In the waiting room, an old woman with shriveled-up blue-veined skin sits in a wheelchair; ahead of her, in the examining room, a doctor is telling me he's unable to diagnose the cluster of red spots meandering up my right kneecap, as they would be encountered unexpectedly, just past a bend, under a ledge, on a high stalagmitic column, at the edge of a pit, or deep in a pit with horses, ibexes, stags, lions, and bears...female objects (often as vulvas, breasts, or female creatures). In fact, every visit...is a series of surprises, and you get the feeling that the surprises are beginning to fade.

    Waiting, they linger,
     with crystalline moisture
     forming upstream,
     toward the mountains--
     the Shiwana are cutting back centuries...

One night last week, my toilet tank's innards gushed over the floor. Phoned the manager, who said, "Can't you fix it to body decoration, grave decoration, object arrangement, and other simple symbolic applications until the late Upper Paleolithic. Then, relatively suddenly, the situation changed. The most dramatic evidence of the change is found before the sight of everyone, all the birds of great value which emerged and rose into the sky. They saw the roseate spoonbill, the cotinga, the trogon, the heron, the yellow parrot, the scarlet macaw, the white-bellied parrot, and every other bird of precious plumage. And when the ashes were extinguished, then arose his heart, the quetzal bird itself; they saw it in the Ice Age caves of southern Europe, which contain the felt correspondence between the oral language and the landscape, an alliance so thorough that the speaker must pace his stories or songs to match the speed with which he moves through the thousands of sculpted figurines and carved ivory and bone objects and numerous paintings, some of great beauty. In a relatively short period of time, graphic art had been elevated to yourself?"

    It doesn't mean much to the rain,
     I feel like saying, but for the grit
         of old roots.