The City of Woven Streets

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and another landscape opens ahead, a world that is ready to crumble or change.

She dreams dark dreams of a place where longing settles in limbs and thickens into fog on window panes, where a hunger to run free and feel the salt of the sea on one’s face makes the air bitter to breathe and fear crawls dense along the floors. The walls fall quiet into deep water, every door is held by a lock and branch-stiff lattices cover the windows. If you go close enough, you may hear words swishing, and behind the walls you may sense many solitudes interlaced with one another. Even closer you may sometimes catch screams, but perhaps they are of seagulls.

Those who carry marks on their faces and are confined within walls scratch the doors until their claws break, and under the weight of their dreams the city subsides and cracks, poles and foundation stones under houses shift out of joint and crumble, the edges of shores and canals corrode into the sea. But ink chains others also, flows under skins and in the veins of the island. It grows slow wounds at the core of all life, hiding from sight what is meant to be seen.

Hands reach for the threads of sleep and fall towards them, and they do not thwart the touch. Their stirring started long ago, elusive, adaptive, impossible to stop. The door into darkness is closed, the door into darkness is open, air flows and through it