I remembered and relived another moment, one of freezing cold in the midst of a bright warm summer, a moment of my taking the fair color of frost amid green meadows and barrows as I was made pale as lime-bleached skin scant days before I’d first heard the sound of a man’s eyes turning to wood. And with that long-ago press of smooth wood against the soft cups of his sight, I had been freed. I am not now free, any more than is the boy whose shade I reflect through his demonization, through the reverse-exorcism canticles that tend the seed of spite deep within him. The seed sprouts. I feel it. It earth-breathes despair the boy cannot grasp, but that the boy knows with the same intimacy that he knows his dreams. The boy does not feel the germ quiver to life . . . to my life . . . and the lives of my distant, more bodiless kin who sleep in his imagining. I now know no meadows, no earthwork mounds heaped over chambers of rusting swords.
