It all comes back to the garden. There were roses and lilacs, asokas, lilies, and the sugary pomegranites of May, which were strewn all over the overripe greens like bleeding stars. Thickets of tall trees, thickly hewn silver clusters of star-dust limbs and ironed, emeraldine branches, buttressed the boundaries and propped the ancient ceilings of the sky.

By night there were meteors, flashes of dizzying celerity falling earthward in the heavens; then there were the thousand etched canvasses of glittering Chinese lamps, reduced by distance to blotches, some, or yet mere speckles as fine and jagged as bits of cemented glass. If the old man came to smoke his pipe, then rings of floury black dust would lift themselves heavenward like the praising pillars of the old sacrifice.

What did the old man think?

Promised but not fulfilled; being deceiver or deceived? Perhaps in the great motions of the globe, turning in immovable remoteness -- removed, removing stars in any event versing or reversing, inverting or reverting to the the vertigo, the prodigal, the vertigal gale. Fine upswing of their tender bits, the virgin prat paraded in a parody of cunning life, coming rife orgestrions of organed beings, bringing in salopous serum venomed holds of brightly ecstatic binges in arithmetic, probably coinflips and dipping trips on sea-quenched boats in farthing moats around the milky, molded floats of flecking, faceless cheese. No. She stands still and unbequeathed, bolt upright and securing doored perceptions -- not reception, nor intention, ours or hers, declensions of a verb, th' acanthous word. But with the aperture of eyes, scries, inscrutable and dazzling songs, inscribed or generally imbibed and so provided in the gongs of viridian mares, tugging shares of mangy ploughs for furrowed earth, lies any worth in wounds? The coughing wind of winding cords rewrapped 'round crackling cork, the cristling cross of crissed and crossing crises? The name of the bark is hidden in the cords of the stolid earth, foolishly, and no rebirth.

But still and always the expectation blazing in gold, like a fire before fine water rhymes the traces of a carefully carved arch, vaulting into the rainbow calamity of its existence, multitudinous symposiums of colored being. And when lightning strikes a branch from the void sky, no less the intermission of a cackling explosion, the holocaust spreads slowly, the way a baker pushes frosting with a carver's knife, and no less rich in heat than the various pusillanimities of painted sound or the caned expressions of a snowy sucrose.

Articulation, the old man thinks, is the big toe tracing its own emptiness in the furrowed dirt, the same articulation of bent fingers that he can identify in octocenarian oaks, and yet the perfect vibrancy and fragrance of mountain hymns. The desire to sing, should it come upon him, would be no less an outer vibration of his gullet with the air, no less his heart beating in time with the thyme, the flower sprigs, the divine perfumes of this endless summer, but still it is an endless summer doomed to fall.

Memory perches in his mind like the crow on the gnarled hemlock, tracking the quick-cracking snow. When the terse winds blow over the forests, and their feminine limbs quiver in the freezing wind, will the endless vistas of fields mourn the passing shadow of the sun? A feeble light gains the ascendant horizon, and looks down from his cataclysmic perch; but how feeble, as abrupt in rupture as a callous branch when the mistral bites, and it tumbles soon into the twilight. Then mourning night of the cold gales, sapping night, sucking the strength of freshling saps, sorrowful night, night of ruined towers and creeping frosts, comes.