Origin

Alone in the wet hollows of mountains where faceless spirits of men he once knew still flicker among cradled bamboo boughs He asked the stones whether Dying happens in a single moment or a thousand: if life stops like it begins, but only in reverse, with first a spine, next a heartbeat, then unraveling into unearthly limbs; or if it trickles away from each cell, one by one, so that even when the heartbeat has gone silent some parts of him are still alive, some microscopic bits of him still teeming, no different from how they do in rock faces or in the earth beneath him, really, and only they know how the bonds between oxygen and hydrogen inside him somehow set him apart from the earth and the air by an unknown divine scheme, gave him lungs and desire and tears before he learned to sing and love and grieve. He asked the stones why Birds were blessed with wings but he had been born with none, why those free-spirited creatures of air and wind could escape through the narrow crack between mountain and sky while he and his children and their children would be forever condemned to be tied to the land, backs heartbreakingly bare like smooth marble, vertebrae protruding like stepping stones or perhaps ridges shrouded in mist. He asked the stones how It must feel to be the last cell alive as the others drift off for the final time, how lonely it must be to remain behind as the last one who has not yet departed as all the others fly south. He asked the stones who Had built him, hungered to know if it was a man or a woman who he could call Creator, whether he was carved from riverbed silt or the bedrock beneath, Whether the monsoon current would sweep him away downstream to wherever it stashed its stolen treasures or if water would part for him in its path, Swells blooming and thundering on either side of him like the hoofbeats of a thousand white stallions as the land grows mountains in its sleep.