scattered sleeping herds of dairy cows and horses hen houses self-conscious and startled leaning pig sties noble nonagonal barns white-walled and field stone farmhouses all in a combination of near-view rush and farther view stately procession and farthest view near immobility at the point where hilltop became the ridge of a horizon halting the sky.
And the pale clouds reflecting the sun above them staring into endlessness like a blind and irrefutable benediction.
Sun and clouds and the brazen cars.
… and opened his eyes out of memory again and took in what he had to of the pale surround of his present.
It was fleeting furtive might have been painless had it not been for the edge of light pursuing a remorse that had no clear justification. It stabbed him periodically and at awkward moments. An inconvenient and uninformative demon. It was like a hot coal shifting in his shoe. It made him dance with feverish spastic movements and sparkling laughter from his peers.
The look in their eyes of merciless contempt and joy in their power and the white horseshoes of their grins made him wonder.
It was feeding time in the playgrounds.
His teachers stalked blind and unbending above the pint-sized mayhem indifferent and bureaucratic and booming like foghorns. They watched the bullying from the corners of their eyes with shirt-fronted satisfaction.
The only shield against mortification and despair was to sheathe the face in stone and stand in the margins of the yard unmoving and taking everything in.
The coal against the foot quietly gaining.
(6 × 7 × … what is it now … 45,301 ÷ … let’s see … (2 × forever)… plus … + 8) the whole minus infinity … and whatever happened to the primes …
Taking so long to learn the tables of shame.
Pass. Pass on. Pass out. Pass over. Pass away. Pass the course. Pass the buck. Just please God let me pass.
(He walked the halls of school murmuring blasphemies.)
Aloft.
Cast your eye where you’ve never been.
Here. Now. Nowhere.
Pencils of planes move against the clouds.
Lost in abstraction. Like the retelling.
Thinking behind the emphatic blue irresolutions of shadow.
Eyebeams from which they hang like plotting ecstatic school boys paper angels mouths alarmed with praise children in the dark whispering stories.
Spastic.
Flinching.
Resigned.
For the dead power whose fingers spin their wings.
Their fathers.
The wombs that sucked them out.
The vortices.
Up there.
Beyond this.
Not beyond this.
Surrounding and subtending it like a cord an arc of the infinite circle whose center cannot be found.
Has not been found. Yet.
Your eye.
The top starting to wobble.
The family drama skittered around the edges of historical catastrophe. Mice panicking on the imperilled vessel. Or rather sandpipers bickering in the skirts of the runoff over a few shreds of crab and worm.
When the sudden tide thrust out showing wards of kelp colonies of crustaceans hospitals of coraline monstrosity uncovered to an irrelevantly dissecting light. A bit late in the day. Kaleidoscope of seabirds. Burrowing sand crabs in a tide pool. A quiver of anxiety half hidden fingering the fletches. The fishermen looking up startled from their daydream. The smell of women on their hands. The wall of water lurching above them unscaleable bright curling down to them. A roar of ten thousand trains.
All enacted at the edges of the dining room.
Cube of light and gin and laughter.
At whose center obliqueness coded warnings. Wisecrack semaphores. Paper napkins in an origami of crushed animals. Messages tapped by silver on crystal. The reflection of a face on a butter knife. Two knuckles a bare bum on the bowl of my spoon. Ha ha. Abrupt silences. The taste of vinegar and olive oil. Of safety. Of betrayal. Of sea brine rising to the walls. The implosion within meeting the explosion without. Without passion but efficiently. The uncharitable love of Eros. Sucking the beach like a vacuum.
Standing wave about to wipe out the happy colony on the beach.
“God damn it over there I said.”
Slam.
“I thought …”
“Shit.… ”
Silence then renewed clatter of utensils.
“… just put it down and get the …”
“… wait …”
“I have been waiting for the last ten years for you to figure out the fucking …”
“… Daddy? …”
“Watch yourself go back to your room your mother and I are …”
“… but this one didn’t we …”
“That one over there not that one by the …”
“But that was …”
“Now the rice is burning.…”
“… it seemed …”
Slam.
“‘Seemed’? If you’d open your eyes and shut your mouth for once you’d see what it is. But you never have not fucking once!”
Sound of breaking glass.
Alert frightened silence.
“Forget it!”
A rustle of angry steps and cloth being torn from a hook then a door slams. Then a sound of water in a sink. Then sobbing.
Like hands drawn behind his back manipulating objects in the dark to a background music of incomprehensible bitterness.
(Yet in the ring of darkness the circle of light. At the center of the light a crystal spinning. Shimmering. Seeking the level where it can come to rest. At last. The level of its flaw.)
At that time.
