Phlebas III


Ookha! I had heard where you are alone. The sage of konigsberg dined on appetites dishumed and specular. In a haunted relief that the agèd infinitesimaled though briefed in identikit’s succour. That truly reminded me of the view from the 19 year old serried balcony, the terrace of hope fashioned lopsidedly in a draughtman’s memento mori unintentionally, of course, spalled. I do not, said she, wish to sit cushioned in the cat’s way and resemble you in my limpid artistry, fawning or chewing the sticky gum in my toothless mouth. Those are not my races, my face is cold and that is all I know as you told me. You. Told. Me. Your life is as unreal or real now as it was then. Why semble a view, so. As tight as the moon to the gate in the darkness of the twitching breathless forest and the wind that whispers now. In the stone yard where chickens blood and canaries smelt of grandfather, there the word was made ample flesh. Tutored, schooled on permanence the spoils of memory tucked in fast against the tide of rain on the roofs in the spring burgeoning light was that the spall of a goodbye. When you, yes you my dear start to also unrecall, I may be all that you remember. So. Kindly forfend this article that, clocked beneath your catacombed head will truly announce the vision unseasonable of my daughters’ life, the trusted beneficence lit thoroughly in the window. I fear the paces of the yearstall and lift their simple lights’ munificent terror to the sun in this spectre of mind in your eyes terrible tears, bountiful as the pain resting in the night’s flower gorgeously scented for the incensed morning when we cry over thee like a mother’s pain humming and echoing in the measured vasty sound, tremulous heartbeats in the fuming sky. It bore the greatest forged beauty in the world then as now. Turn the handle and construe the hexed runes dissembled gift that trumpets a unique illuded configuration of tracery. You spinning in the hot breath of faces we wore. Loving and murdering in all measures while troubling the master for a song. Lying still in the road, drunk and lashed on a pig’s back and sent breeching into villages where women rang bells for gods and reason won the idol universe cranked to the altitude of mountain snows. What a splinter tranced to heaven is my face, waxed for the fashion troped in the mistress heart, bywaters fraught spawning and shivering. Come closer now his spittle cold in my ear, drawn capitals of wisdom laced. Coughed and looked away again into the fire. Cataract cerulean I begged the dancer from his loft and built an ark in every cold place for the safe transport of my sons, their wares and the fading photos of our dead fathers