Jamblique
William Fuller
For the sake of illustration I fall asleep and things change as
I breathe them in, the walls becoming floors, the floors be-
coming streets, the streets becoming fields, while various an-
imals, startled, cautious, move warily up the hill and into the
woods, where they revert to a prior state. ere are sometimes
moments of calm arising in an imagination without the dis-
cipline to embrace them. The animals all sense this. They
stalk one another through the trees in order to demonstrate
their most characteristic instincts. But these become detached
from the bodies that house them, which huddle along the
circumference, or glide back and forth through small gaps in
how they were made. Sounds fall to echoes, roughing out a
zone where what one hears matches what one doesn’t hear,
and adjusts to its shadow.