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.
