I crawled out of angry dreams and found myself in the same bed where the long sandy hair had once fallen and the pale blue, winter-sky eyes had once flickered, their gaze moving through me like a tide, eroding my insides, drawing me out into the ocean grain by grain. There was no sandy hair, no wintry eyes this go-round. There was only my own dark matted curls framing my own tired, throbbing orbs of blood and nerve and color. I stepped out onto the porch, into the white fog that musters its strength here after rainy nights, in the trough of two looming hills where the duplex stands like a crumbling house of cards—the same porch where the blonde strands whipped while turning away and the backpack bulged and the hiking boots gripped the asphalt at the beginning of a long, muddy hike into nowhere.

I shook the mesh-iron chair and watched the droplets clatter across the stone deck. I sat with my coffee and looked out over the wall, down into the woods where the stream rolls on, the same stream that flooded over the bridge after days of rain and we waded across with our jeans rolled up to our knees and bottles of liquor in hand. The same stream that rolls under the bridge and past the trees where that woman told me she had carved the name of her lover when she was fourteen.

Now I listen to the orchestrated moans of the band she brought me to, the melancholy flame of a grating violin held in the arms of a heartbroken drunkard like the child he might have had by his dearly beloved. She told me of the days when she lived alone, smoking marijuana and cigarettes and drinking heavily in the dumpy basement apartment in the back of the antique store, listening to this music, left behind by her parents and her friends. I stand on the carpeted floor running through contrived exercises with the red-handled axe, pulling it to my chest on the upturn of a squat, the axe that brought us together, that I used to split wood in the falling snow with a cigarette clutched between my lips, moist flannel clinging to my skin, the taste of beer on my palate. The song she gave me, so strong, gothic, and sad, like the musculature of a dying horse. And the banjo player that lived across the river from her house when she was a child, the twang of each note drifting across in the evenings, bringing a smile to her face that was blissful surface to the ineffable profound. How she wanted to thank the mysterious artist, the musician who played only for the air, for finding a pair of ears he would never know about, two young organs that would ingest the chosen tones but never taste the burly voice of the chooser.

Note the way memories move, the transference of her story into my subconscious: the story of her traveling companion, the hurtling locomotive, steaming along beside her through the night for a thousand weary miles before veering from the parallel and away into the dark, blaring its whistle in what could only be a gesture of fond farewell. It is the dream substance of another seeping into my own, taking on a new form, crawling into fresh nooks, growing.

Note the way they twine and untwine themselves, like the newborn snake, four inches long and thin as an earthworm, minute scales the purest, brightest green nature can conjure, wrapping itself amiably around my forefinger, playfully nibbling at the skin, before sliding off into the grass, into invisibility, into memory. Into those same tunnels of gray matter where the hungry raccoon is still alive, there on the moist earth, just before the rifle barked and spat two bullets into its gut, and the thing squealed and spat blood, convulsing into a ball of fur and fluid and needle-sharp claws.

And there was the little girl on the sterile white sheets. Her eyes were closed, welded shut with yellow discharge. Her face was motionless, moon-pale and contorted. But all the bitter sadness, all the vain anger and curses and prayers it would never again express flowed in great auras of feeling from the face of her mother, who leaned over the bed and looked into those pus-congested eyelids as she had done sleeplessly for days. There was the strange elation when she passed away: Atlas watching the sky lift off his shoulders, ready to hold itself up again.

I moved through the fog and climbed the hill one step at a time, looking down into the ground, focusing my eyes as if on something distant, so that the dew-gilded grass blades slicing the dirt from my boots were lost in the blur, and some cold mirror lurched into focus.