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Excavations

Copyright © 2012 by Iliya Ansky

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contract ........................................................................................................................................................ 6

An Explanation .......................................................................................................................................... 8

Fait Accompli ............................................................................................................................................. 9

Under the Medlar .................................................................................................................................... 10

Safety First ................................................................................................................................................ 11

Fidelity ...................................................................................................................................................... 12

Stone Cold Transport ............................................................................................................................. 13

What of it .................................................................................................................................................. 14

definitions ................................................................................................................................................ 15

possibility ................................................................................................................................................. 16

after this .................................................................................................................................................... 17

Procurement ............................................................................................................................................. 18

thaw ........................................................................................................................................................... 19

What Had to Be Done ............................................................................................................................. 20

What it Means .......................................................................................................................................... 21

formation .................................................................................................................................................. 22

Preoccupation........................................................................................................................................... 23

getting ahead with what you’ve got .................................................................................................... 24

Their Own Surprises .............................................................................................................................. 25

Advice for New Beginnings .................................................................................................................. 26

Eurydice to Orpheus ............................................................................................................................... 27

Abelard ...................................................................................................................................................... 28

Intentionality ........................................................................................................................................... 29

the girl and the world ............................................................................................................................. 30

undated correspondence ........................................................................................................................ 31

Kampa ....................................................................................................................................................... 33

Whistle for It ............................................................................................................................................ 34

approaches of the preliminary .............................................................................................................. 35

the coveted twist ...................................................................................................................................... 36

Sand ........................................................................................................................................................... 37

Crannies .................................................................................................................................................... 38

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And they saw that it was good.............................................................................................................. 39

thanksgiving ............................................................................................................................................ 40

men of means ........................................................................................................................................... 41

The Aim .................................................................................................................................................... 42

Aprocrypha ............................................................................................................................................... 43

verily .......................................................................................................................................................... 44

nonsense ................................................................................................................................................... 45

Jeanne D’s Hiring Process ..................................................................................................................... 46

Reuptake ................................................................................................................................................... 47

lost craft ..................................................................................................................................................... 48

Pressure ..................................................................................................................................................... 49

Areca Palm ................................................................................................................................................ 50

The Chair Has It ...................................................................................................................................... 51

what is a simple option .......................................................................................................................... 52

Geographic Properties ............................................................................................................................ 53

the coach.................................................................................................................................................... 54

Refraction ................................................................................................................................................. 55

Livingstone ............................................................................................................................................... 56

Requisites ................................................................................................................................................. 57

Old Wives’ Tales ..................................................................................................................................... 58

Collapse .................................................................................................................................................... 59

winnowing ............................................................................................................................................... 60

They, Who Feared Her ........................................................................................................................... 61

Sitting on a Bench ................................................................................................................................... 62

Mr. K. ......................................................................................................................................................... 63

a petrified gorgon .................................................................................................................................... 64

northern solstice ...................................................................................................................................... 65

Poppy ......................................................................................................................................................... 66

A Drop ....................................................................................................................................................... 67

The Kettle is Warm ................................................................................................................................. 68

kin .............................................................................................................................................................. 69

Worries ...................................................................................................................................................... 70

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In this language ....................................................................................................................................... 71

Disquiet..................................................................................................................................................... 72

A Vignette for the Byways .................................................................................................................... 73

fragment .................................................................................................................................................... 74

all the beautiful businessmen .............................................................................................................. 75

Fecund ....................................................................................................................................................... 76

Visions of Denial .................................................................................................................................... 77

Home ......................................................................................................................................................... 78

Conceivably .............................................................................................................................................. 79

The Glass .................................................................................................................................................. 80

The Dimensions ...................................................................................................................................... 81

Loveseat .................................................................................................................................................... 82

Walpurgis ................................................................................................................................................. 83

the cavity ................................................................................................................................................... 84

the boundaries of confirmation ............................................................................................................ 85

far stretch .................................................................................................................................................. 86

it .................................................................................................................................................................. 87

A Finger in the Pie .................................................................................................................................. 88

Double Take ............................................................................................................................................. 89

sat 1 dec ..................................................................................................................................................... 90

dim in carcosa .......................................................................................................................................... 91

Return of Investment ............................................................................................................................. 92

changeover ................................................................................................................................................ 93

Ruin ........................................................................................................................................................... 94

checks and balances ................................................................................................................................ 95

mid range .................................................................................................................................................. 96

A Lesser Stranger .................................................................................................................................... 97

One of Them ............................................................................................................................................ 98

BwO ........................................................................................................................................................... 99

presentiment .......................................................................................................................................... 100

Reporting Live ....................................................................................................................................... 101

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“In the daylight, the blue sky tells lies. While the night mutters the truth, we are asleep. And in the morning, we all say we dreamed.” – Tanikawa Shuntarō

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contract in nine years i will wear you tell you this old satanic breakup mumbojumbo don't you go hiding with the whales for barbarous clarity with your stare fluttering out of the page toward recognition that you may have a second homeland where everything you do is innocence don’t go hiding with the whales sporting a lockjaw of sulk of where we are of the interior splitting and spouting on me

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An Explanation Man will not devour anything when a woman is watching. But when he suspects that it is him she is watching, his suspicion will elicit for his sake any self conscious wager from her truant glance, and he will devour anything. He will delicately slice and dice and fake contemplation, or he will gnarl and tear mouthfuls off a knife buried succulently within. And then he will chomp on glass like a giddy reveller or an eager magician, quench his thirst with tongues of fire like a tortuous fakir. He will devour the ancient rumors of the earth, visions and breakers of visions. To spit them out one day eloquently in mid conversation over a cup of coffee should he suspect that the woman wants it, should in his mind she wager it, should there be a gliding glance, an explanation, if only for him.

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Fait Accompli Several affectionate strokes, concealed by a friendly chat going nowhere, is what they want. They pay for it. Some think it exotic, saying, he must have acquired his tricks in the Far East, like yesterday, that man or that woman, unspecific about happy endings, hinting at them with childish mischief. Forbidden fruit et al. People come into the room, twisted from the inside, knotty and thick in the joints from years of a malfunctioning conscience, at times expecting things to be ironed out by a back rub. With my silent expression, I tell them, Sir, Madame, you come here so crooked, thinking of a miraculous method in my hands before prostrating yourself, with your face in the hole of that clinical bed, smelling incense and eager in a solemn tone to enumerate the incurable diseases of the day with a prouder assurance of having a friend or a relative stricken with one. Ah, Sir, Madame, you don’t know the ancients who had everything in them (that’s why no one can find a single, formidably accurate trace of how they were, nothing but oddity in their bones, in their remains), lifting megalithic stones left and right by means of organs now given to unformed rudiments. Think of yourself, Sir, Madame, how theatrical your modernity is, twisting you this way and that into a cubist contraption sold out to the kind of progress that doesn’t want any abilities to seriously remain in you, not even your thinking, kicked into the bargain, tearing your best faculties out of you and hurling them into the more efficient prosthetics of daily life until you’re shriveled, and twisted, and seeking out people like me, until you’re history. Let us both stop and try not to be bamboozled by a past which is not yours or mine.

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Under the Medlar Under the medlar, he enlists the gist. She, all of her, taken by the hand, pours into his ear. The retreat of her fingers on him unplanned, uncalled for, a molten voice. He gives her an indistinct shudder, ghostly and complicit. Undetermined, he returns. To whom, to her, does he return? She lacerates this in her head, this for what it is and not, a presence, a gist of him in her, of him. Her fingers do not trust her eyes, do not trust her hands, none of his laughter. Her fingers entering his laughter as into orphaned clay, seek what is under, under the medlar.

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Safety First Everybody needs to hear that it is safe or that it is safe now rather than five minutes ago or for the future in a few hours. It is safe depressurizes blood, is good for digestion or degustation. It is that wall of flowers whose followers need not heed the bricks. Preterists, yes, naturally it is safe to speak up now for the sake of what had already happened. Tell us then, how did it happen. It is safe but we want the juicy details. To be a little more content inside after the fact that a surprise of a sunk heart could jolt us back into humanity.

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Fidelity

Under their feet, the ‘Welcome’ was a thick scruff. Shod or unshod, it didn’t matter. It was trodden on as a path is walked by those who are egged on by a certain one-way disposition of betrothed foundlings. It was known that out there they were called a cult and other names. Myrtle was plucked for good luck and for that which resembled a streak of confessions, performed outside the house or downright in the bush of the backyard. There was a horrible suppleness of limbs for those of the first kind and for the others the days stuck to the skin without magic as narrow pupils begged for pilgrimage. Nothing could be done for them. They stayed in and enacted mental voyages in their solitude among the rest of them, how they would get away, day and night where everything was up for grabs, or else could not give up the smudges of love found in the short lived unity of their suburban pastorale.

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Stone Cold Transport The animals graze the first light, thimble silhouettes on the horizon. Disguised by the hour, the land grows on anything, softens and eats through, decides for you. Your voice is believable, with a jaded tip to my throat. It is what you want that I would like to understand, sacrificing more and more winks to your little hum that is supposed to send me someplace where multiplicity is not about double entendres, where none of us could previously afford to travel. But we still carry our fetters along with us. Where I lie, you say you forgot the bucket of water to wash your stone cold transport with.

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What of it In the pharmacy By the counter It may be difficult To ask For rat poison Even if the city is big In the big city What if They look for it And have it In stock What if they Bring it What of it Then Rat poison In the big city A commentary Almost personal Will they have it And what of it

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definitions there is that fundamental confirmation of zones like the cellars here where one can come to terms with definitions or be torn by them is it necessary and was it the right way to go the hours there and back do not count for what else was there to do but try it

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possibility in class she is unchanging decisive with a bob of her ponytail above the stoic creamy neck her eraser pencil unchewed though close to the lips beside the teeth her eyes on the ceiling resolved i wish i could have the answer from her.

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after this she curled her hair behind the ear with narrowed eyes from crowfeet pressing on the words in her weighing and letting them whisper a studied why is there a golden brown strip a kind of sort of fading frequency line going narrow in amplitude of skin an asymptote at the base of almost every cock out there as if it were a seam as if man was sewn there and it meant fate

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Procurement An emptiness as obedient as a china dog on a mantelpiece with no mantelpiece or dog only a flat hill outside a crevice blurred by black ants at the edges whose stumpy bite can cure the wounds of a spy in the woods according to the manual with no manual no woods or wounds only an emptiness in the afternoon after school the patent delight of excavation of getting back in touch.

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thaw in the spring air the science of offering quivers with hidden frequencies of carnal justice what has been done is concealed by the curve of the earth the barren white land awakes to rumors of verdure a boy or a girl turn the pages of a candlelit bestiary their mother knows her own lap better than that of the gods

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What Had to Be Done He shouldn't have risen out of the dusk for work, to get his hands dirty in the ruts, in the little mounds. He grew all kinds of things that could grow under the sun, the moon, flowers and weeds, thorny and docilely smooth vegetables and fruits, even strange fruits, holding seeds of strange promises foreign to this land. And in the process of digging, of combing the soil with his rake, the children that he didn't yet have would be in front of him. He could not understand what was his brother up to, with his odd faith that could only blossom in such a mind as his brother's. Sometimes at dusk he would make fallow repetitions of the gestures in his brother's offerings, as though he was preparing to be that kind of man, though the offerings had been kept hidden from him. His brother had little faith in the land, he would sometimes think. One day his brother surprised him with a creature he had never seen before, a strange creature. It lay snuggled in his brother's arms and didn’t move, it was docilely closed to his touch when his brother held it near, reverentially asleep in that cradle of arms. But no will, not even the primitive one of breathing, seemed to dwell in the animal. His brother placed it on the fertile soil and halved it like a ripe fruit and it didn't stir, nothing stirred but what was languidly spilled, his brother's mouth and hand and the unsure wind of the field and the dusk that caressed the animal as if it belonged to it now and not to his brother, his brother whom he glimpsed in the animal; and he knew despite the hour that what he had toiled for could never be favored by the wind with such graceful subtlety, and he understood his brother’s faith and what had to be done.

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What it Means The button is there shiny and untarnished. Sometimes it does not even look like a button because it is circular and therefore perfect as far as forms are concerned, while many buttons are not perfect. It is self contained and therefore can only inculcate calmness with its shape alone. You can’t be against this button because it is white and therefore you can’t be against it because it has no streak of menace to its color. And the button, if it is a button because sometimes there is nobody around to tell you that it is one for too long, has a wire to it that you don’t see and an end to it that you don’t see. An end that may be so unlike the button. An end that you can find out about in the papers, and not in every kind of paper.

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formation we stood by the hobs they were black and clean deep seated in the grille do you know how it smells I asked her I had to and she knew I had to because she knew yes I think I do she said the oven black with crumbs of the interior grunted agape it is the same I said to her yes I believe it is she put her hand on mine on the knob with a dot and a dash and gently pressed the formation in and to the side for the hiss inhaling it to be sure she said

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Preoccupation even this light at work this light is arcane part of it is dead and part of it has dissipated and spent time on thick crusts that cores have grown when they set to become less questionable when it left them for some trick in the dark when I carpentered on the table in the evening with my tools and hands the concept of extension could not be denied a proposition solidified in blank movement is understood only when it is done in the dim light of the work

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getting ahead with what you’ve got he was a lad of many saints steeped in the intricacies of their rise and fall and for a while the elemental attributes of their desire to change approached his own mentally he kept a snapshot of himself as a shepherd before the flood not crestfallen in view of the uncompromising wave for the science of disappointment was not new to him not that he wanted to stand transformed for what would be standing in such lucidity of azure his to transform himself to learn a lesson and could he do it nobody answered

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Their Own Surprises A vehicle of iron for the oldest passions had been produced, begun with the unrealistic sound of propositions torn from the hereditary forms of pain; yet ocularly shut with intensity, they continued gulping the air, dropping as stones into velvety pits, their mouths casting weak spells on the world, invoking a similar kind of god. And when deprived of it, their history was being made. The iron vehicle had the rest to take care of, to make it easier for them to recognize their passions but hardly themselves in it, until they were nonthey, until they were again their own surprises, not knowing if and if and if.

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Advice for New Beginnings The man begged to be symbolic, if not to differ, then to be symbolic. Even in youth he dissented from the language of things which he saw in the adults of his time, who in his eyes could not see anything any other way. His father, a man so well versed in the language of things that he made his mother see that there was nothing but what was practical, one day, said to his son, his only son, son, a man can get away with anything, if enough reasonable doubt is left behind. Be practical, but never be acutely specific, for that man can lose his head literally if and when found guilty, and not figuratively, when he is unspecific, by appealing to the better side of his judges, who understand that the man's head had been lost long ago. The son did not believe him, even when his father was being executed, he did not believe him, because the judges and the executioner spoke in the language of things, and were older than him, older and acutely specific.

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Eurydice to Orpheus You ask me to speak about love, or of love. But I cannot. I can only make love and probably I cannot make it. Make it as complete as addressing it thus, to describe it and not retain the undoing hollowness. I can only make love work, but I cannot speak about it, of it. Love as truth as true creation which is unconscious. Perhaps because it is missing a question. The complication of universal substance from scratch and after disruptive regression. The patternizing of energy into matter. It is never finished, at any given time, it is never made, and is in the making. It is you not looking at me, but dementedly refurbishing my phantasm with the patient movement of its walking behind you. It is me reinventing your face ahead of itself because I do not see it.

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Abelard Millions of years without love in the world brought on this eve of consent. And the bricks, the bricks upon bricks laid above this sepulcher, laid for this sepulcher and the good intentions of men, their high vaulted hopes, their vagrant hopes. For the iron cross in the cellar. For the sombre finitude of a pagan god. For the crescent of the east, or the tacit splendor of the sephirot. Chucked for the scent of love in the letters that were held between thighs, for the letters that hardly grew flesh, discarding the clay, the letters, children of late hours when everyone else is a warden, of owllight, of clitoral butterflies and crural tides. All gone. No more carnal understanding, no more understanding. Only the guilty visions of a prince who gains access to the house of chimeras, finds a dazed spinster in a lapidarium of petrified suitors, messes with her head, leaves her cold, only to be called a Gorgon by reputation. Millions of years without love in the world on the eve of consent, of repentance, of the forceful breath of men on the neck, their arms of steel springs, the erect blades of their hushed wrath late at night. Morbidly dumb and guttural as a lay of bricks on a nutsack.

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Intentionality Into the night he tosses, tosses into the night from a rock, a head of a cliff. His breath reveals the empty night filled with breath. It happens every other night in the earliest instant of conviction that the night can be transfigured into a dawn by what he does. Some say that nothing ever happens, those that make the world and those who think they don’t and it would seem that if we are to behold a memory after we let it go and pick it up it would be filled with more and more ends of things, things that end, because those things ended, if everything else went unnoticed, as if everything else never happened, until one forgets how to be whole again. How to be one, since the unfulfilled want to be another introduced the first crack, and one is left in the earliest instant of conviction with all the wrong other choices that happened, that somehow fit together when the horizon is burning every other night.

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the girl and the world the machinations of want were swathed in persuasion and conviction they were sticky strapped to her skin with neatly packed nails and screws ready for a world of infernal surprise that at first glance may not have wanted to catch up with what was about to be offered to it as a youth she wanted to blossom and this want had not left her

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undated correspondence in the antiques shop the shelves are musty there are books and maps on them the books are second hand and new the maps are frayed and old nobody makes maps like that anymore and somebody sells them to antiques shops like that or gives them away there is nothing else there but books and maps deficient in letters and postcards I go empty handed this time having bought groceries in need of a fridge I don’t take the tram and prefer the walk home because it’s hot and when it’s hot trams rattle heavily with silly hot air and everyone there looks out the window in anticipation so there I turn the corner putting the main entrance key in the main entrance keyhole when two stout ladies overtake me one of them lagging behind is holding an old woman doubled on a cane as an introspective question mark by the arm another asks me if I live here to which I nod they break me in and say that it’s been two hours like that for them and I nod they say they must go and that it cannot go on like this and that they have seen enough and that somebody should be held responsible and they allude to unnamed authorities one of the stout ladies gives me the old woman’s grocery bag which the stout lady has been carrying for two hours on the old woman’s behalf the old woman is not very trusting and with shaky deliberation asks me where I work with the help of her cane she informs the two stout ladies that she has never seen me before the ladies nod in understanding and one of them asks me for my number I climb the stairs a step ahead because this is how the old woman prefers it

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she lives on the last floor under the roof and unwillingly laments the absence of an elevator in front of a stranger every few wheezy steps she has to stop and seek reassurance from the railing or my step ahead she drily sniffles into a handkerchief unsteadily produced from her handbag looking down to ask me which floor it is it takes a while at the door she fumbles for the key and the keyhole and some fusty air escapes as we go in and she asks me to put the groceries out on the floor a ladybug made itself visible on her crooked back not sure if it should fly as if something might be blooming inside her the kitchen table was layered with undated correspondence

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Kampa disheveled for deficit in articulation how does passion inside affirms the ridiculous look the precious cinders of tragedy or pinched in fate of this is it and now it must change this is it and how treacherous this the bugs of summer hit against my shirt in their coupled flight the sallow wall beggar eyes the park restfully with conspiratorial content stirred drunk in the fortitude of his canine charms

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Whistle for It A dog tore itself off from the city. Its tail – the harbinger of its pursuit, of the purpose. It ran fieldward with the hot saliva of happiness at the mouth. It ran fieldward where man was scarce. Each dogged leap of instinct renouncing a favorite bollard a wall or a corner, in sight of the ever rising sward. The dog sent its frisking muzzle into every dirty leap unconditionally. Alone, it was breaking the rules of the sayings about dogs. Alone, it could be a solitary beast of nonpareil grace. Alone, it could be creation itself. Alone, it could beget man or at least make him happy.

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approaches of the preliminary the snorted line led to the pool, the bahama shorts he wore were the prerogative of his transactions. hot and sticky it was in the night and robots had to be concocted, planned from nothing, from the sober scratch of an asian engineer and his unconscious creative nudge made true by the whiskey breathing fuming science fiction hack who lusts after class and the beyondness of his genre. where is the wife? passed out cold as the worst critic who is indifferent. how he wanted her to masturbate to the rite of spring, in his absence. it could work for him now. he could write about it. how these self pledges terrorized him alone at night. alien worlds were beyond his grants and he would leave them for somebody else, if not for the one retarded promise that can only be made in one's youth. now he wanted consistency of leisure, to be maxed out on the conundrum of god particles in the morning, write it down.

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the coveted twist advertising was once easier, local. it was your neighbor afraid. and your fear of him. and yours and his casual lack of concern for being afraid when trading speculation which was what it was about, before advertising the menace. the potent worth of the unacknowledged had to be the true knowledge, the coveted twist for sale.

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Sand What the hell did they have to do in the sand? Seeking shelter in the tardy symbols that made their conscience crystal clear. They arched intensely, as though camouflaged by the tender shadows of leaves that were not there. They were going through the motions that once made perfect sense, and compelled them to make perfect sense. They were compelled to inscribe their experience in stone though it was not visible. They clawed for contentment, clawed the tablets with the stubborn anachronism of the nonexistent. They were confounded by the fire in their throats. What the hell did they have to do in the sand? They were told to practice.

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Crannies The car is parked. There are things to do. There is a list. At 2 there will be hands and legs dancing with measured periodicity upon the flip of a switch; there will be waiting in the waiting room. Check. But before that, there is a car parked; the engine stopped warm. And a cat, its inexhaustible reservoir of green wisdom engulfing two black slits fixed on the unseen, the other side hidden by the hood of a parked car. It’s a gamble. Purring gently to the scrunch of cooling metal and not waking up.

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And they saw that it was good He walked through the flea market. He had to hide the aimlessness. His books egged him to go on. He chose them carefully. One peddler after another was building estimates as they saw him approaching. He resisted the urge, not capturing the signature of instinct in their quickening. He was good for their goods. Anybody in sandals, a welcome token of vagrancy, was good. And the kings and the emperors, driven out of the forbidden lair by a full cankered moon, or their theurgist, to teach themselves commiseration under the guise of a vagabond in the bowels of the city, stabbed in mid offer – they, too, were good for the mouths back home and the malignant divinities that spring from pity's obfuscation of cause and effect.

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thanksgiving a homeless person in the cold says do not strain your shoulders says you are no atlas here do not strain it let them poise in you like a hanger to hold the warmth in says it in the cold where I am almost frozen where I am fake and dim with exaggeration says that there go the sons and daughters of darkness refraining from a passage known to him for any sense of it for any memory a passage of how much time it takes for the unconscious to snuff meaninglessness he shrugs as to where they are going his trodden voice would seek the crackling of firelight studding the night with a starful of motes if there was one in some way to the people you do not know you begin to say what you know

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men of means hobos and paupers come-a-croppers hoarse from howling biblically who have given nigh all their teeth to the fairies lie effaced by the curb protectors of the passage from man to beast reborn in the crusted layers of alleys men of means are only content with dirt in the countryside weary of narratives of revenge teaching their children the songs of invocation before sleep and the fairies sow the children’s teeth for their wishes to ring true

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The Aim The animal mind wants to conceal itself within a structure, not to be reminded of the tortuous landscape it inhabits, the erratic readiness of that landscape, to obtain a sudden ragged fluidity. The animal mind strives for the cortex as the cortex strives for heaven and hell, or the collective plateau where forms of higher order dwell. The animal mind conceals itself with reason, it starts to explain, to explain itself, and its explanations grow more and more compelling. The animal mind acquiesces to reunite with the ragged and unpredictable landscape in sleep. For it, in rest, the structure that conceals is the burrow, the hole in the ground or in the face of a rock, unintentionally rising and conforming to the unconscious predictions of how it may look when the animal mind reworks the landscape’s shape in the sequence of a dream, a dream so cavernous and deep that one can only fall into from a higher ground, already emerging.

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Aprocrypha Moria syndrome, maybe I’m misspelling it. A telltale desire to make everybody burst with laughter until they are doubled with a hurting side. A disorder of the frontal lobe. Also known as Jastrowitz. Like hearing the whisper from the Book of Books telling Abraham go and offer thy beloved son Isaac on Mount Moriah. And Abraham not knowing how to take it, as a lark, a poke to the side, or what should be done, or what should be done about it? Hell, what should be done about it?

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verily why would you want to jump from a plane relieved by an instructor screwed behind you be a member of a skydivers club established on the grounds of an abandoned airfield thick with reeds should you be afraid that the pure air of a particular altitude would polish you into the shape you always wanted for yourself

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nonsense the people who call themselves natives gradually began to speak through the immigrant children in the street their parents wanted to be told what to do and if the parents trusted themselves in doing then that would be inhuman like animals stripped of anything but going with the gut their surnames had meaning but at this end of the earth they were only talking nonsense

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Jeanne D’s Hiring Process Clarion in the tomb. She spat and her face. Treachery obliged. They evoked conditions. She renounced, visibly lured. How do you do it? she asked and who said that one would reply equally to the sketchy devil in the moment. We fear of what you may, this unfinished answer condensed in their scowling. She, naively rubicund in her ire. And your lesson, and of your lesson what? Resenting us in our maxims which you have violated with care, care for the ages? Could that be it? You who wants us to erect a saintly whoredom up here said one with a finger to his temple, his beard the color of a meteor. You who wants us to carry the zest for prayer into a blasphemous territory of the supplicants of demons. May your wishes be subordinate, may your wishes though voluptuous be subordinate. You respond to incongruence, like anybody else. I say so and we too say so said he and they or they and then, you lack in faith and refuse our lament. You who ordained men to gloam.

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Reuptake The air changes luminosity and a face cut in two with want of sleep gets spluttered with light on no occasion but sunrise. Unresolved it is drawn by fatigue to a decision of instincts to shut what is heard and seen. A face twisted into a hieroglyph of worry screwed to the window with torpor and dawn, does nothing coherent but gulp, does nothing understood but gulp and try for air.

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lost craft the woman who they tied up before the age of reason for burning in spring in the open said to them curiosity is always pagan where history stops and life begins and isn’t it enough like a woman who takes you in I’m asked to teach you something and what can I teach you with this lost craft but intention like children with spurting colors behind closed eyelids around a maypole on a bright day

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Pressure The deadened treasure of beckoning. The list which you have had. A resolute disorder of the nerves in the elementary. A hint in the prescription, in the traceable language of the hardened parts. What is not yours is left to communicate. The vein is jet, and inquiries are sent from deserted lips to deserted lips drunk on relying.

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Areca Palm At his work desk, Honza corpulent and full of omens of himself next to his green plants, Areca palm (Dypsis Lutescens), falls backward on his chair with the sun stealing through the blinds as the blind high priest of Shiloh who was put in the picture too late on a hot day in the bible, and dismissed from this world with a whisper of bad news. So does Honza, who, though he was not told anything bad, was not of that age, was not seemingly, not to keep up appearances, going to find the day too wondrous, knowing what had to be done at his desk, collapses into a ritual dance of stroked nerves full of backfiring axons, ridiculous and horrific. Visibly, Honza who lurked in a few marginal thoughts of those who saw him there, did not particularly appear as someone about to be reduced to a few moves. Visibly, as someone, who had not danced in a while, below the surface of the telemetry of conversation to admit it, but as if the moment was right, and nobody knew if he had ever.

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The Chair Has It The chair has it, handles for adjustment, modes of sitting upright with a forward bent like through a half tilt from breaking hard to a lonesome emergence of a child’s color ball on the road, or sitting slack. Upright or slack – it doesn’t change much. From the neck up, pressure, a waxing itch of the foramen magnum, interior volcanism. I’m saved by getting up with ringing in my ears, tending the skin with a white dig of nails in a fist until small crimson moons punctuate the lifeline when I release it, four of them. The snake is tight on my spine, biting upwards. Easy on the caffeine? But I did not have it. So I devise, now leaving work, that if I came home with nobody in it and saw there an entity, an entity I was not expecting, then it, then only it could relieve the pressure by the lineaments of its condensed presence alone. And would it suffice to just think, I don’t know, to think it through. And have I a bottle of something, if not.

52

what is a simple option what is a simple option or the last set option a name for it or a pendant on the chest as a knocker to swap roles in the wilderness is commendable too rather than bellow at the rasp of hinges bellow to their continental primacy there is of course the probability of contract

53

Geographic Properties In this country the walls are thin and the law is the sole law of gravity, which is exported as an antidote and told in a serious manner. The walls are thin and everyone can hear the confounding fathers at it in the same story’s moral. Like dice, man is cast into the world. Anticipating the science of the accident.

54

the coach the inspiration coach dies of heart attack only from sobering youth can the mechanical vision be born he says on his deathbed only from sobering youth the unthicketed paths of cold logic the garden labyrinth of childish laughter caught upon a snag and turned into the repressed violence of love an amorous bite cicatriced into a myth in the nick of time of broken branches it never fails to take one by surprise how quickly one is rendered raping and murdering from belief in the common good and then standing in for truth in an abandoned classroom for a soldierly trial at the end of war the inspiration coach is not being sarcastic is not a muse in drag not a humble owner of a fiery word smithy with lips folded into a wish ah those canned wishes with a body only good for studying in it the reactions of chemistry he would not be delighted if someone mentioned his disease because it is so hard to believe in because it is much more or less without being ironic even on his deathbed even if he was dying wisely alone in a barrel and out of time

55

Refraction The heart muscle worked up autumn style, to which a theological apology is owed. A mute conversation of deeds that cannot appear more pragmatically resolute after the passing of the twelfth moon. The will to define a single god in the rain forest on page 11. So soon, and by no mistake from the scant promise on the blurb. Crafted in the current language of resources, for the resources who take interest in reading it, who lose their value, become impecuniously distracted from their day job and stare at the window. Because page 11 resurrects an inner turmoil about a dormant god that could once enslave geometry in the mouth of a missionary who preached his cosmogony on dark continents, with the scent of gunpowder about his stole, telling the loinclothed adamkadmons that He who sent him was both within and without, talking of a pebble in his hand and of the mist veiled backbone of the land scraping the clouds, a rudiment of a dormant dragon, almost hinting to them at a newly found freedom to paraphrase it, paraphrase a certain will that understands the whole being anything but the sum of its parts. Yet then comes a certain reflection from the refraction in the window, a reminder of the adopted course that was taken. The remains of the release forms, and the lip service, late in the afternoon when the people in the theater are in a hurry to put on excessive makeup and don anachronisms; remove modern coats, unfog humid spectacles and snuggle up for the performance before an air raid siren moves them, suggesting the part that all of them have to accept. And when they run out, the folded beggars outside are as still as caryatids.

56

Livingstone A thought raving with disintegration startled by its new language throws itself upon the soiled pages of a diary with the demented calligraphy of a last resort. It seems that with whatever understanding at hand nothing curative will stand the test of snuffing the light. The landscape in the mind is at the mercy of the tent’s opaqueness, and in the thicket, the wish is ironically strong to be in the middle of a desert, when it is possible to project oneself onto the land, be calm about a few purgative convictions even if blown out of proportion through the suppressed imaginings of a way back. But in the heaving darkness of the jungle the weak shell of man can only double onto itself with all the surprises of proximity condensed to a degree of seizure when recognizing what one is. One page admonishes to forebear, another begs to clinch a revelation, be it an end on all fours for both or not, as long as there is ink and paper or their substitutes that one would not fear.

57

Requisites the villain basks in the jab of the blade that stops him his brain squirms the size of a grapefruit the satisfying conclusive notes have been plucked to clinch the illusion regained by freedom and the florist the florist is certain where he is one way or the other they come for him concealed by the grammar of a purchase

58

Old Wives’ Tales Old wives’ tales. That’s what they say about mythical perseverance when a husband is lumped onto a wheelbarrow and trundled from the lights of the inn into the dark of tomorrow on the outskirts of town.

59

Collapse Behind the iron curtain the first man gave his dog a western name. He read about another man who was decapitated and staggered a figure of infinity.

60

winnowing gloom that one cannot tell if it would make an idiot or a demon of somebody. the universe enters the capillary of the man who holds himself distant and cold and plays its oldest trick on him in his solitude after which the man breaks and somebody is alone no more.

61

They, Who Feared Her A woman harbored a killer as illicit purgation. She knew that she would teach him a lesson that could only be hers. They prescribed this kind of behavior to her. They thought that she might and that if she hasn’t so far they could throw in a couple of favorite predictions and voice them for her. They were respectfully evasive about the etiology of the killer. If it would be within her, Or if she would improvise it in somebody without license, in one of them, perhaps.

62

Sitting on a Bench A conspiracy theory is not just the rules or a plan for a story – it wants to be the story which is perpetually delayed, with a tailspin ending whose anticipation is repeated near forever with more and more details. Seeing that things turn out the way the theory predicts is the theory’s birthright. I miss the unidentified arrow game in the park.

63

Mr. K. (For Henry) A quiet room filled with morning air receives the colors white from the interior and a rustling pale of goldgreen from the window. On the bed is a nondescript servant of duty, mummified in the stillness of bandages. He has got a little peephole for visitors, nothing more. Oval enough and black enough to transmit some primitive amazement to the holder of the clinical gaze from the depths of a total lack of understanding enclosed in a fully bandaged head. A visitor, seated opposite of the life support unit, is wearing a visitor badge saying Mr. K. He has curly white hair, his skin is yellow matte, creased and spotty with age. He is burly, in a visitor chair, waiting for breath to stay in after emerging from the line break. Mr. K. reads Cavafy’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Mr. K. reads into the abysmal oval, from which nothing returns, nothing echoes back. Mr. K is a hawknosed ancient politician with whom people fill an uncomfortable silence, reading out loud and occasionally faltering to a croaky nadir in his dewlapped throat to a very special audience. It is quiet and nobody promises anything if you stay tuned. The room doesn’t do anything but whitewash itself with hints of 9.15 yellow. No doctor or nurse has shown up yet. And Mr. K, Mr. K is of the people.

64

a petrified gorgon big bertha, men of rank admitted their plans when they laid their hands on you, hands that after were mangled in the trenches or peacefully broken by gout. hands of men who did not read the divided self because it wasn’t out yet. big bertha, no one like you was so able to void significance into a fiery moment. the women of the men who held you envied you that, what you allowed these men merely by design, for which they had to leave their wives and make widows.

65

northern solstice the war doctors grope the naked boys with promethean vigor thinking their flesh ready or unfit they blind them looking into their eyes and giving their lids a stretch of grafted wonder as if seeing how far they can go with horror at first sight one of the doctors imagines where a scar would nestle like a curious shaman of savage initiation while another trails off from the rigor of his deciding fingers torn with a snap from the boyish skin in favor of looking at his own nails like a man of the world or by a moment of what is there left other than to become a naturalist versed in the mechanics of death after playing witness to the irrevocable outside the clinic spring turns into summer

66

Poppy I saw a red square look alike picture today that somebody smuggled from a closed country. An aerial shot of a neatly trimmed parade. I knew they were cultivating special flowers there and remembered the student in our dorm, whom I saw hush practicing slogans in front of a mirror in the morning. He breathed and tasted them for dignity. He got red in the face and I asked him to teach me and was given a syllabic crash course.

67

A Drop She sheds the city, breaks it in herself, rainbow sided, steeped in grief or happiness or neither. She is in lakes, spurring rivers to gurgle, choke and foam at the mouth; and in the quiet glassy rivulets which decide for rocks. In the bright hours, graying and faintly reflecting the day it knows; and in moth time, letting her night seed sprout into a Tyrian sky. She, drunk with worst and best intentions, with memory, with naked indifference, a present bursting with pasts, bursting in men with unrecognizable needs, or contouring the beasts of the field with anticipation of branches and leaves, part of a wet hiss on bereft and pregnant plains, valleys that beget hills, just a drop in the sea, in the ocean.

68

The Kettle is Warm At work, the kettle is warm. Singes if its warmth is tested a fraction of a second more. The kettle is warm even if there was nobody to warm it. But you would warm it nonetheless. Nobody knows anybody. Some stop by and make coffee or tea or conversation and they could be half dead, or they could have found their other half and are now in heaven. Some have proven something. They would nonetheless warm the kettle, as they are here.

69

kin a parent is losing their transparency as a child gets pregnant with history it's clear where a poke or a thrust of steel should go

70

Worries Loved ones turn into monstrous worries in time, thought the saturnine father who, smearingly out of the chiaroscuro, bit off his son’s head like a sad old man watching the waves; or the mother who ecstatically yanked out her son’s hands and feet with her drunk helpers, seeing more and more light emanate from the taut body in the ravine; or the son who unknowingly at a crossroads drove an iron piece of fate into the flesh of his dad to forget himself in the halls of masks and motherly love; or the daughter – with her loins forever sealed from her old man – who plotted and plotted in the living shadow of her mother, none of them had a good bargain with the echoes.

71

In this language Race in this language is two things. It is closer to survival than in other languages of our time in a hurried sort of stifle of limbo. It sets the stage for the devices of correction and the light it shines on the backward envy from overseas, the mental constructs of the east, is informal with a blur of an evacuation standard. Race in this language implies a destiny hurled into the souls in question, and with them, the forensic aptitude of the foreigner is delayed.

72

Disquiet They tear at the weal for happiness. Respectful of their delirium. They tear at the weal for a lean promise affected in the next morsel. They tear for the weal in everyone else, for the confusion over how they are called. They undo the choral blasphemy at the end of the last ancient act, where everyone finds peace that doesn’t belong there, a peace churned by the hand of a playwright for what is in the public weal, from the playwright’s embers of despair, they tear to belong to life.

73

A Vignette for the Byways The surroundings were trivialized and the hunger. The little accomplishments of daylight were rationalized to endure. A couple froze together on the byways. Some speculated whether it did not happen for the sole purpose of endearment, or for the purpose of lesser faultiness that the seers of that land could admit. The gathered permitted a few illusions early in the morning to be kept not within the muttering of the clique. Witnesses were formed by habitual questions.

74

fragment the passage of the passage is what is lament the moment of death is a moment of fiction because there is so much fiction out there about death the concealed is concealed with a token of forecast and the great translator is lulled by taxonomic frisks

75

all the beautiful businessmen all the beautiful businessmen clerks and engineers rosy and gaunt conceived by thresholds and taken for granted who hide their encroaching sleep in a stall at work spaciously cavitated for the harboring of ancestral sympathies for private parts such as dreams bumbling through the dark rift of the maya or the galactic equator who knows the states of their souls determined or not when their instructions are received

76

Fecund With the fecund smell of shit in a stall rose some of the best lines that I have read, hiding the purpose of my work. Did the men who built this edifice for the working man, whose stamp of duty is to sigh, think that it could be possible, or did they have another thing in mind, perhaps something that moves and vigorously spits out men in accidents? Did they take what they were building seriously, did they think about the mirror principle in the universe when languidly making projections based on their work, or that nothing can be serious until it is complete, and when it is complete, it is nothing too serious, not what it is, even when engendered in barrenness? Did the mothers, reminded from an early age about ends, about borders, through ovarian cycles, who gave birth to these men, think about their sons’ finite lives, their finite deeds, their finite thoughts repeating their deeds?

77

Visions of Denial If this is it, then they want it simple, like a plug pulled out and then new beginnings that can be swarmed in narrowness. Zodiacal slaves of the stars, coupled noises. Subways run down my legs. The outward expert in the doctor prefers it. He wants to take the symptoms by surprise, when they are in conjunction. Then it is safe. To invest glib deliberation into the last joy of the tongue before it gets cut out, as if. Then the plug can be pulled out on the nomenclature of doubts and some electric symphony can trickle uninterrupted into the caverns of hearing behind closed doors in between patients. Maybe we are here to recognize us as a reason for love.

78

Home What is touched in the household retains an almost impalpable vestige of the crude first forms that served this world. The interpretive touch encumbers the objects with ownership, either through beauty or ugliness, neither of which dismisses the germinal otherness of which the interpretive touch is the jailor, when it is magnificently alone and most prone to be ceased by old passions.

79

Conceivably Is there a hidden purpose in the ornaments of locks. Who is recovered from the lie in their design, their outer complication. Will they beset with simplicity that which cannot but furtively thrive on the unfathomable mechanism lying within. Who is recovered from the lie in their design, are they recovered with a key, and is there a purpose to the ornaments, to the intricacy of imposed safety, would it be a thing to cope with, or was it conceivably enough when the best of wives twisted their hair into thick knots for the engines of war, when some maiden blessed a battle axe in the open.

80

The Glass The glass, the question, what first. Man wore mail in chains to deliver man’s promise, to live in it like in a shell. Man ignored his distorted face in a ball of glass when looking for omens of chimerical intimacy, pushing his desire farther afield and masking it until the mask has become part and parcel of man. Man’s war has been more of a metaphor than man’s peace since devices of malice took on the names and shapes of beasts. But the slug calmly salivates for its abode in an instinct of sacred geometry that man wanted to exude out of dreams and envelop with a healthy carnal embrace too, which happened before, as a last deliberate choice.

81

The Dimensions There was one who evoked the dimensions of inner volition, carried within from an obscure source. The dimensions permitted vastness that no solitude could grant an explanation. This volition had the dimensions of an organ, which thickened the hunger that nothing before had responded to. It set the hunger free and imprisoned anyone who understood that it was free.

82

Loveseat A piece of wood, carved from a presentiment of comfort, with an undulating spine that traverses those who take their seat in it. This ophidian curve, when traced, a knotty hint of bonding. Their necks tense from the purpose of fulfilling its design; or else, at rest, are props to views at opposites that never meet.

83

Walpurgis The personality spasm arrived with a blade of grass in the mouth on a picnic blanket, after he finished tending the indecisive catastrophe for the day. He looked at the others, their gray uniforms pressed against the green earth, too recent for osmosis. One complained that his jaw hurt from the lengthy interrogation and was concerned that he may run out of topics with the wife if things went on like this. The visors of their peaked caps glittered like broken vinyl records, with the spittle of prayers on them that nothing could reproduce. There was laughter and they knew that the wives were coming. A camera man with them, with a black cloak, like a magician.

84

the cavity there is a cavity that sets the tone in the world subtracting from the bosom the preamble of clothing of metaphor and allegory of beauty from beyond the animal after the privileged word the loveable obscurity torching the unacknowledged as a hand after the voyage reaching through the ghosts of unfaithfulness

85

the boundaries of confirmation the sorrow of invention was in the secret thoughts of fathers they excavated for what could stay surfaced onto immanence when their reason would have consummated its disappearance they excavated for it as the jews excavated for their god and identity with a tefillin for a head torch until their answer arrived through the fire onto their children who consummated it

86

far stretch over chicken conjured the irony of the airplane knife and fork. airplane because it is plastic and one off or one time and found on airplanes cordially doled out by flight attendants. irony because what if some word in a nigh forgotten tongue contained this selfsame construct airplane knife or airplane fork or airplane wedge of inarticulate shape as the tongue which conjured it terrifying in an old fashioned sort of way.

87

it the power went down almost as they had predicted five days of darkness and listening to the tides where it was possible everyone came out into the open under the stars unvocationally for most and a writer here and there whose expectations had riddled their liver or were about to thought that it was it staring at a bonfire thought it could be preserved and reintroduced to the world after the power came back

88

A Finger in the Pie The man in the suit walked downhill in a manner of a manner of a stroll on a sunny day towards his disabled child in the valley where progress was to be made, towards a child that could not function authentically but had an intact symphony in his head. The man in the suit had been investing into a reconciliation plan. He gravitated towards what justified him. A subjective act of love or an objective. A book about the four worlds in his armpit tended the interest of the women of the valley, the spouses of his colleagues, in a manner of a man who is about to move furniture, flexing his arms on a limb.

89

Double Take Here she was, with a shoe that was not hers in the alley, unrecognized to the nines at midnight, facing the primitive lubrication of mind. She wanted her assignment to let her understand herself a little better without waiting to be undressed in the murk of the soil and without throwing a hint of unsophistication to the blackguards who have imprisoned her recollection of herself, rendezvoused with at different times of day. How tired she was of her own copies.

90

sat 1 dec planets and stars cannot give up the ghost of the infantilism of atoms cannot get out of the surety of the roundness of accretion beyond the scale and with us where we are the sediments of the small have yielded to the whim of intricacy yielded seemingly by themselves and without a second opinion of a higher order of gamble or profitless speculation that would be appropriate on our side of the story but distance distance that we have taught ourselves to overcome in a primordial rite of perspective lets everything fall back to the interminable roundness of how it was there before us

91

dim in carcosa an ordinary man let us call him mr ambassador had a bad day he was summoned for an aught of dissent that was a half murmur on his lips last evening and the time of the century the time of day and the gimlet in his hand half empty did not help the gurgling of factiousness in the paunch of mr ambassador's superior and that half word of dissent that splinter of doubt could not be taken back and returned and where did that word come from surely not from his fortune teller with whom he trysted as one would with an inamorata because she was one twice a week surely not from the now crippled certitude of his position where did that word come from or from when if happiness did its job in him day in day out so where from then from the day before yesterday from when he was a son teeming with who knows what and if no then from where from lingua franca which is lingua plicata for it has gone through losing its sacredness in the furrows of language that was the language of the initial cause of nature that at one time let it emerge as its most promising descriptor there is a difference now say between a rock and the word for it but that offering did not help either and he had to close the door behind him

92

Return of Investment A man in a cafe, wants to order. Orders, looks at the crook of the J curve in his paper that he camouflages himself with. The accepted dint. His eyes drift from the large font to the bits of conversation he picks from the other table. His news. Who writes their prescriptions? Rules are about hardening. They dry up to the slightest spark which puts them to flames. And if no one remembers, they snap as a twig in a forest.

93

changeover the balcony’s sliding door jammed for the density of the dream world in the situation stayed shut like a yet forbidden scenario a jab of riddance on a bleak dawn recollecting the call and the keyword lost on anybody who had to commit to the plan that lifts one out of a rut he held them as some odd fruits limes if perhaps dark from overdue ripeness but firm because of their unsettled usefulness in their fiery piths outlawed and neglected outside of the situation if the situation was not more inclusive with a redefining grip he yanked the door open and threw them over the parapet a number of stories down their colors changed

94

Ruin The sandboy is unhappy, not happy anymore, standing exorcised from a myth with a cut of honesty. The story had dropped dead as a fly. The fortitude of an improvised wish debunked. He foresees music. Leaving is for him now because it is in him. Leaving the totem for a totem as a dog scurries from a post. He has not yet learned how or mastered a pseudo method for repeating it, should it be a necessity against disagreeable encounters, but if left alone he might improvise.

95

checks and balances one of the guests held it at the garden party that which was in his hand a callous extension looking for suppleness in the secret revolt of the hand a fractious apparition of a prehensile conscience whose only evidence was in the penumbra of its aim where a drink was supposed to go he held a gun but who planted it in his hand what if it was planted there in his unsteady grip by an entity that had all the time in the world where everyone was too infinitesimally asleep to see it he was told that nothing that exists here can ever leave what is a no brainer and what can be brain picking for the prematurely resurrected

96

mid range one of us silently shuffled backward nearly an hour poked with tongs stiff from an armchair with a habit of second nature a habit from the past century in a rented costume a vision of you doubled up before the fire drag accepted your mind probably your mind on twenty five and thirty nine across this vicarious adjustment our votes cast the day before approaching the subject on haunches or imitating it as somebody laboring over stellar alignments and trajectories to save us the trouble of who we want to be

97

A Lesser Stranger Tireless and haggard, with a blink of an eye she eludes her own precautions and lets her craving do the rest of the work in her. She is alone in this as in many other choices that came before. The past at the tips of her fingers had never served its purpose, though something recovered had always been doused in the intuitive, before it went against her in the same old way. Something in her ready to snap again an inner mug shot no one would notice, if not for blank movement, movement that is otherwise supposed to bolster one’s face with understanding. She is talking her way out of his conversation, more strained and rugged in his mouth than in hers this time. He is tracing runes of conviction on a serviette, certain that tomorrow can be born that way – the oldest trick in the book which doesn’t stop her from listening. He is orchestrating a tiny future for them, and she tireless and haggard, listens. What would it be, what would it be this time? A lesser stranger takes their order.

98

One of Them I had to wait a long time for them to put me in a tube. Convictions had to be held at bay for their own sake. Slowly and unsurely the mists of magnetic resonance had to be imprinted for the weary shift-bound eye of the technician, the jaded good eye of the doctor, mildly, without any emotion, doling out his verdict. You’re flaring, they told me. In there, we saw it in you. You’re flaring, right hemisphere. We told you so, but you didn’t believe us the first time. Put more faith in us, will you. Put more faith in us for later. A bit of the unsaid personal touch with which to sprinkle the dry lingo of diagnosis delivered. Maybe you’ll come to better grips with seizing the day after this, their eyes never spoke. How about imagining I’m at sea, with all this swaying in me, would that help? They were used to getting to the bottom of things, in their own narrow way, used to it. Their mouths had given up on wanting to be witnesses to the unexplained, while the eyes systematically roved, latching on to concreteness that only a special device can give birth too. And why the hell not. There were lines I had written that incurred prediction, lines about writhing and lumbago, about head swims to uncharted territories, for the main sake of uttering, because losing things descriptively has always been deemed pretty. But try to put your money where your mouth is, or your health, and the old habits take a step back, maybe just for a day, a couple of days, a week or more, for overzealous beliefs of an entirely different nature to become more visible, more palpable by the ruse of repetition. Some people call it prayer, even the doctor or the tube technician may be one of them.

99

BwO How not to make a man out of beams, that would now may be an impossible and archaic task. All the reasons of the day, if there is such a thing anymore – a day – would be retained by such crude viscera that it would all make very little sense, would go against it. Nothing can be as base and fruitless as staying thus condensed. Think of the last modern sailors, in the days of the flesh, sailing through a mountain gorge, unhinged by sonorous visitations but monotonously animated; and where you do not see, below the surface, reminded of how little they know here in the closing crags, pulling the oars to discover what is without, to hoard discoveries and lump them onto the self for others to see, but for now with their efforts congealed into a human thrombosis in straits that can only thicken for the fathomless, vast, deep and dark, fissuring any mental harness lonesome in its fleshly haunt. They do not make men like that anymore, lonesome men, condensed men, men who had to learn how to be men, or stone, or a carcass of an animal, to understand, men never more inclined to forms of wishful dominion than when calculating out of weakness. They make men out of beams today, because there is no more today, or yesterday or tomorrow for that matter. Man is everywhere, man has crept out of the vicissitudes of time and place, no more to be scarred by his own unhinging will.

100

presentiment the azure they say we come from it or is it born within us again and again born a toddler clad like an astronaut puffs in the autumn space safely awkward from the mother ship tied by observation or something less tenuous observed behind the window an egg cracked it did not slip out it cracked with a fluent discharge on the pan a misty thread with a vague connection to the yolk thickened to a red speck presumptuous almost on its orbit of the sunny side up

101

Reporting Live Where I am now, they are trying to address their benefactor in the most soothing of tones that get them so surprised, or started, that they think it is unethical to soothsay out of the realm of the benefactor’s vocabulary. And what it could do to them, not in the slightest do they know. It is not shrinking to the size of rapport. And they begin to trust the word, their word for the benefactor, its foreign drawl, more than the benefactor itself. In such proximity to rupture are they that they want to vanish because nothing is happening if the word is not uttered. And if uttered, the mountains are in their gaze, and so is the main.