THE OTHER, A CLOUD OF FEATHERS:

Legs locked in unforeseeable boundaries, spreading lightly into themselves, he was a pooling of skin. Gliding long and down, downwards, draping the sheets, curtaining the bed, rows and ribbons and seams. Joints dusty and rigid underneath the layers, the drowning weight of uselessness. His body now in cold ungrowing.

Crows dripped black into his head, daylong, weeping the naked dark of new moons. The skein of skies. Tangled and untangling in the square of leafless trees and winter sun. A window out. Crows moving and removing in blinks, the stutter of his tongue. Thatching his face in new screens, shades, the unpiloted movements of black and birds.

Slates in the fencing give way to endless unsolved ground, fruited in gray limbs and endings. Nautical clouds revealing and replacing, covering and uncovering in grasps. His sheets stained and white, the bed a collection of songs, corners dull and spilling. Dusk forever hanging in the peaks of walls meeting walls. And the feel of an unseen measure centering on his chest. The heft of the Other.

Holding his fingers out to the bedside, attempting touch, him disappearing into the Other. His fingers and their bones dropping into the Other, doubling and imitating, dissipating. Him pushing up, up, until his arm is consumed in the depth of the Other. Holding steady and then pulling it slowly and out again, to re-reveal himself and his veins. Him, retuned into the gray of in-between fencing, the skies in spaces of blackened wings.

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