The Corduroy Mtn.


& (eleven)
J.A. Tyler


The Other watches from a space across, from over the wooden floor, from above the world. The Other, in this room, in this expanse of walls, listening to the unbreathing of a man, dying. This man, dying.

The window, silled and sick, a pocket to the outside, showing gray from four corners, trees lacking leaves, wind or no wind, as the day steeps, turning the air to tea. This outside, where the man lived, where the man, this man who is dying, where he used to exist. But he is a bed now. He is unbreathing. He can amount to nothing. He is dying.

And the Other is watching the window above his unmoving chest, seeing the sun fade, bruising the clouds, puncturing the lung of winds, letting the cold air in.

The window and the Other, facing each other, watching each other, waiting for the right moment to speak. They don't speak. No words happen. No language fits. No sentences to melt in the right drooling directions. They stare and unbecome. There is nothing for them to do. Move forward. Keep watching. This man, dying. This Other and a window to the world.

&

Going back. To the man working with his hands. This man, the one dying, the way his fingers prowled wood, lined the curled edges of logs and heaps. Cedar or a drift. Pieces of a forest from over the foothills, into the mountains, a place he is seldom or infrequently. Him now, in the lateness of a dying day, living in a gray and wintering earth. But then, this same man, plucking the wooden air, dancing with the branches of a fallen tree.

This man, making a chest. Opening his own chest and placing his heart inside. Feeling hollow, without a heart, but the chest glows and emanates. The chest becomes an echo. The chest takes the punch out of life, the way he is dying, or will die, or is thinking of the end, the conclusion, the resolution. He has no resolution. He makes a chest from the trunk of a cedar. The limbs hugging his heart, placed on a velvet lining. This man, his life in a box. Dying.

But he was a man making things, creating from another, not the Other, but the world, the tripped down statues of timber. He was hands that crept back and across those dead trees, burrowing in their insides, making them into everlasting. And him, this man, never everlasting, unliving in fact. His heart back to his own chest. The echo an echo now of his lack of breath.

&

The girl, flying, remembers well the cedar chest, its echo, his heart pounding on the inside.

&

This will be the story of how this girl, flying, knew this man, and his dying, and the echo of his heart. This story will be that kind of a story. This will be the story of them. How they separate and connect, how the air in between becomes more and more, how the structure of the world so often collapses. This will be the story of that, in some way or another, somehow.



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Added to The Corduroy Mtn. on November the sixth in the year two thousand and eight.