Birds, more than a score of them perched in collective along a low-strung power line, erupted into flight seemingly the instant he awoke.

He'd passed out underneath a poplar tree in the field behind the school, his back lying against the smooth trunk of the tree. He'd spent the better part of the past day drinking any number of beers while playing his guitar in one corner of the studio while Marshall, also drinking, worked his clay in the room's opposite corner. The sculptor's girl Maxine had come over at sunset and the three of them smoked and ended up killing most of a pint of Kentucky bourbon that she'd brought.

He watched the birds whirl against the wan backdrop of the white morning sky. In their circular motion he saw shapes on a fretboard. He began to play in his head. The shapes and trajectories and inclinations and patterns of the birds' wheeling flight did not alter. The birds flew out of sight as one. Beizart closed his eyes.

The sound of one of the school's heavy windows creaking and thunking open wakened him again. He opened his eyes. The sun by now was well up in a clear blue sky. The seat of his jeans had soaked through with dew.

He sat breathing in the smell of the grass, never once cut since the onset of spring. It never would be, either. He breathed in its odor with the other morning smells. Behind his eyes a line of ascending minor sixths, starting at the top of the fretboard in lower E, bloomed upward into their major intervals. He wasn't sure if it was a phrase Hendrix had played at Woodstock or not.

Up the hill he heard from within the studio Maxine now gently strumming chords on her acoustic. The tenor inflection of her voice with its terrifying and beautiful clarity nearly whispering then ebbing then starting to rush then ebbing again alongside and on top of the harmony like icy water tumbling in a brook somewhere up in the mountains.

Up in the mountains, where he knew he must go. He knew not why, wasn't sure this mattered. But soon.

*

In loco obscurantis.