A Spy in the Ruins. Christopher Bernard

the awning snap. The half-open door creaks in. If you listen you can make out what they are shouting on the beach. The laughter. The officious whistling of the lifeguards. A soothing roar of surf. Lapped with little pools of quiet. Your feet in the water your eyes on the clouds your mind in the city your heart in the forest. Your soul on the back of your tongue.

      There we were all crammed into a multivalent now here always. Then that is to say at that time. How wrong we were! Curled around the jugular nonetheless. Polysemic. Suffocating.

      Nothing was not available. Electronic hysteria glossolalia of the chatroom elusive but multiple tasks. There were subordinate questions such as who tied the solitary one to the bedposts. The exquisite happiness of public humiliation fed absolute pride. The random constellations of public chaos organized according to fire codes and usage zones. Woman was the principle of disorganization man the imposer suspect in the urban ghettos of repealed order.

      She again. Who dared you to set her boundaries. Who lashed according to absolute moments. Living in a present without past without future. Demanding submission to pity. Inciting the stallion to the thrust of light. A hand on muscle. Strain without object. The strenuous drive toward the normal. The ordinary an irresistible dare.

      She again. We dreamed of each other for days. Again. We stalked each other like prey our fear equal to our despair. Again. You stood before me like a pillar of darkness in the wilderness. Wherever I reached for you you disappeared in a play of fire and pain. You burned me. There was nowhere to go. The shed collapsed in the back of my mouth… . The titular leader advanced to the front of the march. And there spoke to the line of winter police. Our job is not to move. Our ice is your boundary.

      In your hand the possible adventure. That must come out. Like an afterwards of stark beauty. A bed of vastness. Caught in a constabulary of sheets. Wild nights of memory and a litter of squibs. Larks of irresponsibility. Rocket flowers in the community gardens. Nothing but name to back it but that was enough. At the time.

      The solitary one returned to his solitude with a hurried bouquet of thankfulness. To briefly coin his joy.

      A spiral of heavenliness rose from his lamp.

      She danced in the pocket of the meadow thinking she was alone. Purslane. A long sigh between beats of night. Being taken with. Being overtaken by. A portfolio of elevations for an ideal city. Gargoyles prone with chin in palm on malachite consoles. Glass caryatids holding the tablets. A line of prophets speaking words of stone.

      We could hear everything. Those of us alive at the time that is. Nothing was more amazing than the way things came and came. The wonder of the night was that it recurred there was always a sky above him the clouds marshaled thought into ranks of possibility the stars uncurtained the hallways of the night there were infinite perspectives of assurance. The glorious freedom of the dream.

      They felt themselves expand to the ends of the universe the musicians of quantity told them had no end. Though only in thought it was enough. For you to have it. To turn your back on the shattering. The moon a flocking of swallows the sun an arrow of tenderness. Where could they meet but on the sand. But you told me to. And I did it. Here. See.

      Tracing the path of the unknown one the silent one in another part of the city. For we moved to a city. Then.

      Back and forth the cat’s cradle of blue threads of light.

      Ubiquitous tangents of the real.

      Valance. Vectors. Corrupted sectors. Prime time. Brief psychotic breaks.

      Healing followed the same pattern.

      He still felt the occasional stab of a barely endurable anguish in the phantom heart.

      I know it is not there and yet I feel it.

      Useless notes from the director applied to a hopeless production. And yet the paradox held. The swinging bell in the great cathedral near the pension where we stayed in that ancient city. Built over centuries weird pockets of light on the entablature where the grotesque peeked at the world between the averted loins of the beautiful.

      You turned toward me in sadness away from me in joy. That was a hard time.

      Knots of the impenetrable hung like lianas in our room. Unbearable the brief openings of light. Seeing was. Between starlight and the seapaths of the moon. She stepped on darkness timidly gathering her hands each clutching a different fear to her small and withered breasts.

      Cross.

      Aching to and unable to. Behind him the ghosts of his unborn children. We received with clenched hands the offerings. We were showered with blessings. We held our hands over our heads to protect them from the sun. We pleaded for exemption.

      By that time love had become unendurable.

      The low iron railing around the small temple.

      More crows.

      At the time the orans presided the slim figure on the catacomb wall rose before him as he turned the corner her arms raised in prayer. The surprise of it. The wonder of a prayer that is not stooped to the knees head bent hands clasped the body clenched in the body language of pleading or contrition.

      Not a supplicant a celebrant. Of what mystery you could not see in those eyes.

      The beardless Christ the lamb against the white wall of the alcove. Fascinans. The tenderness of her. Presents. What was that unknowingness other than the search for. Scintilla. Where the body met the gleaning of its desire. Caligine. Hard love. Broken softened worked to usefulness. But whose use. Contemplatio. Coincidentia. If there were god what then. What if not. Where put her longing. In hopeless quest for justice in the empty courts of the world. Squeezing the stone for blood. She lived in unquenched thirst in unslaked hunger. The ten thousand beings were not enough without the one thing needed. What is that. What is that. There was no way. Oppositorum. She murmured god not knowing what she said. She murmured all not knowing what she said. She murmured you not knowing what she said. Her arms made a cross of her body. A gesture of powerless wings.

      At the center of her devotion burned a banked but incurable fury.

      In the memoirs of the assistant nothing has been revealed. We will seek in vain for a persuasive justification. The main events are scanted the relief is of trivia against a background of confusion.

      You never said you would tell me.

      Given the arbitrariness of the cornerstone to the baptistry of conversion there was little telling what the eventual construction would amount to before collapsing. Piezo. Volta. Cell. Into the casuistry of ordinances and the dark faded mold where. Figural discourse reverted to a slightly quaint abstraction. Picking at instances of law and statistical aberration. The turtle’s shield. Hiding from the interaction of the egg.

      And when one was erased. Cities of infusion the cries of the crazy in the alley which reverted to euphemisms in the café. The night inversions. The male into the female connection to secure.

      Resolved we thought we were enough.

      Vast cope of twilight. Foundations rocking on the air were not beyond settling into the sea’s. The sea’s children heard almost laughing. Through the night shaft. Noises you mistook at first for desperation. Yes laughter.

      My neighbor’s face appeared suddenly on the back of my hand. You cannot move further in. We found a coil rusting from a kind of oxidized nostalgia. Of crystallized blood. It prevented us for years from recognizing the future in the oak tree by the currents of the road… . Twenty years would pass before he woke. In the barranca. Inhabited by only the shy natives of the past. Under the burning star.

      In every rhetoric of explanation there was a trope of dismissal. No mathematical system being both consistent and complete. Incongruent topologies variant geometries of possibility taxonomies of doubt leaving everything possible again. For example the taste of your name in my mouth. Of salt and bay leaves. Unfinished rosewood. A lock of chestnut hair shot with lianas of gray. Of white. An irrational at the heart of counting.

      Infinitely caressed endlessly aroused.

      Moving