Oblique Rain excerpts 2

The rain cut sharp, straight angles across the glass encasement of the bus stop shelter. Simon was preparing his intellect for work, listening to the thin patter on the roof and watching the traffic signals smear through the mess of droplets washing down the panes. His translucent reflection eyed itself. The face, he thought, was a fluid thing, different at different hours of the day. At night he looked aged when he studied himself in the mirror. He saw that his hair became disheveled, his eyes bulged and his cheeks deflated, and sometimes he found the creature there so odd he could not recognize him. But early, in the hours after waking up and washing and having coffee and something to eat, and dressing himself, and then sitting for a time in the shell of the bus stop, waiting for the bus to arrive, he looked absolutely young and poised.

From Monday to Friday, invariably, he found himself at this hour seated on the same chlorophyll colored bench under the iron branches interwoven with glass, either baking in the heat of the sun beneath which the bus stop acted only as a greenhouse, or in the cooler, softened light of a swimming, rainy day. Often he thought that he preferred the mornings when it was raining. They seemed muted, hesitating, caught up in a drawn out gesture that reprieved him silently from the agony of a sun-filled day he would undoubtedly be prevented from knowing, had it occurred. The hours in the Great Hall of Records were long and pitch black. Only two small lamps glowed above his head at his desk. The room was kept dark to better regulate light saturation, and with each workstation, circumscribed as it was in its own unique sphere of pale yellow, and set apart from the others at different intervals about the chamber-like expanse, the scene at times resembled to him a school of jellyfish bobbing in the depths of the sea. As he watched them, they became more like stray moons, micro-planets encasing a silent, hunched individual, broken free from their orbits and come to a still there, in the fathoms.

A full bus: ladies and gentlemen in fine clothes and in worn clothes. The perfumes of the people infected him, drifting on the still air. He was rocked and lulled like a child by the steady vibration. A scent from the woman beside him, a strange smell of violets and formaldehyde, and the green light running along the ceiling disoriented him pleasantly. His eyes were heavy, but he was determined to keep watching the rain-streaked windows as he moved along the curious lengths of the street, now becoming fuller with crowds of shining umbrellas and the sheen of rain coats bubbling in a mass at a crosswalk. These, he thought, were the only minutes allotted to him, and he must take everything in. Even the leaves were just then falling from the rows of trees, and in a matter of a month the same deadened sky would pour its cold November snows over the sidewalks and the window sills. The same sleek backs would huddle a little further into themselves and follow the same paths each morning, their footsteps slightly muffled.

In the afternoon perhaps this rain would burn off, and the air would be cleansed, and on his lunch hour he could walk through the gardens letting the new sun touch his arms. Then the autumn flowers would release their perfume, and the trees would stand upright and sway in the breeze and the sparrows and blackbirds would alight on the branches, waiting for crumbs. All of this he dreamt of in the morning, bobbing up and down on the bus, stealing quick looks at the faces of the people around him.

Though his days were sacrificed on the altar of earning his living, the evening was his. During the interminable hours bent over his desk at the Great Hall of Records, what sustained him most was the anticipation of evening, and the light above Lake Embresse, and the whorl of faces that would pass him on the street. In summer it is a drawn out spectacle, the sky absolutely huge, in swaths of orange and red, moment by moment darkening, the peak of Mount Embresse by the minute merging into the dense purple of the night, its rippling, wavering double mirrored in the lake. Simon had also seen, on many occasions, night passing over the city from a vantage point on the heights of the mountain. Then Embresse slowly became draped in a veil of shadow, and street by street a spray of lights unfolded in the shape of a Japanese fan, as if a lazy hand was spreading it out in the lap of the valley, and then he would admire the twinkling pentangles of fire points, strewn out before him like gems on a cushion of night. The lake appeared to be a softly undulating fabric, dark mercury.

In the evening he could lose an hour wandering by the lake and the canal, watching the light changing over the rooftops. And where the water was channeled into the stone arms of the first lock, it roared a deep and diffuse sound, and he would pause there and absorb himself intently, totally, listening only to this sound and watching the water flow and the people about. At times, over his desk working, he would sit dead still, his head would stoop a bit, and he would lift one ear, convinced that from somewhere in the dark hollows of the Great Hall that same sound was emanating, approaching him from an obtuse angle, washing through the dark chambers and hallways at a terrible rate, rushing toward his little desk with a deafening roar and leaving complete decimation in its wake. But soon he returned to his senses, and the sound dispersed in dissipating waves back to the edge of his memory.

A Bridge.

I seek to still each moment
not for a want of immortality
or out of the fear of the darkest dreams
of the subterfuge. What would I do
with my eternal life
and what would I fear
in the unknown wilderness
if I lived forever unknowing
and had not your hand
to pull me through the wilds?

I seek to still each moment
because the mirror of each moment
reflects something we have shared,
because the surmountable distance
of miles and years that opened over us
only reveals its fragility, its permutability,
when I try to draw the eternity from the instant.

For instance:
the eternality in the image
of a snowy bridge
lies in the passage of the water
along snow-tinged banks
and the silvery surface, silken
with the reflection of the whirling sky.
Do you see? I am
already there, and you
are already there, and we
are there together.

Oblique Rain excerpts 1

These fragments are excerpts from a longer work that I have neglected for months but that I wish to return to presently. When complete, I intend it to be a tribute to all the planes of the imagination opened up to me by the works of Fernando Pessoa and Robert Walser. Take these for nothing more than what they are, brief sketches of a work in progress.

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This year the day of the dead was rung in on the tolling of faint bells, which were carried along soft waves of light and seeped into the houses of sleepers in the same way that the perfume of soil pervades a forest. None were woken by the bells, whose sound shivered in the chilly morning, as substantial as perhaps only the puffs of breath lifting from the lips of dormant bodies and diffusing in the air. Simon listened to them in half-sleep, the refractions of the distant sounds, cool bands of metallic air dilating and protracting. He tossed on his side. He became aware of a sudden desire for the heat of another body. He tossed again, restless. In the frame on the white wall across from the bed, obfuscated by a glare of slanted light from the window, hung a photograph he had taken of a dry, four-tiered stone fountain in a sandy courtyard. Along its lower most basin some loose stones lay among moss. A single tree stood farther in the courtyard, in autumnal flourish, thinning of its leaves which were scattered like patchwork across the white gravel. The fountain was appended to an ancient wall, where faint traces of ruined frescoes almost appeared. On the uppermost tier of the fountain, the statue of a Naiad, her body twisted in dance, playing a lyre. It was from this lyre that in earlier days water would issue in a plume of sunbursts, a stream of honey cascading in an arc across the sky. Its music would bubble and splash in the basins all summer long, overflowing one and gurgling into the next, and the courtyard would sigh with this sound, like a steady wind, through long, light-filled afternoons. But the absolute, stilled, sheer present, the eternal present moment caught in that particular photograph showed no golden cataracts or illuminated mists. Tufts of weeds were sprouting in the seams between the stones. The wall beneath the solitary tree was in disrepair. No water flowed, no music filled the courtyard. There was the orange light of autumn, a white door in the derelict wall, the elegant abandonment of the lyre-player, the silence and resonance of her crystal-like time.

***************************

Footfall followed footfall over the green and gray cobblestones. The street was almost empty, though the sky was clear and the sun unusually warm. He walked from the bakery and crossed the street, where a fruit vendor was set up under the arches near the canal. She yawned and put an open hand to her mouth, looking about aimlessly over the multiform shapes and piquant colors stacked in bins below her. His hand was plunged in the pocket of his coat, working at something. Blackbirds were perched on the walls above and every few seconds one would suddenly flap its wings and dance in place, giving out a shrill call that echoed curtly in the bright morning. He cut his pace and hesitated by the banks of the canal, watching water pour from the lock and the swans lazily drifting about in the current. On the footbridge directly across from him someone was clipping the flower boxes. An old man, with umber skin and a thick white moustache, his hat pulled down over his eyes, was drawing out quantities of lifeless stems and limpid petals with gloved hands and placing them in a wheelbarrow. A mallard swam toward him from the opposite bank and Simon watched its slow progress. He tilted his head upward in concentration; a trail of steam was rising into the atmosphere from somewhere beyond the rooftops. A moment passed. One of the blackbirds darted from its perch and landed a few steps from him. It approached him with an awkward gait, bobbing side to side, its shiny black eyes darting this way and that. Simon drew a clinched fist from his pocket, and then abruptly released a shower of crumbs about the startled animal. It greedily dove into the debris, and its companions followed, leaping from their perch in a fury of flapping wings and squawks. Simon quickly moved on, the birds descending in a blustery black cloud behind him. He tossed another handful of crumbs over the river in the direction of the mallard and walked on, watching the sun-specked water course steadily along the stone walls of the embankment. He crossed the bridge and gave a nod to the umber-skinned man, who in turn acknowledged him with a slight adjustment of his jaw.

Passing under the shadow of the Church of the Ascension, he took notice of the grand wooden door standing out in sharp contrast to the large building’s white stone façade. The sky was pure blue above the bell tower, adorned by a simple white cross. He came out into the square, where hardly anyone lingered now that the mass of all soul’s day was underway. He watched a man and woman pushing a stroller along the sidewalk, the pink face of the little baby girl staring absently into the air. A chilly breeze wafted through the square, and on it the smell of breakfasts being prepared in the kitchens of restaurants.

Under the equestrian monument he found a bench in the shade of a tall tree. He swept the brittle red and yellow leaves from it with his hands and sat down. His thoughts now began to settle, too. The clear morning cheered him, and he thought with pleasure at how he had nothing at all to do the entire day, that there was no work that had to be caught up with, no obligations to anyone, and all that lay ahead of him was a strand of blissful hours of freedom, and the sun shining at that. He looked upward through branches of flaming leaves at the blue sky that came through at every interstice. Towering to his right was the figure of a soldier mounted on horseback. An arm was extended and held a rapier aloft in a sharp line against the horizon. With each breeze that blew through the square, leaves rained lightly from their bows. Simon felt a strange, sleepy peace come over him. His eyes were tired from tossing all morning in bed. Dreams and the brightness of the early hours kept waking him. No matter how he sank his being into darkness, when he shut his eyes tightly, or plunged his thoughts into deep, dark, hollow places, he still could not entirely keep out the brightness of the morning sun, which pierced the slats of the blinds. His tired eyes gazed at the statue. Streaks of dirt from a recent rain had obscured the soldier’s face. Some sort of filth had washed over him and dried there in blotches.

Simon had a presentiment of something emerging from one of the side streets, and before this being entered his periphery he was already drawn to it. Now he began to make it out. Across the square a figure moved silently. A young, dark-haired woman in a long coat and black boots was walking slowly in the slanted shadow of the buildings. Through his tired eyes, Simon thought he saw the air distending about her, as if her physical form was warping the space she moved through. He blinked his eyes and focused again, and this effect was lost. Her shoulder length raven’s hair was tied in a spout at the back of her head, where her lovely neck rose from a tall collar. Her hands were in her pockets, and her slender body was wrapped up in a rather large gray coat, her arms drawn into herself as if she were walking against a stiff wind. And in fact a wind had picked up, and dry leaves lifted and swirled about her ankles. Her hair took in all the light of the morning and held it in a silver sheen that seemed to ripple across the dark strands. His whole attention was drawn to the hair about her neck, bobbing lightly as she stepped. As she moved out of the square he had the sudden urge to follow her. The luminous day, the clean, chill air, his sense of freedom, all rose within him in a single urge to know this woman. But as suddenly, a kind of anesthetic haze descended over him, and while he thought of all the things he might say to her, while he tried to imagine with what words he could possibly open himself up to this girl, she disappeared beyond the stone wall of the Church of the Ascension in the direction of the lake. In the empty square, a wind rushed through the tops of the trees, singing among the limbs as it went. In the distance he could hear the coursing of the water in the canal, and some vague voices which were also like music, if only because they were rendered incomprehensible by the length and obstacles over which they sounded. He listened to this music and the sounds of the square, and almost forgot himself and the reason he had set off in this direction this morning.

Half-light.

An overwhelming sense of you
Flooded within me today
My head bent in remembering
My heart glazed over and quickly solidified
And I wandered the waterfront
In a coral colored twilight
Trying to regain a sense of myself.

A heart fulminates with passions
With wild energies, with sureness,
But it carries these energies lightly
With an ignorance of gravity
And I remembered my heart
Before it bore the burden of years,
Or I wished for this memory.

Evening descended on the city
Lonely strands of lights lit here and there
And the shade of night slowly consumed
The glittering fabric of the lake.
Once in this same half-light
I held a dear friend by a thin hand, and slowly
We were swallowed up by the darkness.

To Loneliness

On a night in my youth,
in an age distant from my aged self
before I had become acquainted
with the mythology of my own blood,

before I knew my life
was ruled by the Moon, incrementally
shrouded behind pale wisps
of the ghostly breath of an unseen demon's

clouds, with no stars illuminating
the presentiment of a deathly sky,
the color of a sickly bruise,
I stood beside a silent river-

my compatriots at my side.

The frivolous nature of youthful conversation,
stuttered and gleaming and fluid,
song-like and devoid of substance, yet
overfull with symbols that would devour us in time.

I was already haunted by a predilection
for solitude, but the spirit was not yet crystallized,
I was not yet irremediably drawn
into the lonely kingdom of my maundering.

How was I to know those princes
who had plucked me out of terrible tides
would one day become strangers
with peculiar motives and flashing eyes?

And the Moon, barely half its height, mocked me

as if to say "behold the deathly
night of your youth, behold the selfsame
darkness and the fragrance of demon's breath
and the muted stars falling adrift!"

What was I lonely for then and what
am I lonely for now? What prevented me
from loving the people I knew?
It was always the adumbral sky

the silent motion of the water and the Moon.