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
