in the mossy cloud forest monkeys dissolve. their hoots filter among elemental sounds. branches shake, monkeys leaping, monkeys walking, tan hides, fur that was leaves, moving between sky and land. birds, or frogs, or lizards of sound call to those that understand their words. in the cloud forest, trees dissolve. if you should reach out, for as the call of keas, the ground yielding, there is no sure footing, if you should reach out and try to touch that which is substantial, you will touch only the illusions you came to destroy, they will run through your hands like tears, like broken waters. branches are not branches, they are light moss that drapes itself from branches. wood is not wood, it is watery matter through which swim bacteria, or some insect unknown to science that someday will fall from on high to escape its naming. the trees will make the rain, as they have for 100 million years--there is no ordinary counting of the times the sun lifted mist from their bodies, or for the cries of monkey-mothers whose young fell, monkeys who are as infants to the forest. we would know which trees have survived, if only there was an imprint of their endless sorrow in the granite rocks. masks of native wood carved by native hands, filled with sadness and strangeness, stare down from shelves and walls. within their curves moves the wind, down valleys of carved wood, my mind's hands run within river channels--perhaps there is an imprint here, a translation for young who cannot read, or there is only an illusion one sought to destroy, to understand.