There is a song....

A private spell, an incantation. He wishes to tell him that he knows what he had known all along; that one day this world will burn down from the love it cannot bear. Fire will reduce flesh to bone and bone to ash, ash to smoke and smoke to air: this is how we shall all go.

The song is whole and wondrous and it alludes to the truth that there are mercies in life so small and humble that they will break you more easily than the cruelties ever could. Now a crimson colored butterfly quivers past him. In a reverie a man touches his neck and he acknowledges his gesture in the flattering amber colors around them. The recherché idiom of lovers. He steps out of his caress and into the garden, where the wind moves through tall pines, a haunting, old colored sound. Where is this place? Where the sunsets are dazzling, but the dawns even better. He has made it here…… a bird calls out from the trees. The horizon empties its dark secrets and the sun, slow but sure, sends up its coruscating flares.

The sudden lightness in his chest he cannot name, and he cannot deny. All he knows to be true is this: there is a song, an evening song, which when you take to the great and old mountains will return no echo. A melody released with a volcanic contralto, it rises up and reaches far and it touches the bluebells hiding and the weasels and the smallest harvester ant that ever breathed. But it returns no echo. Of course, the ear, small and without the necessary wisdom, presses against the crepuscular radiance and hunts out some kind of ricochet. But this song, this last song of dusk, now it demands no reply nor permits imitation simply because it is full in itself: a breath that will never be breathed again. All things under its bough will be healed and returned to the place they came from: silence. There is a song, an evening song, which when you take to the great and old mountains, will return no echo.

There is a song.