A Small Room In Aspen

Stains on the casements, dustmotes, spiderless webs. No chairs, and a man waking up, or he's falling asleep Many first novels begin with the hero waking up, which saves their authors from writing well about sleep. His life is the only novel about him. Mornings he walks past the park: Tai Ch'i students practicing like slow lorises. A room on the second floor. He'd dreamed of a ground floor room, an insistent cat at the door, its mouth pink with wrath he couldn't salve and grew to hate. All afternoon he's a cloud that can't rain. There's no ordinary life in a resort town, he thinks, though he's wrong: it laces through the silt of tourists like worm life. At dusk the light rises in his room. A beautiful day, all laziness and surface, true without translation. Wherever I go I'm at home, he thinks, smug and scared both, fierce as a secret, 8,ooo feet above sea level. The dark on its way down has passed him, so he seems to be rising, after the risen light, as if he were to keep watch while the dark sleeps, as if he and it were each other's future and children.