A High Place

A high place in a dry country. No ghosts live here. No one has ever come here, even to die. Below the mesa, the marbled hills come to a sudden stop, like the toes of lions on a plinth. A pale violet sky kisses into lilac, and then dissolves into ice-blue above the ridge, in this place that has never seen violets or lilacs, and never will.

I say I come here to think, but of course I do what people always do when they set out to think. I remember, and I imagine.

A tumble of rapid images. I could have done this, and I could have done that. I should have known, I should have ignored -- and on it goes, the thin sad piping of a thread of mind that can't realize its irrelevence. If this were to be solved by thinking (remembering, imagining) it would have been solved long ago.

No devil comes to tempt me. No angel brings me tidings.

I crouch and find three stones to set together. A fourth to rest on top. A monument to -- what? You, I suppose.

Is there even anything to solve? To look for a solution is to assume so many things. To assume a problem. To assume progression. To assume agency. Now, now I really am thinking, and I think -- all those assumptions are wrong.

There are none of those things. There is nothing but the burning, nothing but the welding torch of love.