lab assistants through uncalibrated microscopes. All the vivid microbial life hidden in their tears. Lachrymae rerum. Revealed by a simple stain.
Mud fell from the sky smearing its fingerprints on the windows. The city waited patiently outside like a cat burglar. The corruption had already begun. Yet you were growing soaring awkward passionate though immobile. Everything you touched brought amazing pain or joy. Ecstasy and misery were your closest companions. I didn’t know where I was.
I found my solitude unimpaired in the throngs. The city was the home of my anxiety. Everything advanced into an ambiguous hope. The world was scaled to my measure and my measure was infinite.
I gazed longingly at the clouds framed between the towers. They bellied like sails against an azure sea. The sun railed at the city.
Trapezia retreating in perspective.
No loss that was not loss of all.
And at the base of it such mad hope such uncompromising happiness.
We were never wiser than in the folly of our youth never more faithful than in its cynicism and mockery. What generosity burned in our eyes. We spread our nonexistent wings and plummeted blank and giddy. The air whistled past us obscure with hallelujah. We never learned till we were almost wiped out and what we learned then was worthless. Prudence. Circumspection. Duplicity. They were not yet our second nature. Our foolishness was our glamor our self-absorption was our gift. Our infinite self-centeredness the panels of our armor. We were breathtaking. We destroyed each other like children. We wore the mask of corruption of adults. We took as far as we dared and then collapsed. It took ten years to explode our fireworks each day sending up a regiment of stars shaking the house and banishing night yes for ten long years. As though the supply were everlasting and the applause must roll forever. We dug our hole cheerfully and jumped in shrieking with laughter. The world shook in our embrace and wouldn’t let us go. Unbelief was not available to us except as an extravagant charade. Because we were the gods.
At that time.
At whatever time was available to us.
As he walked at the edge of the crowd longing to become one of us.
He sought a place to pray in but there was nowhere there. The churches mocked the divine the surrounding city cursed it. He walked until he was exhausted in his search for a mark of the holy. There was only the humanly obscene. Nowhere reflected back the delicacy of a face.
The breath of a god murmured in the trees and passed over his head beyond him. The sky was out of reach of his hands. He stretched his mind until he thought it would snap. He sought the place where there was no one. Beyond the air. He remembered bitterly the silence of the woods the darkness of evening by the sea. In these eyes there was no paradise.
He shouted voicelessly through the streets. They responded with equal eloquence. Innamorata divina. He wept without tears or so he thought. But there was nowhere.
And still he sought. Like the child he still was. In the silence of music. The whiteness of books. The darkness of the stroke of a pen on paper. There. Sharpened to a form just beyond his sight. There brightened and fluttered a vanishing hosanna.
Oh to be thankful for the writhing labyrinth of life how could he be he who had been at one time so joyfully grateful for the gift life’s gift in this. In this.
He shook the locked casket of his past listening to the bones rattle. Inside must be the key to the secret of his loss of. He shook. Only as a last resort would he take a hammer to it. And out of it emerged a cloud of moths dusting his face with their wings.
To crawl one goes on bended knees. Lowers the forehead to the ground. Raises the voice in. Lamenting the loss of. What.
One must live one’s punishment in the burnt-out garden. At the edge of the garden are the walls at regular intervals the towers where the guards keep watch along the top of the walls is a sparkling of splintered glass and a snow of peach-colored petals. The further they advanced toward the walls the farther the walls moved. And the heavier was the scent of lilacs roses and honeysuckle it made the air drunk slowly drove them crazy. They had thought they were inside the prison. When they finally escaped the trap tripped with the sound of a shot.
A crystal garden of cement and glass. It rose all around him uncanny stalagmites. Clawing its way toward an unreachable sky. Into which the oak does not grow. One expected it for oneself however infinite and unending growth. The feeling of youth was the feeling of surge. Every wall was a test. Smoothly laughing. There shall never be no more worlds. To conquer. Even in the brick encampment of the city. In such weakness was such power. Such sense of power. Such mad and drunken glory. There was a heaven to be found in that particular insanity. So be it. For nothing else had one broken the shell. In this seed dwelled this sun. The air was dense with light. You were a bottomless lake at the heart of the mirror. And the sun as it rose cried love. And the sun as it set cried love. And the haze of stars drew the moon through the night like the sparrows the chariot of love. He could not believe it was not so. Frail brave little boat he blindly rowed. All happy. Singing softly to himself so that no one might suspect. No one know. No one envy. And no one knew no one envied no one suspected no one saw the sudden fall toward the sun beneath him.
Winter grew and the birds escaped from her hair to the abandoned forests. All hollow in the place’s heart. Pinging gently like a bell made of eggshell. She walked the woods chanting from her book. Listening to the silence’s answer. All echo. And the souls of unborn birds sang in her mind for she was their maiden and protector. Butterflies clustered on her lips. And leaves dangled like hands. In offering in benediction in plea. Of her honey drank the mist. Small animals curled against the ache of her breasts and they sucked and drank. And stared into the summer of her eyes.
Neither here nor not here. Neither there nor not there.
You woke from your dream gasping for air.
They sat in order around the table. It was in the age before the microwave. To nourish the family properly required at least one meal per day taken in togetherness. A ritual of napkins and silver. The head and foot traded solemnities for barbs. The peanut gallery tittered on the flanks. Upstaged at every opportunity. Flattered the fertility of the adults. Injunctions prohibitions ejaculations and jibes wrinkled the candles. The kids were never slow to attack. The reward was thunderstorms of laughter. Anger tested in grins and teeth set on the edge of grievance. Into the Yorkshire pudding vanish in delicious savory. Every evening was a festival. It was the high point of each day’s happiness if happiness it was. The kitchen smelled of basil rosemary thyme olive oil bay leaf garlic. Minced onions sautéing in butter. The wolves were kept beyond the firelight for an hour. The thread between the father and the mother was cautiously thrummed the note moving from rumble to trill depending on the day’s mood and pitch. It was examined surreptitiously for fraying. A sudden tension would send the tone out of earshot. The quiet that followed made the small bones in our ears tingle.
Freeze.
Entelechy or rebound to the teleology of darkness. Speckled agape like marbles. Overarching the heavens. Unless their peculiar psychology was secure and there were indeed final things. A moment that in a fit or seizure stopped time and split it like a coconut. Big rip. To draw out eternity like milk.
God to our solitary child had become a rumor what had been a transparence in field and wood the grass-lined roads bluebells tranquilly blossoming in the ditch snapdragons glaring at the honey bees the honeysuckled afternoon beneath a triumph of clouds the eye-like blue of the sky when all all showed him the outlines of a face now he was surrounded by faces each of which was a fragment
