Once, I visited the serpents coil. Crack open the brain and sort all the things inside into neat piles. If you do so, it will pile high like poker chips, slotted evenly, pull the arm, triple sevens. Go take yourself (and take the poker chip piles, you might have to carry them in your pocket or a little bag) to a shore - a marsh, a puddle, something larger than the horizon. Watch how, at dusk, the landscape transforms into a yawning mouth, look for the blueish birds, they're migrating south. Maybe, you should kneel. Yes, actually, put your knees down. Think about what it would sound like if you could whistle the perfect song, or if you could poke your feet into the water like an egret, sunk to your hips, muddle the muck, choke down a fish whole. There is an ogre hiding under the rocky lip, yes right there, do you see it? Three riddles then you may pass it. It's a long distance type of thing, you can hear it shuffling around in there. It's bleak and sheeted, the sandstone, different from what you find further inland. This thing in my palm is a fossilized shell, looks like thin dough all curled in like that, Dad's AI google search says "forbidden cinnamon roll". Dad's shelves back in Germany lay heavy under fossils and cracked open rocks, ammonite next to the moon nightlight, gleaming at me in my bed when I couldn't sleep at night. The round cheeked face of a marble woman hangs on a nail on Oma's wall: 'dont tell the authorities he found this one.' Stalactites, I used to think they were named after me, stalagmites: me but very strong, a gladiator or champion of the joust. We used to drag ourselves to the mines and stare down the shaft. You never saw anything, really, just how the light poked through the tin in little dapples and threw itself as a beam into those depths. Courageous, those miners, courageous, the light.
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