Lost Cantos of the Ouroboros Caves by Maggie Schein. Forward by Pat Conroy.

sorcerer and the taoist monk made clay pots with the widow of the tribal king, who, rather gleefully, was learning to play the flute with a young man who would eventually become her father. The music, I found, played on and on, no matter where my attention was, as though I lived in a house adjacent to the hall, with a window always open to it.

     As I became absorbed in my voyeurism, a heavy dark cloud drew in from the western sky. Under it, the sun rose from the earth, but the cloud palmed it down, forcing the light and the heat to circulate between the leaves of the trees and the moist soil until the heat radiated so intensely that my heart, despite my stillness, shook inside of me. There are so many I have loved. I have lived in the past and the future and in each life, there are one or two to whom I would’ve given my soul if they could have taken it--though none but one could have actually held it. It was too wild for them, I know. My heart shook violently, vibrating until it had exhausted itself and had shaken from its caverns and vessels nearly everyone and everything, and then it lay like a spent child between my ribs. As it rested quiet, and my blood stood not knowing anymore where to go or when, I felt a strange pressure first in one chamber and then in another, as though gentle hands were massaging them from the inside. My blood began to trickle back in hesitant streams, and I could hear a voice as though to encourage the blood to flow. The massage continued. As I sat still, I could hear her-the one I had left on the dock, the one who had come through the battering waves of pain and bewilderment. The one who could actually have held my soul, were I to have given it to her. But I had not yet. A promise unfulfilled. So in my sighing heart she stood, head down in concentration and palms pressing in rhythm against my ventricles, as though creating in me the place I would ache upon realizing I could not touch her. “I learned from the waves, my love. I will move your heart, even when you sit still. The tides taught me how to make your blood flow.”

     And so I let her. I sat still, giving the pulse of my heart to the woman who had given herself to the tides. So even my heart beats because I am still. The movement of my own life, my own insides, is outside of me.

     The longer I sat, the more still I became, the more the trees swirled around me. Time usually comes to them as we move through them, and if I wasn’t going to move through their forests, they would bring their forests into me. The small oak appeared first, and then the pine on which the eagle was perching. I felt his his tail feather brush against my sinuses, The spiders, robins and dragonflies hovered in place like humming birds, holding their place in the spaces between my eyes, my vertebrae and the souls of my feet. We waited for the wind to come to us, for the grasses to move in our feet, for the elements of the earth to slide inside us, around us, and through us like snakes.

     And then I walked. When I walked, I stepped down so lightly that the world disappeared. I stepped, but