a place to rest ones head

He carried Ulysses to the other side of the world and back again, unread.

He starts twice, turning a few pages only before standstill; a mirror, a bowl, a razor, no more. Each eve thereafter he places the book carefully under his head like a japanese sleeping block, to lull in the forest waiting for sleep, embalmed in the elsewhere night. Night belonging in a book, somewhere in a book he once read, in the many nights of books. With hands clasped to chest, tighter than imagined, he hunts frayed words with which to render the darkness familiar.

Something to splice the creaking ship's mast to the poplar's hawsering bowed note once more. Something to tether the screeching thunderbird when it came, talons raking a brimstone sea for whale and sailor alike, as to bind it tightly in the wind spinning off the mountain top. Wind he imagines only from deep under the kelp through halibut eyes, as current line whirlpools, churning the sea far above. Later he hears siberian vagabonds pass bye the bye, whorling iced expletives at painted shutters and doors as they go. Swaying left, right, drunk and belligerent, they stop suddenly. Nearby ? As if puzzled for a moment by a lilting song. A woman's? A woman who trails a sighing finger through the canopy and with a gossiping whisper sends them carousing away down the valley, to the old people Tseax buried with fire... those who wait for news of the sea each night....

quieter, then quieter still...

The ship returns to transcribing the tide. He hears a rat? or bigger? and it's gleeful companion bickering once more over gruel or seed... and when sleep finally comes it comes as a wordless tempest.