Delta 6

During three straight days of heat without let-up, a storm lurked in the anxious stillness until finally drifting elsewhere, and then a gentle, cool warmth arrived, soothing the bright surface of things. So too, it sometimes happens in life that a soul weighed down by living suddenly feels relief, for no apparent reason.

After the heat had lulled and the light beginning of rain increased until it could be heard, there was a tranquility that the air didn’t have when it was hot, a new peace in which the water below had its own breeze.

And now rain comes slowly like the inflexibility of pulling a paperclip apart: a mockery of straight lines. The rain cuts and weaves. A sudden floundering tempest and everything reflected back off the floor.

I unbuttoned my shirt and picked a coarse blanket from the floor. I would have liked to seal myself into it. To measure space. An alien tent and me a cloth doll about to be flung around. At least I physically exist, I fathomed, feeling liquid in my nostrils, noting a dent in my shoe.

Air and atmosphere generated from the speech and perspiration of systems and figures within society. Unlike animal storms, it cannot be predicted, controlled or even remotely harnessed.

Cities, towns, and other settlements fold daily under the menace of this home-built air. The only feasible solution, outside of large-scale stifling or combustion of physical forms, is to pursue the system of rotational silence proposed by Thompson, a member of ideal physical deportment - his tongue removed, his skin muffled with glues, his eyes shielded under with pictures of the final scenery.

Pas the savering gallack seas and flaming nebyul eye
Power us beyont the farthes reaches of the sky
Thine the han what shapit the black
Guyd us there and guyd us back