It filled the time in those weighted grey days on the coast

to go projected

psychically one place to another,

airborne and essential,

luminous as a silver vessel.

Our dimensions over-numbered,

we roamed the astrals unincorporated.

We did not know where we went

we did not know what we saw there.

It took forgetting of ourselves enough to go;

those who did, still do.

And that was more than to expect

of those dull rain-drumming coastal days.

Summertime,

rivers of animal names: the Great Bear, the Salmon rivers,

the merging season of the rock shore.

No longer the narrows of one transmutation,

we went in and out of cycle:

rivers to body, names to the sea,

time and water.

And so I did not notice all at once

when the whisperers returned with me.

They were pure sound, I believed there were words in them,

tone and shape nearly to the visual.

They approached, they followed, almost preceded.

My skin felt song like touch.

They move me, water over stone,

colored me to clarity,

lightened me larger everywhere.

Their presence said there is no body,

no evolution left in us, just loose,

nothing but ourselves, our thoughts, our mumbles

and a bodiless combination that speaks.

They stirred me, earthbound;

a bloodleaf they experienced like stars.

There is no color more than sound,

no plot for stories, time,

just small near voices and a coastline.

I've been accompanied for months now,

never less than same and more than sleep.

Sometimes wind presents a face,

sometimes voice is limb and leaf

and sometimes I feel great distances,

small movements under rain

and a lingering acquaintance with warm days.

I wonder what hands I've bartered with in space

to pass from sleep to wealth

with friends.

I am multitude now, as wind is,

a sound I recognize,

marked separately and unnoticeably

where I change forever.

(Cthulu Calls, 1976; Umbral Anthology, 1982)