A Spy in the Ruins. Christopher Bernard

toward the lightning of is followed by endless thunder.

      A term that designifies god.

      A broken curtain of rain covered the jungle mountain.

      Having taken the absolute we were left with wheels of partial the luminous individual flecked with drops of light.

      The absolute contingent in the fragrance of the momentary.

      The wilting tea rose in the bud vase.

      Infinitely slow what had gone in a moment.

      Whirring like a desert of butterflies rising off the coastal islands.

      Origami twisting in the fog.

      A court of matriarchs passing judgment in the church cellar.

      In the southwestern quadrant a smudge of comet like a smear of chalk wiped by the night’s finger.

      The pristine attempt at a calculation not based on the imposition of an identity.

      Thralled. Parataxis. Metaphor.

      I take you for what you cannot be.

      Dusty grammar. Dusty grammarian.

      Like pink dead worms on black asphalt after the autumn rains the words appearing beneath your hand. Then forgotten. Should anyone hear there being no difference since all is hidden in a code without cipher. The street washed clean next day. The crown of roads.

      What story to tell. Is there a motion toward. Is there possibility. We live ones never knew when we set out we simply went. Between channel walls of expectation down flues of obligation anxiety and desire. Fear that we could not know. Could not be. Or have less than what we needed. Considerably less. Our being after all small sealed repositories of recurrent need. For nourishment protection the respectful greetings of friends. The family of toleration. And the blank terror of other people’s gestures. To let us fall without our knowing into the nihilism of friendly manners. How we could be erased. At will. Our total dependence at the time to which we must at all times lie. Convincingly. With enthusiasm.

      And take what power we might.

      The last definition of freedom you repeated to me over a midweek lunch at Zingari. Is the freedom to fire. And immediately flames surrounded the small flat in a nondescript part of the city. Dancing ecstatically. Like a mummer in a drunken August cakewalk lighting the drug that had transcended our eyes. Laughing loud they carried you enthusiastically to another part of the city where they dumped your unconscious but still breathing carcass between a trailer of unintelligible ideals and a forklift.

      He woke to the ululation of denials where what he admitted only proved what he never would. That was the story he had to tell. Tearing up the cards of his solitaire game one at a time until none are left. Of us. Of you.

      Let tenderness advance as the answer to uncertainty if all this escapes your understanding. For it certainly escapes mine. As it escaped his. Battlements not so much needed as granted without asking. Gunwales against which the fishermen slept. There were banquets every evening and a gift for quiet laughter. Students met in the garden and rehearsed the ideas of millennial exploration. Most wrong turns were not denounced as much as welcomed with a gracious baffled smile. For every labyrinth had a santos at its heart. The couples on the tombs were holding hands. But you were left alone with your happiness. Guilt was considered a rumor yet even it was given a room where it might lay its head for the night. Shame blushed at its posterity of joy. Little boys met in secret covens of adventure where revenge against the dragon was plotted where ciphered screeds were rolled in expectant corners. Back lots were empires haunted houses challenges to our paladins neighboring woods enormous and unexplored frontiers. We played Indians in the yellow weeds.

      There were signs in the sky above Lock.

      Our lives were unfolding symbols lined with promise and warning. Vast green and enormous blue were the theater for our shadow plays. A drama was an incitement to glory. The small beauty of the snapdragon was the signature of an all-powerful tenderness. Shadows stalked the earth beneath the vast keels of the clouds. There was no hardness that did not have in mind our happiness.

      God was in the wind. No sooner doubt it than doubt your doubt of it.

      Pirates laughed in the beech trees. The cavalry irrupted from stands of bush. Adventure was the taste of the morning as comfort was that of twilight. Happiness was no promise for tomorrow happiness was perpetual now.

      Our castle held us like a hand its corridors were roads to the edges of the sea. Its walls were hung with tapestries designed in abstract brocades of rich hues threaded with mineral. Wolfhounds slept near the fire twitching at dreams of prey. The high roof suspended kingdoms and opened at the vanishing of the sun to show us the vast entanglement of the stars.

      Snow was the frame for our wonder.

       Silence. Silence. Yet more silence. He is listening no longer.

      At the bottom of the stairs lay a head like a peeled heart. We set the traps with human bait.

      In the stalls hung the split carcasses of hogs. Stink of flies above the catchment. No stimulant more vitalizing. It edged the mind with a strange unwholesome clarity. There was nothing to see but the revulsion of the audience. Of doubtful sincerity. For they were fascinated by the roadside sandwich of bodies pressed between the slammed cars.

      A skein of cues and forgotten lines. An attack of stagefright in a hermit’s den.

      The legerdemain of power the hostile examination of language.

      The birth of innocence.

      Roadkill.

      Jersualem cross targets.

      The iniquity of the page followed you like a lovesick dog.

      Text for midrash.

      Squatting in the sweat lodge baying at the points of the compass. Some might consider it a euphemism for hysteria. And other attention deficits. A naked muttering accosting a prim silence. And we lifted like the ash of a burning moth. You cupped your hand around the thought of my pain. Then carefully pressed the scalpel in.

      In the first of the twenty-three layers that constituted the ancient city before the conquest by Scipio Africanus lay the undressed stones of a temple in its original foundation. Teneo te. Terra mea. In the turbulence of no peace. A branding. Lamb on the altar pulled splay. Army lined along the ridge. Tossed banners flickering in a crosswind. Nothing more a threat than the moment of incarnation. The tangle of roots edged into us from variant wildernesses of phoneme and radical the rangers stood watch in the towers of spiders. Facies zone.

      Women were the generators of insoluble problems.

      Their goal was the demolition of what they called the crystal dome. It was strenuous and there was no standard of success. The obsession and frustration of the overachiever. Delayed resolution of the chord. The dream of your death unknown to me. Behind my back suddenly erased. I had not dreamt of you in years. Not since our awful love began. Was it love it was love. The nave turned around itself in the choir. I had come to the end point of land in the sound there was nowhere to turn but back. And in that moment you disappeared.

      The soundless words chipped into the low stone wall. An admonition you no longer remember. Yes. Towers.

      The soft book grew beneath your hands. One by one the leaves unfolded across the binding in the palm. Patient eyes wondering if there was a story there and if so when it would begin. Catching at the melody as if at a thread. Echoes. You dozed off for a moment. The liminal threshold where most dreams are remembered. Rapid eye movement. Saccade. If there is an attack into sleep. Barren plains. The percentage of remuneration times the interest on your debt. What if your love letter to the world is unreadable sweet foolish romantic. Connections fall on every side rise unscaleable walls. Of glass and snowpack.

      Resist the seduction at your peril. Licking your lips. You love. What was there about. To possibly. Tantalus. Wading though mercury a mirror of sea. It gilds the flanks of Venus. There is nothing to want he said primly because there is nothing