but with teeth drawn inward
or the lightning arrow reversing the Anglo letter Z, for these signs in absence of the thing itself meant it would come back in body as would some Abundance known to be in a big mountain and waiting and remote yet close as rays of thought that took him back to the isthmus at the top of the world that he had told the blonde woman of (for he could not help telling her) where something he did not yet understand had happened, to do with the two trekkers from that other world and with some air or storm that… he was not sure, except that the rays of thought took him back as fast as the train dissolved in the power of his poverty (though hadn’t the money gone too soon?) though the silver had mattered only as a means and the sun graven upon that Zuni money clip stayed with him as certainly as the bison-tongue chunk in his pocket and a huge dollop of light that had thick-watered down into his upturned face-mouth from the night cloud so it sucked him as he drank it, and then he could not be sick, could not, but the waterfall dollop-tongue from the Anasazi’s noctilucent cloud stayed in and he accepted what had happened like new weather that came from new acts and seemed to help him go on east but both for the sake of the bison tongue and the Anglo girl Margaret, white but so deeply tanned, neither for one alone nor the other alone, he said to himself, regretting his blue mare but knowing life left death-things and was right: so the pursuit of Margaret? he reasoned; no, not enough in itself; the quest for knowledge-energy? he reasoned; no, not enough in itself to explain this trek of his over the — the landbridgtl the land-sea bridge! it came to him like one answer to how many questions. Yet he looked back at least in his dreams of coasts and guessed that she was on some diagonal like his and had been thus behind him some of the time, and he met an old man with a wagon and one horse working their way up a hill toward trees and rode with him and realized Margaret was both behind him and ahead, and remained convinced she was with child. And stranger, he felt close to many people who would not protect him from his wandering but he would gain from many knowledge. So much in him still unknown seemed to know, as we, that an ending had already come long ago. But what was this? — these senses that others and he converged and were all equally alike whether from moons of distances or from nearby, from New Mexico mountain and Arizone and Ute-Colorado trails, or from Chicago to New York — it made no sense, drawn though it began to be along the curves of his thought: for people differed as the bison from the eagle, even as the pistol from the saddlebag, or the track from the gila "dragon" making it; or Mena’s words about this written-down music-messagery she showed the An-asazi and the use she might make of it, taking it home to a woman of her family who made powerful music for many voices and instruments but no one would play it. And the Navajo Prince as if his Margaret-given name drew the curved eastward parallels of these people toward one coast or point felt in his belly hungry for some fact, a soft shape drawn within them by not all these people but some very few he knew of, west to east, and the shape pulled him on toward where he would meet Margaret.
So that one day along the Hudson River close in to the ancient city of New York or New Yorkondo or — quoiandam, he had within him not so much food for thought (as Margaret had sometimes said when he told her things) as thought for food, and the question whether thought followed energy or energy thought, thought its way through his feet and his loins knowing that, close to him in time, others who were close to him had passed, and passed him, but he was almost there, the outer parallels, the inner shape, the strong sound of Margaret’s voice in him, the bison tongue in one pocket, the metal implement in a bag across his shoulder.
Yet where was she? they heard each other think, and what had she done? it was still inside her, and not all the words she could think up helped her forget, mmhmm not words written down in secret pain (the interview with Coxey, interview words) and posted in gaiety from Ohio to her father in New Jersey made what was still inside her speak, so she needed to just understand it and think that it was not the same as the new burden she carried with her on a train that could take her almost home to be met anyway in New York by her elder friend if he had had her letter, and she held (she smiled at her own phrase) on for dear life to the parcel wrapped and layered in years of weeks to hold its breath until, once home, she could do what a dream of her lover told her to do which (she smiled again and was smiled back at by the gentleman facing her) justified her in what she might well have done even without the dream which was wrapped like the cocoon she had in her arms, and she smelled the brown wrapping paper, breathing it so crazily and desperately she could smell the color, which kept her from crying but may have made her look a lunatic, the glass and upholstery and even the sound of rolling stock dissolving away into a sadness that might have been freedom but was not yet freedom, so that herself dissolved leaving for the unknown gentleman across from her only the smile which in turn recreated her by reminding her of the lady and the tiger, and the rhymes, and then the whole thing; but she did not laugh to let her fellow passenger approach what she puzzled through, which was a dream about a daughter she did not have:
She and her lover had ridden across a mesa into a ravine of strewn boulders so largely tilted they seemed about to roll together, all different shapes; and she got off her horse and the horse vanished and she saw a cave in one rock which began to move as she entered it but so that, once in, she did not feel the motion; but because of this she could not get out but could only call to her lover who called back from his rock where he was living similarly. Then she heard but did not feel all the great shapes of rock come together, and she looked out her cave door with a terrible pain in her stomach to see a warren of levels and corridors — because all the boulders had been connected — but she didn’t know where they were going because she couldn’t see out, and she resolved to tell her daughter when she got home — her daughter? yes, her daughter — but then she saw through awful mists that maybe they were not going home, for her lover called to her that this was how she had gotten here from home. But he was somewhere else and she was afraid to go look for him until she saw that she was the awful mist in the complex caves of some other stonework all here joined in a great artifact but then saw he was right there but could not see her, and she had woken in a friendly stranger’s cold Ohio house, her secret hospital, weak and in a state, and reaching suddenly and with pain for the parcel under her bed she found she literally poured like vomiting such quantity of tears onto her nightgown sleeve and the floor that she thought the bed was full of blood, and she thought, What if it’s a boy? when, after all, in a way, there was no child.