And the Spaniards imitate the way you talk. The South American lilt. An alley of palms. Everything slow and asthmatic. Bored biologists watch the rain from the windows of their corporations. It’s no good singing wit h feeling . My darling, wherever you are: it’s too late, forget the gesture that never came. “It was just a façade.” The kid walks toward the house.
2. THE FULLNESS OF THE WIND
Twin highways flung across the evening, when everything seems to indicate that memory and finer feelings are kaput, like the rental car of a tourist who unknowingly ventures into war zones and never returns, at least not by car, a man who speeds down highways strung across a zone that his mind refuses to accept as a barrier, vanishing point (the transparent dragon), and in the news Sophie Podolski is kaput in Belgium, the girl from the Montfaucon Research Center (a smell unbefitting a woman), and the spent lips say “I see waiters, hired for the summer, walking along a deserted beach at eight o’clock at night” … “Slow movements, real or unreal I don’t know” … “A sandswept group” … “For an instant, a fat elevenyearold girl lit up the public pool” … “So is Colan Yar after you too?” … “The highway, a blacktopped strip of prarie?” … The man sits at one of the cafes in the hypothetical ghetto. He writes postcards because breathing prevents him from writing the poems he’d like to write. I mean: free poems, no extra tax. His eyes retain a vision of naked bodies coming slowly out of the sea. Then all that’s left is emptiness. “Waiters walking along the beach” … “The evening light dismantles our sense of the wind” …
3. GREEN, RED, AND WHITE CHECKS
Now he, or half of him, rises up on a tide. The tide is white. He has taken a train going in the wrong direction. He’s the only one in the compartment, the curtains are open, and the dusk clings to the dirty glass. Swift, dark, intense colors unfurl across the black leather of the seats. We’ve created a silent space so that he can work somehow. He lights a cigarette. The box of matches is sepiacolored. On the lid is a drawing of a hexagon made of twelve matches. It’s labeled “Playing with Matches,” and, as indicated by a 2 in the upper lefthand corner, it’s the second game in a series. This game is called “The Great Triangle Escape.” Now his attention comes to rest on a pale object. After a while he realizes that it’s a square that’s beginning to disintegrate. What he at first imagined was a screen becomes a white tide, white words, panes whose transparency is replaced by a blind and permanent whiteness. Suddenly a shout focuses his attention. The brief sound is like a color swallowed by a crack. But what color? The phrase “The train stopped in a northern town” distracts him from a shifting of shadows in the next seat. He covers his face with his fingers, spread wide enough so that he can spot any object coming at him. He searches for cigarettes in the pockets of his jacket. With the first puff, it occurs to him that monogamy moves with the same rigidity as the train. A cloud of opaline smoke covers his face. It occurs to him that the word “face” creates its own blue eyes. Someone shouts. He looks at his feet planted on the floor. The word “shoes” will never levitate. He sighs, turning his face to the window. A darker light seems to have settled over the land. Like the light in my head, he thinks. The train is running along the edge of a forest. In some spots, traces of recent fires are visible. He isn’t surprised not to see anyone on the edge of the forest. But this is where the little hunchback lives, down a bicycle path, a few miles deeper in. I told him I’d heard enough. There are rabbits and rats here that look like squirrels. The forest is bordered by the highway to the west and the railroad tracks to the east. Nearby there are gardens and tilled fields, and, closer to the city, a polluted river
2. THE FULLNESS OF THE WIND
Twin highways flung across the evening, when everything seems to indicate that memory and finer feelings are kaput, like the rental car of a tourist who unknowingly ventures into war zones and never returns, at least not by car, a man who speeds down highways strung across a zone that his mind refuses to accept as a barrier, vanishing point (the transparent dragon), and in the news Sophie Podolski is kaput in Belgium, the girl from the Montfaucon Research Center (a smell unbefitting a woman), and the spent lips say “I see waiters, hired for the summer, walking along a deserted beach at eight o’clock at night” … “Slow movements, real or unreal I don’t know” … “A sandswept group” … “For an instant, a fat elevenyearold girl lit up the public pool” … “So is Colan Yar after you too?” … “The highway, a blacktopped strip of prarie?” … The man sits at one of the cafes in the hypothetical ghetto. He writes postcards because breathing prevents him from writing the poems he’d like to write. I mean: free poems, no extra tax. His eyes retain a vision of naked bodies coming slowly out of the sea. Then all that’s left is emptiness. “Waiters walking along the beach” … “The evening light dismantles our sense of the wind” …
3. GREEN, RED, AND WHITE CHECKS
Now he, or half of him, rises up on a tide. The tide is white. He has taken a train going in the wrong direction. He’s the only one in the compartment, the curtains are open, and the dusk clings to the dirty glass. Swift, dark, intense colors unfurl across the black leather of the seats. We’ve created a silent space so that he can work somehow. He lights a cigarette. The box of matches is sepiacolored. On the lid is a drawing of a hexagon made of twelve matches. It’s labeled “Playing with Matches,” and, as indicated by a 2 in the upper lefthand corner, it’s the second game in a series. This game is called “The Great Triangle Escape.” Now his attention comes to rest on a pale object. After a while he realizes that it’s a square that’s beginning to disintegrate. What he at first imagined was a screen becomes a white tide, white words, panes whose transparency is replaced by a blind and permanent whiteness. Suddenly a shout focuses his attention. The brief sound is like a color swallowed by a crack. But what color? The phrase “The train stopped in a northern town” distracts him from a shifting of shadows in the next seat. He covers his face with his fingers, spread wide enough so that he can spot any object coming at him. He searches for cigarettes in the pockets of his jacket. With the first puff, it occurs to him that monogamy moves with the same rigidity as the train. A cloud of opaline smoke covers his face. It occurs to him that the word “face” creates its own blue eyes. Someone shouts. He looks at his feet planted on the floor. The word “shoes” will never levitate. He sighs, turning his face to the window. A darker light seems to have settled over the land. Like the light in my head, he thinks. The train is running along the edge of a forest. In some spots, traces of recent fires are visible. He isn’t surprised not to see anyone on the edge of the forest. But this is where the little hunchback lives, down a bicycle path, a few miles deeper in. I told him I’d heard enough. There are rabbits and rats here that look like squirrels. The forest is bordered by the highway to the west and the railroad tracks to the east. Nearby there are gardens and tilled fields, and, closer to the city, a polluted river
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