__I honored her struggle; it was so very important to me, due to a similar situation that occurred in my very immediate family. I tried to think as she might have thought, and thus, this short view was written in 1985, just prior Karen Ann Quinlin's  final breath. Now I repeat it as haibun.


__Fifteen years I've looked out of my window, I, the sentry of mortality... watching and listening, and wondering. Why?
__Reasoning, judgement, and my involuntary breathing all converge in a clutter of echoes that linger in my hollownness. I can't feed the birds that I imagine visit me, or whisk away those flies that offend by leaving their specs on my brow. I can't wipe away my tears, or scratch that ugly itch in the small of my back, or clear my clowded throat. In this stony siege, there is so little that I can, and so much... that I cannot.
__Those looking in, insult me with their thoughts of pity, but I can't argue my displeasure or spit out my words of fury. I try to speak,  but the sound's path is blocked, and the only reward for my struggle are these lonely tears... in the sour corners of each eye.
__Gaping through this glass they watch me wither. These gazers... see me as themselves, and I their proxy, signify their anger as they approach their own Act Three. Locked in their desolation, that inescapable tunnel, they voice my voiceless wrath as they search for their own eternal and infinate survival. Their rage, in facing their own life's truth... peaks, as they watch and realize my bizarre existance. They do not see.

__Looking out, in leaving... I shall remain; I wonder why I see... what they cannot?

in leaving
I shall remain
remembered

Fog and Flute

Departure #6
__From the summer of 2005, my fictitious legend of a central Connecticut Native clansman.
_m


__Sunset had taken the day's warmth, and cold slid down the mountainside, out and over the pond's water where a fog was born, layering itself low and close, and filling the pond's hollow... resting in this bowl of trees. The song of a flute pierced the fog, and as I gazed across the water toward the music's heart, two fires peered back through the formless haze.
__As sunrise came, I slid my canoe across the pond and cut the water to the pond's far side where we Tunxi knew our spirits gathered. There, I walked this ground of the fog and flute, and I stood at the place of the night fire's dance.
__No traces of fires spent, or gathered wood, nor ashes or sooted rocks... nothing spoke of the fog and flute at this site of the dancing fires. There were only a dog's footprints in the sand among the stones, a pace trail that mapped its night's restless roving... footfalls, claw marks pointing outward into the fog of the night that once was.

morning
seeped into a sleepless dream
this spirit called

__An instant's haze claimed the stony point, and piercing through that moment's vapor came the song of the flute, and the dance of the fires; quickly the music faded to a song of silence.
__Then, there came a black dog, and it sat at my moccasins. He rose to his haunches... and in his eyes shown the dancing fires. His forelegs were thrust outward, and across them lay the flute... his offering to me.
__I grasped the flute; I knew the fires of this dream would join me.
__In one motion I launched my canoe, and rolled to my knees in the canoe's bottom. I pulled the first paddle stroke above the stillness; on the second stroke I looked up... and there the black dog's spirit had joined me. He had become my image. In the trust of my mind's dream, I am the song of the fog and flute, I am in the trance of these dancing fires.

becoming one
the dream and the soul
a paddle stroke