a place to rest one's head

~ 

He carried Ulysses to the other side of the world and back again, unread.

He starts twice, turning a few pages only before standstill; a mirror, a bowl, a razor, no more. Each eve thereafter he places the book carefully under his head like a Japanese sleeping block, to lull in the forest and wait for sleep. Embalmed in the elsewhere night. Night belonging in a book. Somewhere in a book he once read, in the many nights of books. With hands clasped to chest, tighter than imagined, he hunts frayed words with which to render the darkness familiar.

A word to splice the creaking ship's mast to the birch's hawsered bow. A word to tether the screeching Thunderbird to the mountain top when it came circling overhead, talons raking brimstone sea, for sailor and whale alike. Word with which to tie hood and jess. The missing word for the wind he imagines only through halibut eyes, from deep amongst the kelp.

Later he hears Siberian vagabonds pass bye the bye, whorling iced expletives at painted shutters and doors as they go. Swaying left, then right, drunk and belligerent, they stop suddenly, puzzling for a moment at a familiar refrain heard behind. A gently belling song embalming the elsewhere night. A woman's voice? She passes nearby. Trailing a crooked finger through the canopy, and with gossiping whisper she entices them onwards, carousing away down the valley, to the old people Tseax buried with fire... those who wait for news of the sea each night. 

quieter, then quieter still...

The ship returns to transcribing the tide.

He hears a rat? or bigger? and it's gleeful companion bickering once more over gruel or seed.

and when sleep finally comes, it comes as a wordless tempest.

~