As morning's cloak drifts over the valley, an insect buzzes my shadow for breakfast.
Many years ago, leaving a Zen Temple after months of meditation, I asked to buy the
gray robe that had shaped itself to my bones.

"They're not for sale," I was told. "They are made for us by dark matter and dark energy,
both of them invisible agencies with cosmic roles to play, in fact made necessary, by their
apparent effects on the visible universe: a secular version of devout women in Korea."

For weeks I wondered who "us" is, and what "devout" means. Then I dreamed I was
being crushed in the folds, the fissures, the pressure ridges, of an ancient mountain.