there was a magical place of primal consciousness,
there, by the skid row of your defeats,
by the empty stairs to nowhere
you had refused to climb before, when younger,
when the light still shone in your eyes,
when the movement of clouds
was new and admirable,
when the spider's web deliberate architecture
was triumphantly complex and enthralling,
when the stirring of spring was a welcome sign
to solitude by choice
among time encrusted venerable trees and hills

but now you saw that the glacier too
had stopped long ago, exhausted,
in front of the lake and built a quarry of dreams,
from which you would dig out your own eternal truth.

the protozoa stillborn in the mist
and the dinosaurs asleep deep beneath the ground
did not betray the quest of soul for soul,
they only beckoned the mystery of your hands and will
among the rocky crested hills
and the foliage of forgotten yesterdays,
and when you sat down among the detritus
of Allegheny woods,
there was nothing to do
but count up the oxygen spent by untold generations,
invoke the multiple hexagons of fate,
lie down among the minutiae of life
at the floors of the woods,
and join in fetal crouch all that had come before,
all that would come after,
and you were another link,
another fallen leaf,
another life enveloped by the garden of life,
your face another flower, your body another branch,
your head another piece of the universal puzzle
that a thirty-eight caliber bullet
dispersed among the trees
and just as you had predicted
the solstice struck twelve, spring ended,
and summer raised its wings.

("casually among the living things" © Copyright 1997 by Guillermo Echanique. All rights reserved. For reprint permissions contact Wil Wynn, 50 Arlo Rd., 1A, Staten Island, NY. 10301; Tel. (718) 8167340, email WilWynn@aol.com.)