TOLLUND

6 5 R T O L L U N D H A I L E Y L E I T H A U S E R This is death, dreary as the dying was, half slop on the bottom, half stew on the top, half forgotten wren evening song, tiny and timeless bird singing. This is death when you don’t have a breath or a pulse or a voice but still have two lungs and a rubbery heart to breathe in and out of, less of a death than a settling, less of a settling than press under the march of feet feet feet foot that nobody knows a dying dead man is deeply and darkly and quietly privy to (marking a calender of sour nosed worms, acidic maggots, slug, beetle, grub at nest in a tibia they will never grow fat on). This is a death that crows want to honor and snow at rest on gentling hills wants to lie over. This death that is weariness, this death that is meaningless and careful experience, that is glacial and graveled, hoveled experience like that of existence (calling of children over millennia, loud rivers, clouds). This is the palaces of children and clouds, days made 6 6 Y of fingers and brown brittle ferns, nights made of phosphorus, stale water stench. This is the blanch of a close, stagnant pyre, the burning of soft-bodied amber, the cargo of stomach, the plenty of gut. This is the roughed and the untidy peace of a mud-sodden stu√. This is the death the living are made of. ...