When I caught up with him he was weeping.  He'd fallen onto his shins, sat back on his heels, and rested his arms, palms up, on his thighs.  His back had buckled and curled his head downward to look at the grass.  He sobbed and held tightly to his smile in the cavern of his closed fists.  There would be other works, of course.  Soon the revelation of finality would pass away and he'd pick up his pen and get to building the newest skeleton of his thoughts.  But there was a completion in him for which he was only now learning the proper gratitude.  I got to my knees too, rested my hand between his shoulder blades and felt my eyes welling.  Years now, it had been, since he started up this trail.  And it'd led here.  We faced the back pond.  That lunar stone smiled on it and lit our faces. These are the lucid intervals which dismiss the day to day fog sleeping on our eyes.  Its not so uncommon we find ourselves in tears with the world so cearly outstretched before us.  It is the place holder for what the rest of nature might say in our place.

no matter the vigor of its captain
or the rightness of it crew
the ship which was made by the waves
is a tough vessel to turn

When I sit in this grass I do it like a robot never could.  First you must understand the grass.  For all our intentions it is quite tall, nearly taller than me while I'm sitting unlike robots.  But in reality the grass is tiny, and constatly reminded of as much by the rumpus-loving sky that twists itself, blushing, into a blue dress everytime I come to watch it set.  There is some insanity in the soil.  But not actually dimented minds, no, its the kind of insanity that is bound up in a golden straight jacket in the highest room of the prettiest house on the block and told again and again its crazy for wanting to chase the most-unfashionable earth tones out the window.  Its the kind of insanity you could really make friends out of, in such a way robots could never attempt. When I sit in the grass, its the only time I'm like a Jedi.  I press my palms to the soil as I watch the sky twisting, changing into her evening dress, and I will the buckles to straight shatter on those jackets.  I'm hoping all the recluses in all the houses of all the neighborhoods whose souls are buried in that crazy fucking soil would dig their way out from the dirt, in a way robots can't but in a way one might imagine zombies to, and sit with me and press their palms to the dirt.  Robots can sit motionless, buried in the dirt in their gold and metal and white cloth jackets.  And ours is the crazier state?  There is some insanity in the soil, I can feel it in my palms.

He imagined Lake Superior in his collins glass and his other thoughts cowered.  The mind shivered.  The lake had long ago innervated his chest and spoke to him in harmonics at a distance.  It would stir the strings suspended between them and call him home.  He was born of a cauldron on the beach, where polished black stone entered the great furnace and produced men enamored with and endentured to the waves.  Imagine the air is your captor.  You are suspended in it and at the mercy of its decision to enter your chest.  So the lake cradles its sons.