From them all it seemed. Or but only seemed. Which was enough.
Foolishly oh foolishly.
Not to know a better way to remove the burden he could not bear for long. Yet had to.
The monkey blinking from his shoulder in the mirror.
No way to enter adolescence. Retreating.
The memory of a clump of trees. Where you could hide. Chanting the name of a teacher.
Miss Schmeg.
Which made you think of nutmeg its sweet nutty smell.
Miss Schmeg smell of nutmeg.
He hoped her for his future. Where was she now. Nowhere but in my past. What he remembered did not exist. This was why it was remembered. It was the inflexible law. To find her again would have been intolerable.
The city thickened. What happened here did not exist what he remembered did not exist what would happen tomorrow anywhere did not exist. And nothing in between the empty points of time.
You stared from the bed at the ceiling. You stared through the branches at the sky.
In silence.
Vanishing.
Panicking
Ever?
Ever.
It wasn’t exactly practical to be the way he was. But he was stubborn. Surrounded by fences (he remembered) he had sat still at the center of the grass. Breathing the cuttings.
Beyond the fences was a chaos of traffic in the angry heat of summer.
Calculation was possible given time in some cases. Of the general shape that is. Of no individual however. I took comfort from that from the incalculability of my own trajectory across the. What. Shavings of dust. Quadrille of the infra-red. Captious swirl of enormous smoke in endless rooms of gigantic night.
It was curious how when all was said and done it looked the starry night when examined through the haze of photographs gotten many years later from the infra-red and other amazing telescopes hanging and looping above the sky it looked like well an infinitely enormous drop of muddy pond water undefined and blind and turgid and snaking and filthy and brown and irritably alive. Eating itself. Anxious. Opaque. Strangely frisky. An infinite tangle of spectacularly encoiled ouroboroi each encircling its own thousand-dimensioned universe eating then spewing out all the others. In turn. Out of turn. Simultaneously. Beyond the limits of beyond the spider-ice of light.
But he did not know that then. Could not see that then. All he saw above him were the endless phalanxes of the clouds marching marching across the blueness like Romans flashing in splendor. Or hanging over you soft as a woman’s skin. Smelling tartly of earth and sky. Or high in ice like vast dragonfly wings stretching between rings of the horizon. Or mackereled in tufts of snow-like drifts and pillows of whiteness. Or gray and shapeless and sombre pierced with folds of illusory light. The sun snagging in sheets of tearing fog.
Between these clouds which he could see and those clouds he could scarcely imagine he had closed his eyes (he remembered) and let the moscae wander.
There was much laughter in that household despite what has been said nor was it all anger. It would be a mistake to call it an unhappy home.
There was a kind of elegant giddiness in the air that put a sheen over contention. A sense of specialness of welcoming and open-minded exclusiveness an exclusiveness that paradoxically excluded no one but invited and entertained everyone and only felt a slight pity they couldn’t stay in the magic circle where gaiety and the golden future lived and traded jokes and looked out on the world as a field where pleasures might bud berries of joy drop one at a time at perfectly gauged intervals to perfectly hungry fingers. A world self-contained yet airy and light filled with elegant furnishings good books thrilling music beautiful pictures audacious and satisfying entertainments exquisite dinners wonderful stories the prospect of exciting travels an insouciant optimism a certainty of contentment a world that opened from blossom to blossom till the entire tree dazzled like a garden filling the air with the bracing scent of happiness.
A smile for the future a smile for the past. The present a flushed leap between hope and gratitude.
There was no reason it could not continue forever. When he thought about it calmly and alone. In his room stretched out on his bed. Or walking solitary and happy under the evening.
The humiliation behind the photograph’s smile.
Now.
If there ever was a then.
For there seemed to be movement. Like a python uncurling from its knot in the branches of the lamp.
A slick if slightly mangy lattice for it was shedding.
Uncurling down to your hand.
The impetus of time thus letting itself be felt against the uncalloused palm.
Seeking to wrap around the arm an affectionate or merely voracious tendril.
Around the shoulders around the rib cage and pelvis a helix linking groin through heart to head the eyes unblinking above the lined forehead the forked tongue tasting the random air.
Becoming your eyes.
(He considered this as he (as you) (as I) moved what were at one time eyes across these words just written and paused to consider the slowly darkening paper.
The scaled cord slipping across the eyes …)
Yes there was much happiness between the troubles.
The afternoon at the river along the lightly sloping banks under the wide-spaced trees the thick layers of pebbles beneath their feet cold and sharp and giggly. Moving into the water was an adventure yes slipping here and there on the river-bottom rocks fuzzed with slime there was the thought of water mocassins between the shouts echoing across the surface and the chuff of water against the bank. Everybody was laughing at everybody else. It was charged with teasing the innocently treacherous ridicule yes the generous and exhilarating sarcasm of a fathomless security. The towel flicked back and forth in little punishments of joy. Yes aggression itself was a signature of complicity the bonding of a conspiracy against the world. It gave happiness its spine. There was nothing to lose and everything to gain. Was that the secret of childhood’s happiness its sometimes desperate calm? Yes?
They crouched giggling on the long flat rock above the river daring each other off into the first plunge.
(Not yet not yet oh hold to the rock for the sun will set and the sun will set at the fall of the eyes at the edge of the hand while the waters suck you down yes ride you like a lover devour you with unforgiving desire.)
The air rushing through the car.
Brother and sister asleep beside you.
The smell of cut grass horse manure the occasional dead skunk wet earth of bark and leaves humus of the woods scented bushes whipping in through the open car windows also the smell of gasoline vinyl rust a smell of dried sweat.
The
