***
*
Condemned
*
I’d been condemned to death – by electrocution, apparently. It was to happen sometime the next day, and though I didn’t ask anyone, I kept wondering what it was all about. Getting fried seemed pretty brutal – couldn’t I just drink a cup of poison or something, like Socrates had done? That seemed manageable… peaceful, even. Everyone I talked to sort of just shrugged or shook his head. Figures.
It’s like with a job interview: if it’s still a good ways off, the worry’s not too bad, but as you get closer it just shoots up towards the vertical. It’s really not fair. I had some things to take care of and it’s really annoying.
The following day my friends and I drove to the place where it would happen. I remember walking alone through some hallways aimlessly, sighing in irritated puffs of breath, my hands in my pockets, looking around at what there was to see.
The room where it would happen wasn’t too far away, maybe around a corner or something. Halfway down the hall, there was a water faucet where an old woman, no arms, was straining in her wheelchair, doubled over, desperately trying to press the button with her big toe while catching the water in her gasping, puckering, wrinkled fish mouth, and all the while I was watching I just kept laughing to myself, trying to be discreet, thinking what a house of tears.
*
Alas
*
Alas for the trees and stalks of the flowered world, for the evening’s atmospheres suspire constantly and lend them no rest. Under mound and under cairn the mother and father sleep, and the child between them. It is not a land of the Earth, but of another place.
Alas for the grain of the fields, never to be harvested, and for the windbreaks of cypresses trembling through the dusk.
How many hills can one see in the breathing night, beyond and beyond, the emptiness of nowhere? Above the hallowed land the stars gleam as priests and priestesses, the moon as a sexless monarch.
From a grove a hawk carries a sealed note to the dome of the heavens, the cold and murmurless infinite.
*
*
*
*
three sons, these years postdiluvian
*
in his mind Shem carries the KBM jewel to the heart of the World’s Fortress, the green comet’s destination, through hall and arch and open room, a hurried and nervous tempo – this jar of his cracked and sealed and cracked again, this vase of his shattered that no one much cared for; in his mind Ham bears the KQ-KTZ pearl to chancellors, a crowd of fallen hearts conveyed by conic sections (convoluted infinitely, flooded by a white rum) to arteries and veins of this planet – while centrally transported to the wedding and the law, the bouquet has shriveled; in his addled brain Japheth absconds with the KL 4110 ingot of delight turned right-side up in the prism land…
and bound for the disreputable saloons of the sea’s shelves, he abruptly faints gasping to the checkered gravitational floor;
a coin rolls spirally and is swallowed by the magic slot; it is the mind’s secret of the Fortress that is stolen and lost; for the loved one is born and is born not; amid cherries the wrath of the great citadel endures
*
*
*
*
For the Day is Soundless, the Building Lost in Sunlight
*
The floors conceal the patience player, the nemesis who deals the cards: a striped blue suit and a knife of a heart. Around the hovering meteor rays rotate, bent by the windows.
You carry the book. The book tells your name, your age, your mother and father, the house where you reside. You reach the first floor, the stairs.
Behold the card-dealer: in a hundred buildings he waits behind the door, behind the table. He is a young man with greased, combed hair and a cigarette, his jaw a waiting trap. Through the space above his head a million unseen rivers seem to rage and gather, groaning like beasts of a ripped velvet sea. Through the air runs his presence: in the quiet, the daylight.
The houses glow pink, light green, and yellow. In the city the nemesis smokes. A cloud passes before the sun.
Each door is locked, every hall leads in a loop. The sorting proceeds: faces, colors, numbers, letters.
It is a morning of storm winds, and the jagged beams of a star all the world has forgotten.
*
*
*
*
Church of the Radial Bubble
*
Crash!
Glass animals fall to pieces, shivered by the hammers of the men on elephants, haughty in their war-towers. Giraffes, zebras, crocodiles, leopards, hippopotami: crash! Cascades of shards tinkle and resonate among the nine planets – distant whispers from sphere to sphere, the bobbing buoys of night’s bath.
Crash!
When a man on earth speaks, the elephants lift their trunks and trumpet to the ceilings of the world.
Within the radial clear bubble, a sudden serenity prevails. Messages from lonely Saturn are the mumbled music of this church. I would tell them to the people lying everywhere, but they are all drugged.
Exiled by friends, as lost as the day I began wandering, I see a path stretch into the countryside. It is not so hard at first. Along the garden pathways is lined my glinting menagerie – a virgin army, as yet uncracked, unconverted to the sweet, hard candy of sound.
*
*
*
*
The House and the Desert
*
Summoned on a whirlwind, the rider of the carpet drifts down, a mind of fluish thoughts and bleary hypnotism. Above a sea as blue as unopened blood, he spies the far shore, the line of rocks and cracking foam.
Out of emptiness now, and the shining shapes emerge: screens and francolins, a lawn, a staircase, the ecru sea-lilies, a chateau. From walls and tiled turrets the mice fire their crossbows, sticking arrows into crawling shields – plates of brass slung over the vertebrae of the slavering cats laying siege. The air trembles with a murderous hissing, the mists and light with an ineffable expectancy.
It is a long desert then, a land of mountains, gullies. Shivering in the gusts, desiccated pillars and fan-shapes break apart softly. After many hours, the rider passes the rain-shadow – and orange plains stretch away to sight‟s limit. Miles below, the carpet‟s shadow flutters on the sand.
The panels of the sky revolve: the sun and clouds, the moon and stars.
At last, the rider sees the jointure, the wainscot of the desert and the star-riddled night!
There is a house in this place, a gray-painted, lonely dwelling. On the second floor, a single lamp burns at a single window, and a head‟s silhouette stares forever from behind a curtain. And as the rider passes this house, he hears a faucet dripping, a tapping in the silence. Each time a drop falls, another of us slips into these eddies of heaven, these winds of sleep.
**
**
*
**
An old counting-house was purchased, and it was called the Room of Memory. Here were all the treasures of the great magnates and plutocrats stored, but no lock or guard was needed, for sheer distance hid the wealth away from any who might think to steal it. Across the hours the keepers of the bank counted the riches at their desks, forever mumbling and computing, but never scribbling down a figure.
Tall and slanted, the building could almost be called an obelisk; indeed, such it was. For untold miles to every direction stretched a silent sandy plain, but a record player warbled songs from the roof across the land, drawing great patterns of birds and hornets and even, perhaps, the altering clouds. By day the air shivered with the drone of creatures, but by night it was tranquil, and the shine of stars crept like the sound of muffled bells upon the few flowers about, reflecting a silver hue off the petals so that they glimmered like clusters of coins.
In time, a traveler of empty regions came to the obelisk. Crinkled by heat, shuffling, he passed through a door and, some unknown time after, left by another. His step seemed slower, but less halting, as he disappeared into the mirages.
They say eventually the traveler found his way home again, and lived a life as others do. Many asked him over the years what he saw or heard in the counting-house – and whether perhaps he might have filched some small coin or jewel from under the nose of a money-counter – but he always looked straight on, to some point far off, and said nothing.
Since his day, others have sought the obelisk, but no one knows what has become of them. Flocks of birds pass over that empty land, and insects beyond number; and the thick air quivers with their voices and chirruping as they all vanish into the bright distance.
**
**
*
**
Sailing in a Crown
*
The king’s brain lives in the study of the watchful building, the queen‟s in the garret, the counselor‟s in the library. We see a train of pilgrims forever enter at the doorway, but never depart. Sailing in a crown, you and I join those who watch the procession of these devoted, dwelling rather on a pale body, long fingers, shut eyelids, the certain glance of a long-ago midnight. In the cold season the air hurries over the infinite lowlands, singing in the rocks, shaking vegetable bristles and the wrinkled medlars. In vaporous summers the monsoons exhale a humid life, brushing combs and frills and features at the window, wetting the burgundy globes, spinning them off into the sky, the vault of melancholy.
*
*
*
*
To Where Does the Water
*
The striped boxes of waiting – I think of these often, in the purgatory of regretful days, and the figures who fold themselves within them. A withered man sits alone, bent at the knees and elbows, bound in jointed squares; a coiled woman’s limbs rest tangled as a knot. Every night now is the declination of guilt and angst, the nod of a dozy head; every scented hour the son and daughter at once of a harsh, blasted love.
To where does the water pour, the soda and gas of a dial, down winding levels and channels from the full heart of heaven? We will see it feed the swollen vegetables of the floor of sight, and the teeth of flytraps and poison of pitcher plants – these mouths wending up and up, into the structures of the crooked men, and of angels.
*
*
*
*
Cleaning
*
On Tuesday comes the cleaning and washing of the second floor. Some of these robots are copper, and some are silver. They have hands to spray fluid with, and hands to wipe, hands to rub polish in, and hands to buff. Where they might enter this house, and where exit, and who may send them, I have never discovered.
They tell me you are somewhere in the house as well.
On Wednesday it is the third story. The robots seem to move up the floors in their work as the week passes, though sometimes they disappear for days at a time, or move about the floors randomly from hour to hour or even minute to minute.
Should we leave a mess of stained tablecloths and shattered glassware for them? It always helps to leave them something to do – they are much friendlier that way. And perhaps if I come across an overturned table that is not my doing, I shall have some idea of where you are.
There are no doors or windows in the surrounding walls of the first floor, or the second or third. From the windows of the fourth floor I can view only what seems a sky of no horizon – above me, below, in every direction, this unending blue that is the color of emptiness.
The robots can spot every wisp of lint and every stain hidden in the tufts of carpet in the halls and rooms and closets. But I have never known them to watch the wheels and signs that appear to me some days in this never-ending void, this eternal daytime.
Look, here floats across the sky the figure of a man – a face of amethyst, a chest of chalcedony, legs of resplendent emerald – and seven translucent wings, bearing him up from falling through the midmost of infinity!
Should you or I flip over this table in the dining room where I stand? Should I now – or will you wander by later, when I am nearby but asleep and cannot hear, to do it?
I have counted the number of closets in this house – there are exactly a thousand. Behind nine hundred and ninety-nine of the closet doors are spread on tables the forever-freshest banquets of muscatel and fishes, cheese and fruits and ice creams, every delicacy laid on shining salvers, alabaster dishes, porcelain crockery – glowing dinners waiting only for us to drag them by the table legs into clean rooms and break and spill them all with a calamitous crash.
*
*
*
*
No-Day
*
The adding machine of this place runs everything, but cannot tell me where I am. Rows of spotless urns line the paths. It is a clear afternoon, and sailboats glide down the river.
No one waves back to me.
There are people everywhere, are there not? I see them resting on the boats, and on the roofs and terraces.
Yesterday, tomorrow, even today – all are equally remote.
Can the people perceive me? I do indeed see some of them glancing, but every eye shines vacantly – those glassy twinkling dots, shifting in puppets’ heads.
It is a land of distances – the monitoring sun, marble walls, the fields of topiaries in early flower.
Somewhere in this maze is my beloved, but every face that comes by tells me nothing.
Thoughts Lost in the Muddled Morning
*
Will I be in the city soon enough? Has the train departed? There is a supreme cloud swelling, a stirring above, and a hand draws it down from the cold places where the rain is born.
I am not as old as I might be, but neither as young. On the cushions of the train car, the pillow warms under my head. Infinite years that are hours flash by.
*
Regard that milk-colored palace of arches, shut tight as a clam… It breathes a pale music from some closet far within. Out of stratus layers the far-off spades and wedges scurry down, hiding like rabbits among the sculpted shrubs of a parterre. I have seen this jungle once before.
Jouncing waters – we both lie back lazily in a pirogue that floats across whirlpools, sucked by airflow. Soon the water beneath us forms a stream… and now dissipates into a salty marsh that the two of us glide upon, a slough chirping in midday.
With soft minutes the water clears. Carp are squirming, impaled on the teeth of tridents forgotten at the bottom of a long porcelain pool, while crabs and lobsters mill across the tiles. The forest all around speaks nothing.
*
What shall we glimpse ahead and above? Triangular flags bearing letters and numerals, running up and down on unseen cables. The flags spell out our names; they spell the time, the day, the month, the weather.
Almost those flapping colored symbols suggest a message – perhaps a reminder of half-forgotten happiness and longing from long ago… But the letters have vanished into the nimbus.
Who pulls in and runs up the hidden cords? Someone surely inhabits this platform that slides upside-down across the coral-colored exosphere, rotating in the glint of noon. Alternately those zenithal beings wear the aspects of devils and cherubim, and peer down at us with scowls or rapture.
We two in our boat approach the sky and the open sea, each a mirror looking infinitely inside the other.
*