where_the_sun_drips_fire ovenbird In the botanical garden, the rhododendrons are twenty feet high. I am lost in this place where the sun drips fire into my eyes. My vision fractures, breaks flowers into fractals, and I can’t find the path beneath my feet. As disorientation turns to panic the light becomes a boy of about fifteen, starry and pale. He matches the cadence of my step and when he speaks his voice is the flutter of a thousand moths. “There’s a way to discern the true shape of things,” he says. “You can free your vision from distortions. You can make everything coalesce.” An image enters my mind like ink dispersing in water, and it shows me how to see. I defocus my eyes, stare past the surface of the universe, and suddenly everything comes into sharp focus. The air is silver, mercurial. The path ahead is a fast flowing river. I follow it to a mall where I am soon lost again in endless looping hallways. I wander in circles until I wear a hole in time and find myself in a wide rotunda with a vaulted ceiling and there you are, playing a piano and singing. Your voice is a beacon that calls me back to myself, my heart rate slows, my body relaxes and I whisper, “finally…I’ve found my way home.” 250616 what's it to you? who go blather from