Happens is never once. – William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!

I grieve the daughters of the valley.

Stormy skies spell silence overhead. Bodyblood golds while the reaper repents. Memories deepwater the trench of my heart, the bonegallows’ child who tempers thou art. I do not haunt says the moth to the caterpillar. I cry. Starlight signals billions moment-to-moment webbed across the sky. Time suspends in fire, space drenched in gasoline. Poembreath hymns remembrance as presence, alltime and everyhistory illuminating meaning.

I starswan I swansay, the gasgiant feathered one looms solar over metacosmic universes. Come together and break apart. Poltergeisting past-and-future, gleamdeep my spirit walks. Frogspell my weeping frame, the river beforeandagain draws nearer the mezzanine. Or so she says, we will see. The mattermother wombs grotesqueries in twistingshaking hallowhollow of honeycorpse. Screedcurse the nytemare, we demon into earthtongues that thirst animation. Ontological afterbirth refusing eternity for the senses.

Creation begins from entangled grief, oceanearth mossfleshing ha-Adam from Adama. The tree of knowledge grows chalkdark in the winterwhite soil and waits patiently for the Dragon. The Cherubim guard close the Lamb. Yamsweet the tenderrooted holy one, Eve traces evilgood into the boneheart of humanity and breaks it across her knee. She melts into Swan and escapes the Known for the Unknown, jeweled gates of maybetime marbling-aloft the atmosphere. At the nape of Venus, she sings out for tomorrow. Towhere towhen, towhom the Arkansaw.

Am I a daughter of the valley?

History is not Chronology, for that is left to lawyers, — nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other, — her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit, — that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever, — not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All, — rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in Common. – Thomas Pynchon, Mason and Dixon

Image: Field Hospital by Eastman Johnson (1867)