttons, bumps pockmark the path with lost things poised to roll into darkness, to cluster there. Flustered, the buttons bunch together and raise a clatter. But not in order to clatter. They seek everything lost in the clatter.

The card is your livelihood. As you look over the card, inspect it, you tilt it. Your livelihood slides off. The card is slate, moist; you can feel its slickness and sense, with a gentle rub of your thumb, the easy departure of the card's merit, of your merit. The card is a path whose travelers are always falling into a hole on a path.

The flaps open the heart. The darkness pours in; its breath fills the heart; moves the heart. Unaccustomed to this movement, the heart listens. Its new dark breath sounds like a whisper, a frightened whisper.


The thunder is proud but has no other flaws. It races through destruction with the broad penetration of innocence, its fire the happiness that follows the loss of the forgetting of the loss.