spinning into sunlight.
It was a hackneyed phrase but so true so true.
The wilderness of their bodies. He wondered if he should be ashamed. All my life I sought the woman who all my life would flee. Perhaps after several years of celibacy it was time to end. Is masturbation a form of celibacy what after all is the survival value of the opposable thumb. You turned from me appalled. No one like you should have desire you said. I will save you I will screw you I will dump you. The sequence rigidly followed. My heart committed suicide several times. It was easier than murder. Like life itself. To erase the memory of love with great slowness.
The gods of adequacy were laughing you could hear it at the head of the stairs.
The theory of chaos after all was not a theory of chaos.
Words clustered according to structures of grammar over which the speaker had no ultimate control. Association was free only to a point. Which was as frustrating as it was reassuring. Or will be. The roses on the trellis near the birdbath in the forgotten corner of the garden. Night light. I played a game of stones on a sort of frame of random parallels. We bared our bleeding wrists to the moon and the long sleep of the bees.
Evensong.
Arrows of geese. The plangent honk and responding laughter the hug of the enormous ground.
Windmills.
The smell of drying oils.
It gave you your first sensation of a life ruined by art hunt for phantoms craft of illusions obsessive assertions of rejected self the seduction the strange liminal joy.
A life devoted to the masochism of romance.
For thou art. Glory. And I worship thee. Power. Bless me. Again. Splendor. Show thyself. In glory. Make me. Yours. Destroy me. Again. He said. And she heard. You noted this in your yellow notebook of suspect themes for future research.
He felt as though he were walking down the streets of a vanishing life with a bomb ticking between his thighs. A terrorist of love. You have been condemned to kill all in your vicinity in a series of virtual suicides. Though years had passed. And harm was not after all his intent. It was more like redemption. Not health the goal kept firmly in mind but transcendence.
Precession of paradoxes in testimonials of exhausted desire. Sated with self-love they turned back to the world with enchanted eyes.
How could one not have suspected them of predatory habits given their way of life their income their neighborhood their diet. The calcified victim found after exploratory surgery in the alimentary canal. Of course we were vegetarian that year. It was all we could do to suspend our purity for a summer. There is nothing as ludicrous as self-confidence. Our lives were pratfalls of faith. We kept stubbing against the thresholds of our perfection and raged in tears all night over our book of failures.
We never forgave the mirror its serenity.
For the source of our relentless feelings of guilt was our inability to rise to our own standards for longer than it took to reveal them. Then we collapsed. Yet the sun hung above us so blinding and so clear. Our hatred of life you must understand was the purest expression of our love. We had no hope and yet we were prickly with moods and tenderness. It was an askesis of being. Existence then was a murderous joy. Truth was no longer possible and yet was our only hope.
Our hands bled from handling the stars. The larval stage of being was the rat on the threshold of maturity. Effloresence. Denial. Erasure. What was our life it was the politics of the everyday the abandonment of expectation the reality principle defeating the pleasure principle in single combat.
Ocean.
And love if not a hand held out to the impossible as to an abandoned child. Folded clothes locked in a winter closet. The smell of mildew and mothballs. And the child left to die on the night hillside. Faced it once then turned away. The twisting neck of the owl. Its cry like that of a woman’s shriek as she comes as she gives birth as she dies as she attacks. As the blood freezes into being.
The night is so silent. Did I fall asleep? He’s moved. Yes, I’m sure he’s moved.
Compline.
The ice cross of the moon blanches the winter fields of what was once your home.
Distant barking.
The edge of light at the bottom of the architect’s lamp moves unsteadily as he draws it near. A careful deleting.
A blade sweeps the strings of a harp.
The invincibility of the human is terrifying. That is why she ignored it. Raised in a center of darkness the breasts of gift. Needing to give. Pulsating with the most generous of frustrations.
There was nowhere to stand where she drowned. Flailing between knots of driftwood. The sand loosening between her fingers. She sailed like an angel into the sea. And he was left to his despair watching.
That’s too easy despair is easy death is easy what is hard hard is reaching out holding on drawing in is life is hope is love she proclaimed all heroism the violets falling from her eyes.
She wept in her anger. I will not give up I will not she broke down I will not not not. He stroked her hair from far away from across the sea he reached out and wiped the tears with his finger. He held her in the world of his arms. They did not settle for less than everything. They scarred each other’s hearts with diamonds. The dream of each was the storm in which the other wrecked and drowned.
There were those who refused all sorrow their faces were fixed in a purity of mad joy. You met them in the hallways of the university they were often surrounded by admirers. The mind was its own place they shouted in the square there is no loss that is not gain the erasure of earth is the birthing of a star behind each love there is another.
Ill wind.
You looked at them bewildered with hope you longed to believe. Chaos is unspeakable joy they said sorrow is a chatterbox. Her tears had no place in the dictatorship of fulfillment happiness is the only imperative happiness is success success is the moment’s victor follow it. Wipe memory from your lips with the kiss’s fervor lick the body that desires you enter pleasure engulf joy go crazy with absolute clarity.
She writhed on the dance floor like a snake of banners blotting out the past the future the latticework of obligation and care crumbled in the moment’s fire such power raised such love from the flames.
Among the flash-fire cities the shimmer of landscapes the flicker and vanishing of empire and continent and ocean and world turned and dissolved the face of every person she had loved o pyre of essence o woodland of flames.
Sudden palaces.
She could not stand she could not walk she could not lie so she danced on the floor of embers secretly hoping for a quick end to all. Which cannot be given like every too-passionate desire.
The smell of burning skin.
They smeared their bodies with water and ash. Where there had been a body there was a vanishing. In the garden a wood dove flickered between the trees.
Plush consoles and amber ornaments the caught fly of an extinct species clearly articulated in the polished sepia-brown oblong.
Porcelain
