Cliff of Broken Legs – Collage Essay

There’s a cliff.  Kept up by roots.  The roots are there by trees.  Small trees.  Smaller than one imagines thirty foot wall of dirt.  The tide’s high.  Water laps like a tease.  But it’s colder than ever now.  You can hear voices calling and oddly enough a steady drum beat keeping the tempo.

It’s colder than ever now.  The rain hits the leaves of the big trees surrounding us like walls of a building.  The water under the cliff walls speaks to us as if it’s calling us to come down.  The ground is soft with perished leaves, wet and soggy from the midnight rain.  The air speaks to us with a light breeze from the water making the branches whisper on the douglas firs.

The branches whisper on the dougas firs.  The water gurgles out an absent-minded song to the rocky terrace above it.  Hushed fall voices in the treetops, crushed leaves lay, they are remnants of past talks – the old conversations of wooden sentinels that guard the bay.  They stand there, fixed like mountains, they hunker down in the rain.  Patter, Patter and clicks and pops of twig and branch and leaf and rocks and the small pinging songs of the rain echo in waves around us.

I found the triangle from my dreams, I feel like I should climb the cliff like the tunnel and talk to death, the two children, and watch the wooden crosses turn to stone headstones.  The water has ninety degree currents, and it’s like I run into my lover, we are woven.  We are woven.  I reach and grab for the cliff from which I fell, and wake the gnarled fist to be permenant.

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