O Endless Angst, Thou Stingeth Me

On the sepia hills at dawn, with black ragged spots in my vision, from odd and muted dreams into the blank and endless sky, I come awake asking. Some nebulous woman, alive and fading at the back of my brain calls me with the voices of owls, but a wind from the world keeps me away. Alone and silent in the onslaught of dawn I ask and ask. Some coals still burn from the midnight fire, smoke flung in the wind, and blank-faced lizards dart out to bask in the rising sun. They watch and watch, utterly mute. All of the boys and then men from my past, from my past clamour in memory. One by one they were me: a long stream of selves, shed into time. All of women and girls, who watched me who wanted me or didn't, a father, a mother, a sister, a brother -- all are there in the past with a strange sort of asking... asking, asking with the voices of the mountain birds and the art of snakes in the empty eyes of the lizards the world is asking, asking: what are you? And I ask, at the top of the mountain I ask, and I ask it at the long world ever. I wonder and wander, looking -- Who is it holds some part of me that I wake up missing?