(I walk alone. Alone. Men don’t run in packs, but they run . . . Death at the wheel expects his spin. Dark seeps in around the edges, winds rise in the caves of our Aeolian skulls, five fingers reach to take winter into our hearts, the winter of all our hearts)
And they came now in the darkness, they loomed and squatted about him, all the furnished tombs: this dim garden of rock and wood.
(Bars of silence. Score: four bars of silence, end on the seventh. See how they show on my white shirt among the roses. Bars and barristers of silence)
The quick blue spurt of a struck match. A cigarette flames, then glows, moving down the street into darkness.
(There is no sign for isolation but a broken spring, no image for time but a ticking heart, nothing for death but stillness . . . and the wall, the wedge, is splitting deeper but we’ll hold, for a while we’ll hold on, you and I)
He stood still in the stillness that flowed around him and listened to the hum of insects calling through the black flannel. As if in answer, clouds came lower.
(At the mouth of caves, turning. We can’t see out far, in deep, but the time has come for going away the time has come for becoming ... At the mouth of caves, turning, and time now to enter the calm, the old orders. At the mouth of caves. Turning)
He walked on and his heels talked and the night came in to hush him.
He hollered out into the dark, screamed once out into silence—and it entered his heart.
He passed a pearl-gray streetlight, passed a graveyard lawn.
(“Sudden and swift and light as that the ties gave, and we learned of finalities besides the grave.” Is this how it feels, the instant of desertion—a vague epiphany of epochal stillness, primal quiet?)
Around him, scarcely sounding his echo, stood the shells of houses, like trees awaiting the return of dryads who had lost their way.
(The instant of desertion, the instance of silence) The cigarette arced into the street and fell there, glowing blankly.
He bent his head and began to hurry. And with a flourish, the snows began.
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Orbit 4 - Anthology Page 27