# [D15:1M] Vision: [[The Fountain]] Hexagram: [[Fifteenth Hexagram]] Trials:[[Fifteenth Trial]] Symbols: #grandfather #mother #machine #mines #mountains #snake #locomotive #winter #river #snowfall #brother #dog #sun #eyes #arm #head #smile #sister #airplane #bodyadrift #black #two #boy May 27th, 1783, 2001, 2023  I. And now, my grandfather is confessing  to my mother.  He is hooked up to the oxygen  concentrator and while he confesses, there  is the occasional beep and there are voices  in the hall.  His breath and the whirring of the machine make the same sound.  He killed a boy, he is saying.   They were all boys, the lot of them from the silver  mines of the Bitterroot Mountains.  And now, The three miner boys of Wallace get down south. They are hammering away at the face  of another boy until he quits his whining and squirming on the icy banks of the Snake.   Their hot breath together blooms soft and whole like silent locomotives in the tin of winter.   The three distant boys of Wallace heave the dark  strange shape into the river.  This is what  my mother knows.  It is snowing now.  And now, I am about nine years old and my brother  and cousins and I are following  my grandfather through the quaint main street  of Mountain Home, where I was born.  He has a laugh  like a dog with its snout tied to an exhaust pipe.   We love our grandfather and he loves us. Now I am in the hospital with my grandmother,  on her third to last day, and my uncle, from behind,  is saying to me—is saying to the room—_you know_  _they’re trying to feminize men these days_.  I am  turning to look at him because he stops talking.  He appears like a man whom the sun has blinded. I am saying to him, _who_?  Several times  She is rising in the night worried and confused,  and will not take water.  And once, just once,  she sits up by herself with a smile beneath  her shining shrunken eyes.  I am sitting  up and she is leaning forward with her arm  outstretched and touches me lightly on the forehead.   Her smile is making sounds I cannot understand.   I can’t be sure it’s me or someone else  she is addressing.  She is lying down again.   In the morning, she is somewhere else.   And now, I am dressing in my best  friend’s sister’s clothes.  I want to know what it feels like  to be a girl.  I am skipping along  the sidewalks of our Boise cul-de-sac  in my new skirt.  I am giggling at freedom’s swish  because I hear myself inside it.  All the moms  and dads and kids and, it seems, even the dogs  are having a good laugh.  It’s just a joke I like  to play.  It’s the Fourth of July and our dog  has singed her whiskers black chasing the fireworks that skitter across the pavement. I am  Dreaming of that skirt, even now, how wild  an animal it can still be, how much sex for a boy was waiting within it, and is  waiting still.  I am woken by the still  ringing phone in 2001 and the voice  of my friend is saying an airplane has crashed  into some buildings in New York.  I am  telling her thanks but it is too early  in the morning for the news.  And now, I am still  At wrestling practice, and two boys take turns  hoisting me above their heads and slamming  my body to the matless floor. I am  sobbing.  I am saying stop.  Now, which is also before  now, the boys are flicking pennies at me.   They are calling me faggot and queer and grab  my ass.  Right now, I am laughing.  What difference,  to laugh or to cry?  Each a shade of the same thing.  Right now, my little brother is choosing  bubblegum ice cream.  There are actual pieces  of gum inside it, so that he must chew  as he licks.  And now, I am slapping the back  of his head.  I am calling him queer.  I am  telling him what a stupid choice it was.   I do not like to look at his face.  Here and now,  Amon Pyburn is landing in Virginia in 1783.   And now, my great grandfather is hoisting  a drill above his head. It bores into  granite ceiling. He is bearing a secret,  that he is afraid of the dark.  His rage is where his strength dwells.  His hatred  is longing for sunlight.  Even now,  My mother is looking down at the tiny  body of her youngest son. It lies on a coffee table in a private room.   She is looking at it right now.  The body  Drifting down the Snake is beginning to open his eyes.  He his pale and looking at the world as if from the bottom of a black hole.   And now, I am my grandfather’s last breath   breathing into the boy who wakes at the bottom  of the world.  I can see an old man coming  down here to meet me.  I used to think  there were two rivers: the Snake I remember  and the one I imagine. Right now, each boy  is beginning to make out a distant light  in the darkness.  The lantern the other carries.