—[an island, in thirds]—

—The first island meets you at the end of the empty lakebed,— the Island of Lost Souls. You trip on low brambles, lose your way in the numberless insect skeletons crushed under the balls of your pus-white feet. Not because your senses are dulled, but because you lose your body in the darkness. Not at first, but over many years. No mirrors. Nothing can be confirmed. No water from a parched well. Nothing but lost souls unable to escape the high arch looping over the island’s entryway, spilling into the start of an open stone garden raked with white phosphorescent pebbles and pink sandy crystals extinguished one by one when the sun dips into the oblivion of night and your body chills into a bird released from a space capsule. A chilled lost soul. Punctuated with flat stone benches, the syllables of the winding walk into the interior accented with glottal stops. Tiny hearths for burning paper money to be exchanged in the afterlife. Stone lanterns and swinging chairs held by ancient stone ropes falling endlessly into the sky. Salted, tallow-white and burning, into clouds of perfumed leaf suspended above your head. Floating silver spots collect where lost souls guard the soft door between layers of this strange world and the denuded banquet of your eyes.—

—[an island, in thirds]—

—The Island of Blessed Sheep connects to the Island of Lost Souls via a zig-zag bridge. A long plank protrudes from the first island with a second plank parallel but extending from the second island, meeting only for a short square at their mutual tips. The second island thus oaxes dreams from the waking brain while the narrow bridge wards off demons who travel only in straight lines. To cross into the next world, you must zig-zag. You must meander. Leave silence behind, and so transform among the bright-colored coleus plants hiding death in purple-veined petals smothering the soft chorus of cicadas emerging, always, in the 17th year of cherry blossoms. Here, your thoughts dive into the depths of a botanical subconscious. Under weeping willow trees, large enough to enfold the past centuries in a canopy of hanging branch, a tiny muskrat nibbles on the water plants thriving closest to the rim of island bank. Other animals turn ghostly as pronounced bleating rings soft from a distant lyre plucked off-key in the warm wind. Such sounds increase, redoubled around your eardrum, until the flock of spectral sheep perform their woolen parade in the air. You will find nothing but the bleating of the sun and the throbbing of the air and the torque of the wind violated with the ghostly tether of hoof looping through purple prairie clover. Sheep as reason unhinged. Days grow long on this second Island; dreamers collapse with arms outstretched before the power of the animal spirits, eyes wide at smoke rings hollow under the smazy exhaustion of the sun.—

—[an island, in thirds]—

—As a child, you catch glimpses of another world in a hallway door blotched with shimmering wood stains, the pattern of a little girl cast by the illumination of a magic lantern; only when you forget these connections can you locate the third island. Undulating shapes suggests a coastline. Lumps of clay set the grave faces of Easter Island coagulating through a curtain of soot and dust into strange formations so solid, so close in the haze, that you yearn to call the icy water over your body as an ancient priest calling forth his barren goddess; submerged in this sea of deep blue ether, your body will float forward as if a reed knocked lengthwise by a heavy rain. But in this water, you will never progress—the distant coastline will fade into the foam of a stolid lake, and your body will tire, surrendering to the stagnant nibble of water mosquitoes on your swollen cheeks. Only empty beaches and faraway rims, biting into unfamiliar food…you will settle yourself atop a stone golem on the second island and scan the horizon for the smallest hint of the third. You will only know the mirage. Raise your arms high to the heavens and mimic an ancient statue, or push your body to the earth and then slither, a water snake advancing on a nest of eggs. You emerge always at the zig-zag bridge merging the first and second islands, drained among the bright-colored coleus plants with purple veined petals, hiding the striated secrets of eternal return.—