The Narrative Image

Clouds, like insubstantial whales, drift almost inquisitively over the high desert plateau. Perhaps they taste the frosty tips of a sorority of mountains, or,  rising on ephemeral flippers to test the bounds of the stratosphere, they glimpse the face of a goddess. And I, perched on the edge of a reservoir, feel the chill sneak out from the shadows of the vast scar below me, chasing the sun's residual heat out of massive basalt rim-rock back into space. You'd think the gentle breeze could be the faintest evidence of the turmoil of a planet's atmosphere spinning, on average, hundreds of miles per hour against the vacuum of space, but only because your dilettantish comprehension of vacuums is based mostly on an object named Hoover . Regardless, you imagine it really is the sound of the world turning, and try to feel the ground trembling as it turns away from the light. Given imperfect knowledge, given mathematical ineptitude, given mistaken assumptions, I st