(I wonder about you. I summon your faces. Why would I ever wet paper with ink unless I wished for the stain to spread beyond its first aching?)

At the Gate of All Wonder, Kevin McIlvoy

"I am not going to touch you, or hug you," I said. "You do not want that."

*

(You did not want that.

Did you want that?)

*

At the Gate of All Wonder, Kevin McIlvoy

We heard planets and major and minor moons of sound. We heard churnings of sound, and eruptions and meteor bombings and comet tails of sound. We heard our imaginations making some of the sounds into music and some few into noise. 

At The Gate Of All Wonder, Kevin McIlvoy

Huge had taught me to first find the ground of the song, the light rocking that sets a cadence before it introduces a drama inside the hearer's consciousness. He said to make the bass line my teacher for this, and if there was no bass line then to draw (and only sometimes blow) the notes according to the drum's cooking, and, if no drum, then to simmer down the flavor of the guitar's cleanest repeated riff. Don't imitate. Feel what it was before it was, and feel what it might become. He made me chase after the vocal phrase before gliding under it. The sound at first was mostly meant to be single-note, and meant to mostly come from the middle of the mouth or from the back of the mouth. 

At the Gate of All Wonder, Kevin McIlvoy 

The one said, "We'll tell her about climax forests," and the other said, "And how about the crying lichen?"

"What?" I asked. Already, I liked what I heard. Liars with uninformed but forming self-awareness are my favorite fictionalists.

"About how they cry when they can't grow," said the other.

I had taught them about certain lichen that might be considered "signal lichen" since they cannot – or will not – grow where there is pollution. Needless to say, the lichen make no audible sound. "Right," I said, "tell her about the pitiful sounds of the Crying Lichen."

"Have you heard?" said the one.

​"It is really sad," said the other. "They never stop crying."

​At the Gate of All Wonder, Kevin McIlvoy