Читать книгу A Spy in the Ruins - Christopher Bernard - Страница 11

Dazzling.

Light from every compass point.

In the outback at the edge of the frontage road the sky opens like a long-clenched fist. Offering a suddenness of generous blue and constantly changing clouds. Or reaching out to sternly grab someone’s hand. Or pointing to an error in a serene-looking notebook. Or about to slap someone’s frightened cheek. Or …

Are we ready for the next lesson have we learned anything from the last. The eyes blink rapidly they can’t take it all in. Frozen watching. Waiting. Vast perspectives on all sides. There is no end to the horizon.

Who is in control here? You or you or you? Someone overtaken someone taking over. Surprised as the egg of the lark spiraling up to nimbo-cumulus imagined from inside the shell… .

You are unseen but guessed at.

Shh, he’s finally sleeping now, leave him, let him sleep, go, go …

You think so do you let him forget. But he can’t forget. Ah where is senility when you finally need it… .

Behind the rivulets of laughter ice and the smell of sex the list of humiliations I went over each night before I slept.

No. Hosannas… .

A narcissus in a small clear bowl. Yes that.

On every side the boundaries were collapsing. At the time. The border guards stood like torches of pitch. You were drawn without your knowing it. Into the conspiracy.

The net flying beyond its reach. Adenine guanine cytosine thymine. Cartilage cleaver bone. Shell. Cage. Jail. Wings.

Into the tide …

O the astonishing novelty of dawn.

The screen goes blank with beauty it was so great a joy we vanished.

A spare swath of light crosses the hallway table. That!

Why we could never quite remember the lesson and so must keep repeating it.

The head has no voice only whispers furtive signatories to the treaty you made with the past. Hand-flocked mail sent to a blocked address and the cartouche that will not disappear from the monitor screen.

The solitary one moves across the bottom of the aquarium collecting trace bubbles rising from the oxygenator… . A glint of bluefish through the tidewater… . The air rising from two open hands… .

What you remember what he remembers is the pain in detail it cannot have been all suffering you reasoned why can’t I remember the happiness.

Let the door pull you through. As you approach the threshold you grow immense and slow never to be seen to attain it.

If esse est percipi you will not ever be.

As you dive into the shadowy heart of the rose. A cross fleur-de-lys on a banner. A tide of grasses moving over a plain. The boy not seen that day… .

I think he’s really sleeping now. His eyelids are quivering. Yes, of course, if you like. Stay.

Take the turnoff to Lock among the ghost towns in the hills beyond the city.

See the shadow of a condor. From April to November waterless earth. The sun nailed at noon. Creek beds smooth as.

The counterpane you can see it from above knobby with hill ranges like the knees of teenagers sleeping in the hot afternoon. A Cessna whirrs oblique to the horizon. Whistles sound in the burdock glen. The birds are strangers to me you announced. The keys clattered to the floor.

The peculiar range of sound in the country the chuff of tractors I could almost hear you from there. The exhilarating scent of compost. There were many horses but they were all silent. An open palm shining with moisture. The woods arched over me like hands. Pale as. Dark as. Thought of winter at the center of summer brightness. A daydream of snow. Flash of water skis an arm waving. The roar of the motorboat beyond the jetty. At the heart of the winter dream in the silence of summer the memory of other summers cocooned in snow. The taste of seawater. Everywhere… .

The soft hour of the sandpiper in the distance the pier that collapsed section by section over the decades but never entirely fallen.

The ship’s log lying open in the antechamber.

Coordinates in parallax psychopomps terns.

Whitecaps.

A thin layer of sand on the linoleum a bend in the tide reflecting the clouds. Foam crowns the shell of a horseshoe crab lying on the beach like the helmet of the fabled dead German soldier. With tail.

Retorts. Why retorts?

The fumes cleared the chemistry wing in long-lost adolescence why that now.

The shouts of the walking psychotics as they scream in the night. That you should pity but can’t except in retrospect.

A tangle of undercurrents the Portuguese man-o’-war the sharks. Airborne. Off the port of tempests. Cape Hatteras and the flight to the islands of Malatesta and the coast of. Campana the call of the horns. The review closed with a corps of dancers strutting to strident reprises of Semper Fi. Consume your reserves in the night. That you have been given many of. Gifts.

Our altars burned with offerings. The hammers formed a circle their handles point toward the center. A suspicious stare at the passport the airline ticket your shoes your look of innocence that no longer convinces it could be anyone. Here. Now. The fog closing in. A flare of coins a string of buoys. A plangent moan as of a snoring giant the sheet shifting over the harbor of his bed.

Oh what was his name? Nomen Dubium. Or nomina nuda!

The solitary one removes his hand.

A velocipede is overturned in the driveway.

Representations of social power in the land of the living were inflected through docile bodies panopticon of the net Argus made supreme polymorphous perverse expressed through the search for the multiple orgasm. Again. To erase the assertive I and the it. Parry riposte. Hit. Do not spare the heart. Whip. Tied to the finials of a bed. The humiliations the too-powerful pay for. The sexuality of the atom was to implode. We had a wanton tenderness phemes of repulsion and a drive toward nescience. We were counting bone samples in the art department. For catastrophe theory how the mosquito’s wings in the Maldives upset the tech stock rates on Nasdaq. A tear in the unified field. As collapsible as charm. Toward a cast party in the Balkans. Or the collapse of Bam. Or where the road for Cabeza de Vaca spanned. The bain-marie spilled on the countergirl’s thigh. El Camino Real to its end in the Ohlone graves. Tension between accomplishment and. Intention. The result never in doubt. So that everything can now happen at once. What was meant by the end of distance. There was no more there. Unto the tenth generation. Immediate demolition why wait.

Ah whoever is waiting?

The solitary one closes his book. Then casts it lazily into the flames on the café hearth. “I have written” you said “in invisible ink.” As if you could have known. You were caught in a glass brick signaling in the latest dead language.

How tall the young were they had the serenity of those who cannot imagine the future. The rent due for months she keeps her back to the millennium. There is acquaintance rape in his eyes. If I ignore him he may not go away but he will not be there. Between her lips a red medicinal Campari edged with rind.

At the time there was retrodisco at Julie’s Supper Club we were dancing just out of reach of each other’s arms.

Not robust he had the features of a mouse of prey. A woman was dancing with her own hands. There were three undrunk martinis. The glitter ball fell between us then surprising both of us bounced away. Even the growing tangle of gazes across the packed dance floor could not be sliced by a single hard thought. It was a virtual orgy. Ramifications of the appearance of mass traffic in the suburbs of Petra. Gridlock of mutually exclusive. Blossoming. What brought you here. Baiting us with frustration. An aphrodisiac cocktail of denial. Placental camisoles flip-flops thongs. Cars of silence and overhead the quiet rattle of a patrol helicopter circling. The spotlight caught you at an especially embarrassing moment. You were never good at the tactics of seduction. She was overly proud of her sexual career never having learned how easy it is for a woman. The man must work the woman need only fall. Back into the grotesqueness of remorse. A lemon-colored blotter. The hermit crabs returning at night to their stolen shells.

Midnight silence in the wards. The soft tread of the nurses. They think I am dead and are trying to ignore me.

The eulogy was brief enough. Someone spoke and what he said was what no one would have expected. To pass on. To remove. To erase your words before they were spoken. Like a sculptor of air. With all the self-destructive honesty of eros. These emblems of worship provided the earliest signs of their civilization. The gathering in the atrium expressed its grief through the attenuation of expression its calm even cheerfulness. There were no tears. All the more overwhelming was the devastation within. Subordinate accuracy to politeness but respect nothing. Of strange presumption there was among other examples that could be mentioned the chapel awkwardly placed on the university campus. I wore my hopes like a life preserver that didn’t fit but would have to do. What does happen when two become one. The elaborate emptiness of the ritual the ritual hypocrisy of the priest the priest who had never after all even met her.

You did not look dead even the last time I saw you. Refuse circulation stuff it in your mouth place one then the other over your eyes. The pilot at the ferry landing in the shadow of the prison. Not quite. The prison is due north. Always regnant in sun from there. He collected bribes from the timid among them.

A grotesque pause.

Like an inconvenience. Into the trash of a life. Such clarity was a form of deception after all. There was an alibi but you disposed of it when you. Which means less now than what it might have meant at the time. The flatworm cut in two was resurrected twice.

What was that? I thought he just laughed. Shh. His eyes are quivering.

Partly hypocritical praise yields to jokes at the banquet followed by singing though no dancing. Reflecting morning sunlight the eight points of the Maltese cross as it spins snakes spirals. The ashtray in my hand is the shape of a lotus in glass. Her name falls through the air. Weakie thrashing on the dinghy seat. Save as. Give it a name. Then close it. Nail it down. Now.

Floating hovering a total openness where everything is available all closure relative all certainty tentative suspense of intention held breath of possibility the resolution into meaning delayed or not so much delayed as shied glanced at acknowledged caressed. In embryo moving toward birth.

You are my possible lover. But not now.

Not yet made whole but soon to be made whole. Some day some hour. Metaphors of immanent transcendence and other oxymorons. Flickering. Fritillary. A strange attractor graphs a butterfly.

Available in the dark whole brightness. Empire of holy tragic of happy. Memorialized by the one not to release the many. In your hand. In the white ink well of. Glory. Back alley of grunge the smell of decayed bananas not forgotten. In your face. A rage of tenderness.

What better way to express desire’s paradox than the oxymoron. Thirst was the desert’s happiness. Cloud chamber of the night. Shrunk to naked singularity the genesis event. From an original tranquility serenely exploding. Etc. The self turned inside out like a sock. The solitary one plays in a sandbox of galaxies. Building bridges to emptiness which then plodes. Like a piñata in a park. Crowded with happiness oh smothered with joy. A sundae. Hot fudge. Lots of fun. Tag you’re it. Your time your way your side your fault your turn. Great America. Terrific Milky Way especially with nougat. Making love to the air. In order to exist at all she had to have sex with the universe. At the center of her cunt burned God. In ecstasy. Forever. How could you not love. Her. She did not believe it she could not let herself believe it.

The solitary one pushed down the walls of the sandcastle. To expose a pair of clam shells pressed together like hands in prayer. The stink of stagnant water in the tidepool. At the zenith the Perseids scratching the night. The night a tunnel beneath the road. The hunger of being in pursuit. Smell of panic. The eyes turning to you as you sleep.

What is love.

The solitary one caressed his thighs remembering. His head was eaten by the moon. Salt heart. Unknown the void between mountain and mountain. The cable dazzled us away. We were airborne for half the night. She leaked blood and tasted of sweat and tears. I licked the shadow beneath your mouth I sucked the sweetness of your nipple I feasted on the starvation of your loins. Until you took me. And shattered me against your heart’s stone.

You were a blank screen of contradictions. You were a scavenger of happiness. You sifted your life through your mouth like sand. And cannot die because he never lived.

The heart is the size of a loosely clenched fist. Gray tells you so. The lambent blue of a western mountain flower. What color are my eyes today. White.

He cried. Wake him up. I can’t. He cried.

Glass spy.

Ruins of the kingdom.

Far far away far flung.

The village at the bottom of the road was where the rooster could no longer be heard. Velvet as the creek bed the embrowning layers of leaves. A tremor of waterskate. A shape of spire surrounded by maple. Long long the distant siren. Crack of shotgun in the dazzled glen. You tasted the hot cross bun before the butter. Enchanting. But what was the cause of the anxiety that passed between our eyes? One speaks there only when one is lost.

Look. The farmer raised his cap in greeting. It is a friendly place the talk is mainly about the low prices for farm products and rising real estate taxes. The soft stench of the cowstables of milk and manure and their comfortable stares. Moo cow. Lovably ponderous tender and dumb. The rotted barn door opening to the blanched fields. Gone. Sky. Road. Rolling thunder of traffic. The hand riding the slipstream. An ensign snapping at the mast. Green blur of roadside whipping past. Swift plunges into the forest darts of sunlight on flashes of meadow shafts of brightness a fugue dream of the kingdom thought of the ornateness of leaves the netting of branches the dropped jewel boxes of wild flowers the weaving of the songs of the birds. Enframed in blur slipping by. Velocity. The automobile as an aid to daydreaming. Between any two cities there is a reverie. The hum of cement. Fly cast in amber. A special flair for knowing where to be at what time. Pigeons perched on his shoulders for the slightest reason. He dipped the zinc pail into the vat of milk. All you needed to do was make a list and you had an order. The peacock shrieks beneath the willow. The little girl drops her fork to the restaurant floor. A blow of ocean breeze makes the awning snap. The half-open door creaks in. If you listen you can make out what they are shouting on the beach. The laughter. The officious whistling of the lifeguards. A soothing roar of surf. Lapped with little pools of quiet. Your feet in the water your eyes on the clouds your mind in the city your heart in the forest. Your soul on the back of your tongue.

There we were all crammed into a multivalent now here always. Then that is to say at that time. How wrong we were! Curled around the jugular nonetheless. Polysemic. Suffocating.

Nothing was not available. Electronic hysteria glossolalia of the chatroom elusive but multiple tasks. There were subordinate questions such as who tied the solitary one to the bedposts. The exquisite happiness of public humiliation fed absolute pride. The random constellations of public chaos organized according to fire codes and usage zones. Woman was the principle of disorganization man the imposer suspect in the urban ghettos of repealed order.

She again. Who dared you to set her boundaries. Who lashed according to absolute moments. Living in a present without past without future. Demanding submission to pity. Inciting the stallion to the thrust of light. A hand on muscle. Strain without object. The strenuous drive toward the normal. The ordinary an irresistible dare.

She again. We dreamed of each other for days. Again. We stalked each other like prey our fear equal to our despair. Again. You stood before me like a pillar of darkness in the wilderness. Wherever I reached for you you disappeared in a play of fire and pain. You burned me. There was nowhere to go. The shed collapsed in the back of my mouth… . The titular leader advanced to the front of the march. And there spoke to the line of winter police. Our job is not to move. Our ice is your boundary.

In your hand the possible adventure. That must come out. Like an afterwards of stark beauty. A bed of vastness. Caught in a constabulary of sheets. Wild nights of memory and a litter of squibs. Larks of irresponsibility. Rocket flowers in the community gardens. Nothing but name to back it but that was enough. At the time.

The solitary one returned to his solitude with a hurried bouquet of thankfulness. To briefly coin his joy.

A spiral of heavenliness rose from his lamp.

She danced in the pocket of the meadow thinking she was alone. Purslane. A long sigh between beats of night. Being taken with. Being overtaken by. A portfolio of elevations for an ideal city. Gargoyles prone with chin in palm on malachite consoles. Glass caryatids holding the tablets. A line of prophets speaking words of stone.

We could hear everything. Those of us alive at the time that is. Nothing was more amazing than the way things came and came. The wonder of the night was that it recurred there was always a sky above him the clouds marshaled thought into ranks of possibility the stars uncurtained the hallways of the night there were infinite perspectives of assurance. The glorious freedom of the dream.

They felt themselves expand to the ends of the universe the musicians of quantity told them had no end. Though only in thought it was enough. For you to have it. To turn your back on the shattering. The moon a flocking of swallows the sun an arrow of tenderness. Where could they meet but on the sand. But you told me to. And I did it. Here. See.

Tracing the path of the unknown one the silent one in another part of the city. For we moved to a city. Then.

Back and forth the cat’s cradle of blue threads of light.

Ubiquitous tangents of the real.

Valance. Vectors. Corrupted sectors. Prime time. Brief psychotic breaks.

Healing followed the same pattern.

He still felt the occasional stab of a barely endurable anguish in the phantom heart.

I know it is not there and yet I feel it.

Useless notes from the director applied to a hopeless production. And yet the paradox held. The swinging bell in the great cathedral near the pension where we stayed in that ancient city. Built over centuries weird pockets of light on the entablature where the grotesque peeked at the world between the averted loins of the beautiful.

You turned toward me in sadness away from me in joy. That was a hard time.

Knots of the impenetrable hung like lianas in our room. Unbearable the brief openings of light. Seeing was. Between starlight and the seapaths of the moon. She stepped on darkness timidly gathering her hands each clutching a different fear to her small and withered breasts.

Cross.

Aching to and unable to. Behind him the ghosts of his unborn children. We received with clenched hands the offerings. We were showered with blessings. We held our hands over our heads to protect them from the sun. We pleaded for exemption.

By that time love had become unendurable.

The low iron railing around the small temple.

More crows.

At the time the orans presided the slim figure on the catacomb wall rose before him as he turned the corner her arms raised in prayer. The surprise of it. The wonder of a prayer that is not stooped to the knees head bent hands clasped the body clenched in the body language of pleading or contrition.

Not a supplicant a celebrant. Of what mystery you could not see in those eyes.

The beardless Christ the lamb against the white wall of the alcove. Fascinans. The tenderness of her. Presents. What was that unknowingness other than the search for. Scintilla. Where the body met the gleaning of its desire. Caligine. Hard love. Broken softened worked to usefulness. But whose use. Contemplatio. Coincidentia. If there were god what then. What if not. Where put her longing. In hopeless quest for justice in the empty courts of the world. Squeezing the stone for blood. She lived in unquenched thirst in unslaked hunger. The ten thousand beings were not enough without the one thing needed. What is that. What is that. There was no way. Oppositorum. She murmured god not knowing what she said. She murmured all not knowing what she said. She murmured you not knowing what she said. Her arms made a cross of her body. A gesture of powerless wings.

At the center of her devotion burned a banked but incurable fury.

In the memoirs of the assistant nothing has been revealed. We will seek in vain for a persuasive justification. The main events are scanted the relief is of trivia against a background of confusion.

You never said you would tell me.

Given the arbitrariness of the cornerstone to the baptistry of conversion there was little telling what the eventual construction would amount to before collapsing. Piezo. Volta. Cell. Into the casuistry of ordinances and the dark faded mold where. Figural discourse reverted to a slightly quaint abstraction. Picking at instances of law and statistical aberration. The turtle’s shield. Hiding from the interaction of the egg.

And when one was erased. Cities of infusion the cries of the crazy in the alley which reverted to euphemisms in the café. The night inversions. The male into the female connection to secure.

Resolved we thought we were enough.

Vast cope of twilight. Foundations rocking on the air were not beyond settling into the sea’s. The sea’s children heard almost laughing. Through the night shaft. Noises you mistook at first for desperation. Yes laughter.

My neighbor’s face appeared suddenly on the back of my hand. You cannot move further in. We found a coil rusting from a kind of oxidized nostalgia. Of crystallized blood. It prevented us for years from recognizing the future in the oak tree by the currents of the road… . Twenty years would pass before he woke. In the barranca. Inhabited by only the shy natives of the past. Under the burning star.

In every rhetoric of explanation there was a trope of dismissal. No mathematical system being both consistent and complete. Incongruent topologies variant geometries of possibility taxonomies of doubt leaving everything possible again. For example the taste of your name in my mouth. Of salt and bay leaves. Unfinished rosewood. A lock of chestnut hair shot with lianas of gray. Of white. An irrational at the heart of counting.

Infinitely caressed endlessly aroused.

Moving toward the lightning of is followed by endless thunder.

A term that designifies god.

A broken curtain of rain covered the jungle mountain.

Having taken the absolute we were left with wheels of partial the luminous individual flecked with drops of light.

The absolute contingent in the fragrance of the momentary.

The wilting tea rose in the bud vase.

Infinitely slow what had gone in a moment.

Whirring like a desert of butterflies rising off the coastal islands.

Origami twisting in the fog.

A court of matriarchs passing judgment in the church cellar.

In the southwestern quadrant a smudge of comet like a smear of chalk wiped by the night’s finger.

The pristine attempt at a calculation not based on the imposition of an identity.

Thralled. Parataxis. Metaphor.

I take you for what you cannot be.

Dusty grammar. Dusty grammarian.

Like pink dead worms on black asphalt after the autumn rains the words appearing beneath your hand. Then forgotten. Should anyone hear there being no difference since all is hidden in a code without cipher. The street washed clean next day. The crown of roads.

What story to tell. Is there a motion toward. Is there possibility. We live ones never knew when we set out we simply went. Between channel walls of expectation down flues of obligation anxiety and desire. Fear that we could not know. Could not be. Or have less than what we needed. Considerably less. Our being after all small sealed repositories of recurrent need. For nourishment protection the respectful greetings of friends. The family of toleration. And the blank terror of other people’s gestures. To let us fall without our knowing into the nihilism of friendly manners. How we could be erased. At will. Our total dependence at the time to which we must at all times lie. Convincingly. With enthusiasm.

And take what power we might.

The last definition of freedom you repeated to me over a midweek lunch at Zingari. Is the freedom to fire. And immediately flames surrounded the small flat in a nondescript part of the city. Dancing ecstatically. Like a mummer in a drunken August cakewalk lighting the drug that had transcended our eyes. Laughing loud they carried you enthusiastically to another part of the city where they dumped your unconscious but still breathing carcass between a trailer of unintelligible ideals and a forklift.

He woke to the ululation of denials where what he admitted only proved what he never would. That was the story he had to tell. Tearing up the cards of his solitaire game one at a time until none are left. Of us. Of you.

Let tenderness advance as the answer to uncertainty if all this escapes your understanding. For it certainly escapes mine. As it escaped his. Battlements not so much needed as granted without asking. Gunwales against which the fishermen slept. There were banquets every evening and a gift for quiet laughter. Students met in the garden and rehearsed the ideas of millennial exploration. Most wrong turns were not denounced as much as welcomed with a gracious baffled smile. For every labyrinth had a santos at its heart. The couples on the tombs were holding hands. But you were left alone with your happiness. Guilt was considered a rumor yet even it was given a room where it might lay its head for the night. Shame blushed at its posterity of joy. Little boys met in secret covens of adventure where revenge against the dragon was plotted where ciphered screeds were rolled in expectant corners. Back lots were empires haunted houses challenges to our paladins neighboring woods enormous and unexplored frontiers. We played Indians in the yellow weeds.

There were signs in the sky above Lock.

Our lives were unfolding symbols lined with promise and warning. Vast green and enormous blue were the theater for our shadow plays. A drama was an incitement to glory. The small beauty of the snapdragon was the signature of an all-powerful tenderness. Shadows stalked the earth beneath the vast keels of the clouds. There was no hardness that did not have in mind our happiness.

God was in the wind. No sooner doubt it than doubt your doubt of it.

Pirates laughed in the beech trees. The cavalry irrupted from stands of bush. Adventure was the taste of the morning as comfort was that of twilight. Happiness was no promise for tomorrow happiness was perpetual now.

Our castle held us like a hand its corridors were roads to the edges of the sea. Its walls were hung with tapestries designed in abstract brocades of rich hues threaded with mineral. Wolfhounds slept near the fire twitching at dreams of prey. The high roof suspended kingdoms and opened at the vanishing of the sun to show us the vast entanglement of the stars.

Snow was the frame for our wonder.

Silence. Silence. Yet more silence. He is listening no longer.

At the bottom of the stairs lay a head like a peeled heart. We set the traps with human bait.

In the stalls hung the split carcasses of hogs. Stink of flies above the catchment. No stimulant more vitalizing. It edged the mind with a strange unwholesome clarity. There was nothing to see but the revulsion of the audience. Of doubtful sincerity. For they were fascinated by the roadside sandwich of bodies pressed between the slammed cars.

A skein of cues and forgotten lines. An attack of stagefright in a hermit’s den.

The legerdemain of power the hostile examination of language.

The birth of innocence.

Roadkill.

Jersualem cross targets.

The iniquity of the page followed you like a lovesick dog.

Text for midrash.

Squatting in the sweat lodge baying at the points of the compass. Some might consider it a euphemism for hysteria. And other attention deficits. A naked muttering accosting a prim silence. And we lifted like the ash of a burning moth. You cupped your hand around the thought of my pain. Then carefully pressed the scalpel in.

In the first of the twenty-three layers that constituted the ancient city before the conquest by Scipio Africanus lay the undressed stones of a temple in its original foundation. Teneo te. Terra mea. In the turbulence of no peace. A branding. Lamb on the altar pulled splay. Army lined along the ridge. Tossed banners flickering in a crosswind. Nothing more a threat than the moment of incarnation. The tangle of roots edged into us from variant wildernesses of phoneme and radical the rangers stood watch in the towers of spiders. Facies zone.

Women were the generators of insoluble problems.

Their goal was the demolition of what they called the crystal dome. It was strenuous and there was no standard of success. The obsession and frustration of the overachiever. Delayed resolution of the chord. The dream of your death unknown to me. Behind my back suddenly erased. I had not dreamt of you in years. Not since our awful love began. Was it love it was love. The nave turned around itself in the choir. I had come to the end point of land in the sound there was nowhere to turn but back. And in that moment you disappeared.

The soundless words chipped into the low stone wall. An admonition you no longer remember. Yes. Towers.

The soft book grew beneath your hands. One by one the leaves unfolded across the binding in the palm. Patient eyes wondering if there was a story there and if so when it would begin. Catching at the melody as if at a thread. Echoes. You dozed off for a moment. The liminal threshold where most dreams are remembered. Rapid eye movement. Saccade. If there is an attack into sleep. Barren plains. The percentage of remuneration times the interest on your debt. What if your love letter to the world is unreadable sweet foolish romantic. Connections fall on every side rise unscaleable walls. Of glass and snowpack.

Resist the seduction at your peril. Licking your lips. You love. What was there about. To possibly. Tantalus. Wading though mercury a mirror of sea. It gilds the flanks of Venus. There is nothing to want he said primly because there is nothing to have. There. Hole surrounded by flesh. She heard. And fled. Doors slamming down the hall. You know too much. It was a long tale compressed into a few words. A catherine wheel. A stocking. A metal box. Because you didn’t. Not once. Ever.

His emotional level was that of an underdeveloped graduate student. No one he had loved had yet died. It was bound to go on forever. Our power was infinite. We were going to show them how it was done. One of the gifts of age is that you learn to forgive the young their unforgivingness. We became at last kind to ourselves. In their eyes danced the splendor of the absolute. Success was mandatory. Grandeur vaulted on every side. The universe opened like an enormous theater and beckoned you to the tables of honor. Hosts of women gazed at us from cushions along the palace corridor. A hand gently and thoughtfully attended your advance into wandering. Although our secrets were held in a polished vanity chest locked with gold and inlaid with mother-of-pearl we consulted them only on the soft occasions when our judges were safe to ignore us. Bliss was it. The enameled park. A molted feather lay on the stoop. I put forth my hand fearfully and tenderly.

The heavy snows were after all the first promise of spring.

The solitary one briefly rejoiced in his hard-won aloneness and listened with affection through the decaying wall to the ghosts.

Nothing whatever could stop us. Every conversation dissolved into music. The thrush on the locust tree in the darkening courtyard sang for you alone. Walking the streets was a triumphal procession. Joy was not as much an anticipation as an embarrassment. I was almost ashamed of my happiness.

We were giants and wrapped the crowds in our arms. She ached to give. He was the banner of his own victory. You moved from temple to temple seeking a god adequate to your worship. The only source of a deepening sadness was the thought that you would never be adequate to your love. There were so many clouds.

And the sun and an assault of laughter. Aimless shafts vaulted into the white dandelion air. The hunters knocked at the sky’s mother-of-pearl. The springhouse. The feel of cold water on her ankles. In the left hand was an oyster shell in the right hand fields of summer corn. Intensities of endurance and the demand for an instant heroism. Marked the intolerance of the young ones.

So that we learned to thank.

What before left us fitting fragments into a pattern that might suggest a symbol out of the luminous trash of the past a night road to the future.

The solitary one smiled in the darkness of the shed. Among the branches the spiders were weaving a signature across the sky.

Fears crossed the field in clouds of fireflies. Lambent anxieties fox fire. Immense spires. A flock spiralling across the autumn bells. Agate and rose that. That there were helices where asymptotes had been denied. Begging ever closer. Truth functions and the elegance of symbolic logic revealed to have been forms of political torture. The ascent of equality led to the even distribution of pain across any given population. If everyone is unhappy. What is daunting is the prospect of joy. Instinct for leveling and the vertigo of the spectacle. Tropism of the valley peeling away layers on layers of mountain. Intoxicating view. The point was to be reasonable beyond the tolerance of pain. Avoidance theory propounded the law of the deflection of bodies proportional to the square of their desire. The fear of sex was the fear of dissolution. We paused in astonishment. The century was just beginning to end a new one to begin. To millennial strains. How could one hold so many symmetries in one hand.

You made a sign to keep me from staying. But it was a language I had not mastered. There was no response. Yesterday’s signs of romance seemed embarrassing today. They had made us. It was time to lay siege to the city but all we had were catapults of oak and gut and battering rams from an old millennium.

Daydreams spinning into sunlight.

It was a hackneyed phrase but so true so true.

The wilderness of their bodies. He wondered if he should be ashamed. All my life I sought the woman who all my life would flee. Perhaps after several years of celibacy it was time to end. Is masturbation a form of celibacy what after all is the survival value of the opposable thumb. You turned from me appalled. No one like you should have desire you said. I will save you I will screw you I will dump you. The sequence rigidly followed. My heart committed suicide several times. It was easier than murder. Like life itself. To erase the memory of love with great slowness.

The gods of adequacy were laughing you could hear it at the head of the stairs.

The theory of chaos after all was not a theory of chaos.

Words clustered according to structures of grammar over which the speaker had no ultimate control. Association was free only to a point. Which was as frustrating as it was reassuring. Or will be. The roses on the trellis near the birdbath in the forgotten corner of the garden. Night light. I played a game of stones on a sort of frame of random parallels. We bared our bleeding wrists to the moon and the long sleep of the bees.

Evensong.

Arrows of geese. The plangent honk and responding laughter the hug of the enormous ground.

Windmills.

The smell of drying oils.

It gave you your first sensation of a life ruined by art hunt for phantoms craft of illusions obsessive assertions of rejected self the seduction the strange liminal joy.

A life devoted to the masochism of romance.

For thou art. Glory. And I worship thee. Power. Bless me. Again. Splendor. Show thyself. In glory. Make me. Yours. Destroy me. Again. He said. And she heard. You noted this in your yellow notebook of suspect themes for future research.

He felt as though he were walking down the streets of a vanishing life with a bomb ticking between his thighs. A terrorist of love. You have been condemned to kill all in your vicinity in a series of virtual suicides. Though years had passed. And harm was not after all his intent. It was more like redemption. Not health the goal kept firmly in mind but transcendence.

Precession of paradoxes in testimonials of exhausted desire. Sated with self-love they turned back to the world with enchanted eyes.

How could one not have suspected them of predatory habits given their way of life their income their neighborhood their diet. The calcified victim found after exploratory surgery in the alimentary canal. Of course we were vegetarian that year. It was all we could do to suspend our purity for a summer. There is nothing as ludicrous as self-confidence. Our lives were pratfalls of faith. We kept stubbing against the thresholds of our perfection and raged in tears all night over our book of failures.

We never forgave the mirror its serenity.

For the source of our relentless feelings of guilt was our inability to rise to our own standards for longer than it took to reveal them. Then we collapsed. Yet the sun hung above us so blinding and so clear. Our hatred of life you must understand was the purest expression of our love. We had no hope and yet we were prickly with moods and tenderness. It was an askesis of being. Existence then was a murderous joy. Truth was no longer possible and yet was our only hope.

Our hands bled from handling the stars. The larval stage of being was the rat on the threshold of maturity. Effloresence. Denial. Erasure. What was our life it was the politics of the everyday the abandonment of expectation the reality principle defeating the pleasure principle in single combat.

Ocean.

And love if not a hand held out to the impossible as to an abandoned child. Folded clothes locked in a winter closet. The smell of mildew and mothballs. And the child left to die on the night hillside. Faced it once then turned away. The twisting neck of the owl. Its cry like that of a woman’s shriek as she comes as she gives birth as she dies as she attacks. As the blood freezes into being.

The night is so silent. Did I fall asleep? He’s moved. Yes, I’m sure he’s moved.

Compline.

The ice cross of the moon blanches the winter fields of what was once your home.

Distant barking.

The edge of light at the bottom of the architect’s lamp moves unsteadily as he draws it near. A careful deleting.

A blade sweeps the strings of a harp.

The invincibility of the human is terrifying. That is why she ignored it. Raised in a center of darkness the breasts of gift. Needing to give. Pulsating with the most generous of frustrations.

There was nowhere to stand where she drowned. Flailing between knots of driftwood. The sand loosening between her fingers. She sailed like an angel into the sea. And he was left to his despair watching.

That’s too easy despair is easy death is easy what is hard hard is reaching out holding on drawing in is life is hope is love she proclaimed all heroism the violets falling from her eyes.

She wept in her anger. I will not give up I will not she broke down I will not not not. He stroked her hair from far away from across the sea he reached out and wiped the tears with his finger. He held her in the world of his arms. They did not settle for less than everything. They scarred each other’s hearts with diamonds. The dream of each was the storm in which the other wrecked and drowned.

There were those who refused all sorrow their faces were fixed in a purity of mad joy. You met them in the hallways of the university they were often surrounded by admirers. The mind was its own place they shouted in the square there is no loss that is not gain the erasure of earth is the birthing of a star behind each love there is another.

Ill wind.

You looked at them bewildered with hope you longed to believe. Chaos is unspeakable joy they said sorrow is a chatterbox. Her tears had no place in the dictatorship of fulfillment happiness is the only imperative happiness is success success is the moment’s victor follow it. Wipe memory from your lips with the kiss’s fervor lick the body that desires you enter pleasure engulf joy go crazy with absolute clarity.

She writhed on the dance floor like a snake of banners blotting out the past the future the latticework of obligation and care crumbled in the moment’s fire such power raised such love from the flames.

Among the flash-fire cities the shimmer of landscapes the flicker and vanishing of empire and continent and ocean and world turned and dissolved the face of every person she had loved o pyre of essence o woodland of flames.

Sudden palaces.

She could not stand she could not walk she could not lie so she danced on the floor of embers secretly hoping for a quick end to all. Which cannot be given like every too-passionate desire.

The smell of burning skin.

They smeared their bodies with water and ash. Where there had been a body there was a vanishing. In the garden a wood dove flickered between the trees.

Plush consoles and amber ornaments the caught fly of an extinct species clearly articulated in the polished sepia-brown oblong.

Porcelain objects aligned with studied negligence on shallow glass shelves.

Shafts of light supporting the ends of long afternoon hallways.

Motes hung above the carpets.

They were shrewd and manipulative at that time. It was the result of a cunning ancestor’s unscrupulous and patient accumulation of a jealous futurity.

Stocks and bonds.

It was a chained freedom but it was freedom.

I had always assumed wealth. What a shock.

The flattering placement of mirrors on landings at the ends of brief corridors above the mantel of the rarely used fireplace.

Her ears were indeed translucent. Paper nautilus of light.

The pinking shears on the formica table top. Zigzags of cloth. A hum and throttle of sewing machine. Domiciliary habits and cares the round paper lid of the glass milk bottle. Thumb and finger. A closing refrigerator door the breath of cold. That made one feel briefly warmer.

Snow outside.

Such happiness.

And when the rains came we dawdled in doorways and played endless games on the scattered rugs gin and monopoly and magic tricks and marbles and jacks for the girls and quarrelled because reconciliations were so nice and ran away though there was nowhere to run our universe was infinite and bound.

Tranquility over the waters of the Cher. Chenonceau my castle of murmurs. What a theater it is you said. What I asked. And embarrassed and happy she said our life. Oh yes that yes our life I said should we be grateful she said or ashamed.

The long climb out of the valley of nettles and ice streams toward the village on the summer plateau.

Pockets of schist and huge knuckles of moraine like the remains of.

The oblique angle of anticipation.

Although they were uncertain how their adventures would turn out and disaster was always a prospect.

The pleasure of not quite knowing what might happen next.

Politics.

The possibility of imminent collapse.

A shadow propped against a corner of the empty living room.

Why after a certain age one ceases to feel.

Unknown to them they had blossomed.

The beach was littered with fallen roses.

And the stones rose between the cedars in a gray pile of incoherent elevations and scrambled floorplans. You made your way through as though it were desire’s maze. Every corner offered an enthralling spectacle in prospect an illusory dead end. For pessimism was never entirely justified. Nor optimism though there was always hope on that island despite every setback and there were many. The roads you drove down were defined by the ditches you fell into. The tangle of mist resolved for a moment into a map a circuit board of currents carefully engineered to offer you a way out or at least the thought. Here was a door there a window we were given much scope. On the porch the rockers in the cellar a winter’s load of coal. A curtain in the draft. A statistical average of contentment between extremes of nightmare and ecstasy. Unsheathed nerves and the tenderness beneath the callous.

It was advised to render not too much even to the heart if you would know contentment.

A view of mountains seen before only in photographs and movies.

It was a vastness one could not even dream. Nor remember except as a stifled exclamation.

Cold and unbroken.

White heights.

The fishermen returned home at nightfall bearing presents from the sea. A shoal of blues had caught in an undercurrent past the windward islands and drove down the coast past the sparkling lines. The men with their waiting hooks. In patience the bait was a window the capture a charm. And possession a means of honorable seduction.

They flailed in the buckets but could not escape. Not then. The panting of the gray gills the flanks the spasms of hope the cold eyes in retreat.

Arc of terror.

To leap from your hands into the sea. To escape anyhow anywhere and keep escaping. As though the world were a bucket the sea a crowd of hands clasping them as they flee the medium of their escape their prison. In those eyes unmistakable panic.

We were the fishermen and the sea and the baited hook and the caught fish and the longing to escape and the hunger and the nourishment that fed us. A ubiquity of incomprehensible yet the charge was to discover. Slated in commands of chalk.

So she fed herself on her fear.

He sliced the fruit and raised each piece to her lips.

What he found in the book that he had removed without help from the high shelf in the school library was a maze and tangle of highly wrought phrases that described a cast of experiences by turns agonizing and ecstatic without clear cause enigmatic to the ignorant reader.

He was made to feel like a child listening to the incomprehensible conversation of adults the shorthand of an uncanny omniscience.

These were the beneficiaries of power.

His only certainty was that he would be put in the wrong and made to pay for it.

The penalties came randomly and severely.

You had to make up your mind though mind was what you did not yet have.

He stood on the threshold unable either to enter the room or turn on his heel and leave.

The darkness at each moment promised to break and did not.

Phase transition into being.

The war against reality.

It was like a dream and you wanted to awake and were not allowed to.

Words wedded in luminous arcs chains of laughter lightning and music promised a gift even as they dimmed to haunting possibility brightened in the air between two eager faces rose from the pages of an afternoon garden then out of nowhere broke like a pod eaten by parasites clashed in the twilight scattered like fireworks fell into pockets of ash and brightness memories of regard grails of understanding burned the ear with anger and fear shimmering in splinters of incomprehension.

All was in suspense it was thrilling at first and for long after not knowing or caring to know not seeing ahead more than the next curve in the road the spine of the next hill against a cloud forming on the horizon a charge of lights down a night road a crowd of shadows massing around your head your hand held out for an alm of the mystery.

But then one wanted it to resolve into something firm and clear a plinth of stone a crystal even a door of lead to batter against in exhausted frustration for it was mortally wearying to chase it over those icy meadows there was nowhere to rest there was nothing to believe there was nothing to know but no it stayed quick and fluid and slipped from his grasp like a joke he was not meant to understand the book the solitary one read was his life at that time it abandoned him to questions he could not answer yet needed to urgently it tantalized him with every conceivable answer and

therefore

no answer at all the binding dissolved in his hands the print appeared on his palms he read the runes of his veins until he was half blind.

You wanted to run away but there was nowhere to run.

This was escape and there was nowhere to escape from that.

Any attempt to stop the wheel merely made it turn faster.

The world spun like a nail inside his head. It drove down through in out the axis of a top a pain just barely endurable.

Nothing was allowed to make sense.

The hammer descended without ever reaching the vase.

Neither creation nor destruction but a state between the two suspended.

The unmerited punishment of love.

Silence. Or is it the hum of an iron lung? But do iron lungs hum?

Or have you too fallen asleep.

Then you will never know how she contracted bliss that summer. There was nothing that was not real. She wore sun dresses and woven sandals and her hair in a long braid or loose bun and large floppy hats that hid her eyes from the sky. She carried her heart between her lips. A silver anklet sparkled at the back of her mind but she feared that wearing one might make her meaning too clear. She had the painful tenderness of those who are both timid and sincere. She told herself bitter truths in the desolation of her solitude as though picking at a wound that would not heal. She was moral to a fault. She was in love with God. She was ashamed of the blood between her thighs. She wore no lipstick on the day it started it was as though she were doing penance for something she had forgotten she ached to remember. Her mother had not told her how it hard it was to be a woman and why were men so unaware. She opened her eyes with all her might she fed on light as a vampire does on blood and yet we saw nothing at the time. Her body was a wall between herself and the world. And yet there were times when the wall collapsed and light streamed in from every side bathing her darkness and penetrating her with wave on wave of joy.

Where did it come from where did it go.

There was amazement in the day. Anything could happen anything did happen. Her body shifted with the tides her body perished in the arms of the moon from those same arms her body was reborn her body was her tyrant her body was her lover her body was her betrayer a locus of tempests the principle of chaos the fault line passed through her she was the problem that no one could solve she carried a twister in her womb. Beneath her silence there was laughter shaking with tears. She felt like an aircraft doing somersaults in the air always on the point of lunging into a dive the crowd would be astonished amazed horrified with an eerie feeling of privilege that they had witnessed the tragedy they would never forget that day.

Salto mortale.

She sat quietly in a corner and felt herself spinning out of control.

It was when she was happy that we worried most when she was desperate we shrugged at what we called her moods.

She walked in unsteady balance over the abyss of her body trying not to look down.

What will you do he asked himself on the other side of the partition.

The light had fallen from the day.

Between his desire and his desire there was fear it was like a page written in words of shame.

There came a time when he was afraid to let himself believe.

Golden was the arrow catching up with him as he vaulted toward the clouds. Gentle were the fingers of the bars. So he wrapped himself up between his walls.

It was love that then ripped him from himself and returned to him shame and joy he walked each day across the splinters of his heart the scabs became scars the scars became callous eventually free of the bandages and the splint he hobbled outside again to the open air.

Birdsong emptiness.

She does not love you he said to the morning and grew calm.

He returned the precious object to the shelf and steadied his nerves with a drink that was tasteless and clear.

He had lost often enough to play without hope he had given up hope he was tranquil. Not joy not despair he thought anything but joy and despair.

He discovered the reassurance of control.

What after all was contentment not obtaining what one desires but not having desired or gained. Satiety and peace though this contradicted what he had just thought.

He began smoking again.

He picked his heart to pieces and then shook the pieces over the ground they lay there dazzling in the sunlight splinters of glass and flames as he stood blanked out in the sun. There was nothing to do but give up I am not a saint I am not a hero he repeated to himself over and over.

In the mirror he saw her bitter look.

Equipoise between two hindrances paralysis before the fork in the road which way leads faster to damnation one cannot tell from here the depth of the fall. So he thought at the time. He had grown.

Nothing appeared as grand as what had never been but might be. The air was transparent as possibility it smelled without the pungent stimulating stench extremely pleasurable (piercing sweet) in small doses of reality.

It was now clear. There was no smog at all between himself and his eyes. His movements his words were painfully awkward his thoughts his feelings were dazzling swift all powerful they swept the night in enormous dreams oh what will life hold in store. He was in love with life he could hardly bear the joy of taking in a breath the deep penetration of the light. He felt the hand of God beneath his feet each thought was touched with grace he felt the terrible privilege of living. He heard the hosannas of the angels welcoming him into time he shook in thankfulness. He felt so happy he was almost ashamed. They whispered among themselves and tittered softly the young women. The solitary one felt no solitude rather a rustling of wings and whispers that followed him everywhere. Desire burned in his hand. The torch procession grew out of the darkness he watched it moving toward him the songs grew louder there was drunken laughter it was a wedding procession they were bearing the newly-weds to their tent somewhere at the edge of the darkness. He stood off to the side wondering when it would be his turn to join in. The waiting grew longer it stretched into years it threatened to become his life he was paralyzed watching. Act act cried the voice inside him to which he could only reply how? All action was self-canceling. Turn to her embrace her take the beloved face between your hands and kiss. Her. Oh that. Oh yes. Take the fiery iron in your hands it will scorch the skin from your hands like paper but it will also illumine. The deep shaft of being the dark well of her body. The night that lies behind her eyes. Take it enclose it as a glass does water contain it in a firm grasp and do not let it go. She will flee you but it will be mock flight. She will thrum at the bars you draw around her and fall back into your arms. But you must act says the voice or earn the punishment that is self-contempt and burn in its unforgivingness.

So he heard at that time as he stood on the threshold looking out at the day.

Shavings on the floor of the woodshed. The sweet poisonous smell of gasoline. And cautious the spider descends from its tangle of logarithms and surds into the resplendent darkness cautious and daring. Like a folly of mountaineers up the Nameless Tower sheer face a thousand meters up. Up into the crystal enormousness. A vault of leap into the sky. Spectacular. Toward the cauldron. That darkness nameless with radiance. Her undeniable pain. Which he could only gaze at paralyzed with pity and longing across the battlefield of the room. As she picked her way through the dead. Singing.

The solitary one marked each spot favored by his solitude with a flower of bent iron. These marked the shrines of his happiness even when he had known love especially when he had known love. For he gathered his love to him in his solitude and relished it there far from others far from the other far even from the beloved.

She danced and whispered in his mind’s theater its hidden balconies where transcendence transpired shadowy boxes generous stage. His eyes flickered with memories of her he used her for his own joy. He suspected this was not quite fair but he wished to be happy not good he had noted the abject cheeriness of good people the relaxed serenity of the profoundly selfish.

His central passion was to love he cared less to be loved in return being loved was a prison and a torture being loved was to have your skin removed a layer at a time by the loving eyes being loved was to be locked inside the cage called you and not let out except in anger.

To love was to grow a cloud of wings to be loved was to be buried alive.

There was something wrong there he knew but what was it in his mind that baffled him from that happiness.

He sat quietly in his room and listened to the breathing. Tantalizing to feel so vaguely guilty and serene. As if this removal were a deliberate abandonment but was not. Not deliberate it was not. Not deliberate abandonment with its accent of betrayal. Not that. No. But liberation.

But from what the solitary one asked the vacancy. And an answer came but from where.

From only human love.

A dust storm rose on the horizon the birds wheeled in ragged flocks.

There was nowhere to go that was not there.

The sun sucked up the darkness leaving behind blindness and nakedness. To be absolutely seen yet blind they could imagine no greater. Pain.

They moved alone across a field.

The farther they fled the tighter they were bound.

The grass pursued them burning. The walls of their eyes were blackened with bands of ash. It was a withing of weed and steel.

When will come the day when it will freeze into a shining of ice and cold detached and ponderable. As massy and solid in the hand as this stone. Remote as the history of an ancient century whose suffering inspires nostalgia for a time one never knew unreal and far and strangely pleasing in its depiction of struggle and victory followed by annihilation.

Into a cold and magnanimous page.

As they walked through the night of their love like torches.

The fishermen plucked their lines and there was a trammeling of fish. In the ozone above them the islands of depression had just begun to bend inwardly. Embossings of emptiness slippery with the sun.

Over the hill on the other slopes the village straggled to the edge of the forest. Fields enameled the borders of the farms. The sound of tractors tooted through the spring. The summers were silent with growth. The tractors chuffed with melancholy satisfaction sated sheaf-heavy in the fall. Kids were crying out as they played in the evening the occasional fight graced with theatrics of reconciliation. The neighbors pretended to despise each other but didn’t poison the borrowed sugar. It was a happy time spiced with impatience for the future.

Cans of air stood on small grocery shelves in the fluorescent aisles of supermarkets.

We were without grief or guilt though obscurely frightened in that time of unrepentant optimism.

The television laughed like a household god the dishwasher hummed the toys smiled from the shelves the car lay supine in the garage. There were martinis waiting in the evening. Cartoons tickled Saturday mornings. Feasts regaled the gourmet nights and music defined the shifting of moods. Homework bored the kids with grudging reassurance. Teachers nasalled bullies leered girls goaded boys pretended to ignore them and struck their bats.

The hundred-year-old oak spread toward us its big gray boughs.

Sirens taught us to bow our heads under the ugly student desks.

Great clouds began invading our dreams.

The sky was tendentious with visions of rockets pointing at us like accusing fingers.

But we were innocent how could we deserve such a punishment. We were pursuing happiness it was a God-given right it was mandatory.

So we learned to deny everything.

The hedgehog disguised as a fox it was his best trick.

To seduce serenity.

Caretaker of breeding generator of the sunrise.

The girl on the beach with the ocelot.

The surfers in the tunnels of the waves.

The acrobats of sticks and platters.

The bright hip shakers of hoola hoops.

The conquerors of bicycles.

The cards spread on the table.

The disdainful minx in the sand.

Childhood? The lost paradise? What was that?

There was so much more to come. I stared hungrily at a tin can called tomorrow placed up on a high shelf. There was no opener sharp enough. There was no ladder tall enough. There was no tomorrow far enough away for me not to dream about it. Oh how happy I would be how happy. So happy I sped beyond dying and what would heaven be what was the greatest happiness I could imagine. It was this to live over again and over every instant of my little life from birth to dying every moment in an eternal chain forever forever forever.

What joy. What unspeakable joy. Life. Life.

Between those two states of twilight a flare of darkness woven with flashing at what moment did the brightness of the night the comfortable darkness of day start? Not from this porch was the line across the sky visible it paled out on either side connecting moon and sun like scales balanced against a pale blue screen. The roof and pillars formed a frame expanding the vastness the open never quite gave rather contracted.

Perceptual puzzle.

As grammar by framing time expands it. As time unordered contracts and withers away aimlessly. Luminous the larval stage of being if it had ever been anything else. You turned on your heel in the doorway and found yourself spinning forever. Only thinking back was there the crystal. Only looking back was the shadow thrown against the clouds majestic monumental that was I. Wow. As the mist vaporizes into evening. Something unknown defined you. What was to come. His ignorance drew a wiry line around him exact as a blade. I am because I do not know. How retrieve the redemptive ignorance he thought how forget the future. Overthrow the tyrant. Liberate the nation. Break through the palace gates. Kill the guards. Seize the temple. Conquer happiness. Draw back a step at a time blissfully into unknowingness. Toward where he stands now at this moment staring down.

(You pored through the snapshots the old documents seeking a thread that might bind them together. It’s the morning of the next day. What made the day before a whole or seem so all the days before up to this one the decades. A lance across a windowsill. What I possess at the moment a confusion of papers and days. That doesn’t quite fit. That don’t quite fit. Bills invoices postcards letters uninformative from family and friends vaguely threatening or speciously friendly but deeply sincere from businesses requesting cashflow from you. Journals. Drafts of letters never sent. Glossy paper stained with white shadows. The one sure thing the oblivion before birth. Stuffed with movies and reading. And less certain the one to come. Oblivion that is. Dickered with guessing. Your life a deceptive confusion between. Suggesting order but never. Not sure even of that. Your prize possession your uncertainty. And nebulous fantasies obscure memories consigned to paper. Or computer screen. What a lark the literary life. Who is “he”? Who is “she”? Who is “you” or “I”? A vastness echoing with the sighing of cars birdsong half-heard speech the sound of barking dogs. Even that. Back into it you must. Lie between dreams. Guess at recall. Go.)

They’re all sleeping. Even the guard, look at him. No, it’s all right. Just stay here. Sometimes he says something in his sleep, but I can’t tell what it is. Listen if you want. I’ll bring you a …

Home. It marked the pattern best. Their household. A fixture between the villages. The slide at the back a swing set an archery target one spring put up against bales of hay. He sat on the grassy bank and gazed across the fields. A dreamer. Nothing made him happier than staring at the clouds. Or the delicious shallow-sea illusion of summer cornfields moving under the wind. Early summer. Late spring. Beginning of the fall. He was convinced he had been made to be happy. A difficult prejudice to shake. And yet it seemed so obvious so clear. For he was happy then.

The lights in the house across the night field.

Always distance however close always the horizon edged with trees and the far point of light sparkling on a hill’s darkness that made you dream of that distant happiness those lives you could only guess at. And preferred guessing knowledge always a. Only the dream. Nothing more. Enough.

Thus dreams were protected there. Honored. A happy childhood. It comes to you now with surprise given. The place where he went to hide. From them all. Could. Can. Shall. The dogwood blossoming in the picture window.

Until he disappeared. Out of joy.

Deeper in. Further.

For there was money oh one was not supposed to mention that it was not sex one hid one’s salary or the salary of one’s parents one’s father at the time. And the money behind that. One always assumed sufficient funds there was no question folly the mulch of happiness. Behind the battlements of one’s parents’ faces stood the brightly shining edges of the mint always unfathomable unmentioned and presumed the good life security false or real. The garden bed. Flowers falling to the hand fruit bending to the mouth. The laziness of expectation will ruin your future. But he does not know then. He dreams. Not knowing the decline from an extravagant wealth to the genteel pretensions decorating the poverty of his domicile to come.

Wealth.

Decor.

Sun.

Exterior.

Day.

The frame of childhood where the little boy with the crewcut stands looking hopefully into your eyes. Up. Smiling as if for a photograph. Straining just a little. Slightly uncomfortable self-conscious. With unquestioning and boundless trust. Of course I believe the face says frowning a little. I’ve seen it.

What.

In the clouds that cross in the stars picking light from in the turmoil of in the hills the cornfields in the woods the face and hands of. No. Don’t give it a name. A gesture only. What. That. This. The all of it although I know only this only that. Pinched between moon and sun. Pageant moving in unending circle. Always returning to its place yet shifting. Always returning yet always. New. Beyond us containing us. Small and foolish and proud. Reflecting it. Even death no object of fear. Even oblivion no reason for. For the single one lives only through the all of it only the all of it. Counts. Cradles the dead one like a child folds around it its arms taking it in. Tenderly. Perhaps. So he thought when he found the body of bird or rabbit or mouse as he walked the fields through the woods near the back of the house after school. For even in the dead one there was life it became nourishment gave back as it had been given. Given. Death was a justice not a punishment. You missed the point it is not here for you you (the small boy thought) are a little gold thread in a vast fabric draping the shoulders of you have your place you are not all you are the center you are not the center either way it makes no difference if you do not know this the universe ignores it either way.

And yet thought the boy how many. Suffer. And make suffer.

And he remembered photographs and films he had seen of dead naked bodies found in large walled and fenced camps after a recent war. And the pity and horror that had then touched his forehead.

And the woods said nothing.

But why don’t you teach me? thought the boy.

You will learn or not you cannot be taught you children with the poison of adults you will destroy whatever you can out of boredom pride envy crazy-eyed optimism look at the clever ones what trouble they get into someday they will grow up and become dangerous there is a storm of godlike laughter.

And woke hearing his own voice echo in the room.

The solitary one walked the fields intent on the sounds.

The sounds of broken straw in the wind of single birds whistle and chuff of wings of old leaves clapping on the gray boughs or singing across the ground.

Whistle of wind through an old bone.

The fallen trunk rotting in the yellow grass.

The vivifying odor of decay.

All the life of the land mulching inward into the land.

The bustle around an anthill.

The vagrant buzz of a late bee.

The tingle of a cobweb against his cheek as he walks between two apple trees.

Unending net of connective across the mud and air.

Deepening weave of loom in loom. Fabric. Carpet. Spell. The wonder of it. Hidden and woven and teeming. Unregarding him anything human. However spurious even transcendence. Illusion whatever price.

Drunk and happy he walked from end to end of his solitude to where the fields broke up into gray and welcoming woods.

Where he shot his look up suddenly to confront the sky’s absolute eye.

And the cold fell.

Deepening weft of light and dirt.

Fabric become stone field.

Carpet become.

Spell.

Crystallizing wonder.

Hidden woven teeming frozen.

Still not regarding anything you.

However spurious.

Periphrasis in snow.

Empire of the inhuman.

Winter twilight.

Plunging mercury.

Venus raging in the east.