Journey To The Center Of The Optogram

 

Inside this leaf are days that have been, days yet to be, days that should have been but never were, days that were but shouldn’ta ever been. Everything is inside this leaf––green blurry fast-moving shadows, glowing eyes, clips of things Inverness said to her former selves passing through the intangible walls of sacrifice & suffering. As this leaf is infinite, she reads from its pages how she changed others, how others changed her, how love alters not time’s fool of brief hours, but bears love to the lips of doom. She climbs Ross Lake to Desolation Peak just to sit in the sun all day & contemplate this blade of grass––the world below like a floating city gone mad with testing to see just what the void can do. “How sweet is life,” she says to the thirsty creeks of September. “Twelve times,” turning in a circle, hands palm to palm, “I stood in the midst of many events that will shake the Earth’s future.”

 

 

[Published in The Ongoing Saga I Told My Daughter: Expanded Edition.

© 2016 by Jim Cohn.]