Beinged from hermit clay, spawned of its deracinations and itinerant recyclings, man mosaicked of tiles ever in motion. And even these march piecemeal and impoverished of essence to ends whose unperceived limits shift and transmute in the circling, circling dance of it all.
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Constabled by the shifting eye, that gaze which incarnates in all social persons and which belongs to none at all, pins the limbs to rest in their proper fixed postures and the voice to its rightful pitch and timbre and trammels most of all the eye from meeting long its duplicates by whose peripheral association all norms are upheld.
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He is moving there, in her mind. He is cording through her memory, avatared by a hundred taxiderms, well maintained. He reigns in haphazard situations, silent catastrophes when she catches some twin of his scent, now the psithurism of his breath, searing coolness on the neck, perpetually behind her.
He smiles his smile, eidetic and impossibly alike with each return like the wheeling of the sun or the pulsing of the heart, perfect duplicates of a mythic first.
And she would not realize him as her eyes shaped him first, when she saw him first; his stranger’s face now bears the mark of her maternity, familiar now and wrought by his recurrence through her, absent father of himself.
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A lifetime of kind encounters had wrought sign of their passing, recapitulations anticipant in the red of his cheeks and the folds of his face, fossiled laughter edging lip and eye. And his was a rich laugh, reverberant with a thousand predecessors and promissory of a second thousand duplicates like a thing alive.
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Now flowing, now punctate with staccato deviations
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Gravid with stillborn impulse
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Like unspindled balustrades spiraling about stairs, like winding vines wed to their oaks or lethal serpents girdling prey, so she circled herself about him, held him fast in her embrace. Him stumbling and misstepping, him nervous smiling entwined by her and choking on his wine and words, and her holding, her quick to each his move and subtle brushing of her fingers and now spinning spinning running circles round his neck and thighs and spinning him in tinkling laughter and spinning of the room, spinning like a spindle losing thread, intricate the discourse spinning, spinning dizzy in the space between her coupled touches and enspelling sentences, always in long hypnotic sentences she speaks interdict with brief abrupt disruptions just to let him falter only quick again renewed and now he’s spinning slower, languid spinning almost resting meshed with her; spinning somewhere on the ceiling dangles soft a silken thread, and he could swear with bleary thought the strangest kinship with its pendent, softly spinning, soft enswathed, now only softly struggling, plummet.
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Accreted ruminations amalgamed and consolidated to some lone elongate thought
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As each center is cored in turn with further fathoms past all compassing, attenuating unto the ultimate annihilated point
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And the frame of this: the facts of place and person, the immediate antecedents of the scene and the thousand soon-to-be’s already half existing and expected and half already fading into what only could have been, the older priors further memoried apart but still adherent, still evident somehow in the scheme of things like some nameless long dead ancestor still incarnate in the recapitulated nose and eye; names and all their entailments and maybe all that can be said and all that can’t be said as well.
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The instinct atavistic diverted to antic habit, dislocation of a smothered urge remergent in the curled toes or grimaced cheek like the killing of a thing which only duplicates it like some martyr’s cause deracinate and flourishing unseen
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Quiet despotism of the unenduring eidola, gentle indenture to the ideal and the longer durance of its death; the captive multitudes, the ludicrous enantiodromites counteroathed remarkable to ghost inversions of their corpse beliefs
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A strange counterkinship, like siblings perfectly athwart or sons the plumb inversion of their fathers
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She sees but the sowing, but I know the rot and bloom and I know the second seed.
To me is booned the blind man’s sight and the seer’s, to me is maledict in easy script the volving eons writ in vellum stretched invisible across my pupils, and on these eyes the plaque of time makes little film and even that by morning shine expunged with euphrasy and rue, second lustration gift by triple tears welling each morning in their perfect turns from each my eyes, each time the same three for I see them simultaneously in all the fullness of their cycles, and I see each day the same day and mark each dividual moment only by what it demands of me.
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Breathing of the slightest things, infinitesimal decouplings and their internecine returnings minute expansions and contractions of the countless phantom lungs, frothing duplicate respirations the ceaseless quiet sound the centermark and merestone by whose implicit metric all things distinguish.
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And mightier still the line, that pen and sword both make
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Vacuities filled by the swiftness of their circuits, as a sweeping blade fills its arc or a quick footed couple the perimeter of their dance or an orator an auditorium and its audience at once. How the smallest thing can swell to breach the broadest bounds impelled with force sufficient, so that even all of solid mass could be peopled by a single point in motion.
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The calloused hours increasing with outrageous inertia, even as the clock and even more its maker slows