A. F. Moritz

Your idea of embracing horror was overwhelmed by the horror: in the mild milkiness of the afternoon, on the bluff that commands a vision of bank towers knifing up far higher than the rising, empty shell of the moon ... on the height where you stand and still can't understand your life as anything but slow dying, your time seeps out as into a warm bath, the way the exemplary career of Petronius the Just—pornographer and satirist- once leaked away.

You that I loved all my life long, you are not the one. You that I followed, my line or path or way, that I followed singing, and you earth and air of the world the way went through, and you who stood around it so it could be the way, you forests and cities, you deer and opossums struck by the lonely hunter and left decaying, you paralyzed obese ones who sat on a falling porch in a deep green holler and observed me, your bald dog barking, as I stumbled past in a hurry along my line, you are not the one. But you are the one, you that I loved all my life long, you I still love so in my dying mind I grasp me loving you when we are gone. You are the one, you path or way or line that winds beside the house where she and I live on, still longing though long gone for the health of all forests and cities, and one day to visit them, one day be rich and free enough to go and see the restricted wonders of the earth. And you are the one, old ladies fated from birth to ugliness, obesity and dearth, who sat beside my path one day as I flashed by. And you are the one, all tumble-down shacks in disregarded hills and animals the car on the road kills and leaves stinking in the sun.

At the table, at the grave not knowing whether to grieve or celebrate, they seemed to find a way within the stalled noon clatter and the dusk over oily swamps and elder tangle along a locked stockade of heavy machines, as the blue heron, looking down, flew farther on. Nothing dissolved for them the mortal green and black in transparent power of spacious streams now gone from earth. The flickering they found, terror-hope-terror, in fire of sunset clouds remained unwavering in its progress to night and day and night. And yet the pleasure they took in everything did not wear out. The limestone quarry of a poorer century, lipped in birds and berries, treasured up, still treasures up, old rains beneath its surface of dusty jet— still waits behind their houses on airless nights to be the dreams and drownings of new children.

About the age of twenty, when the first hairfall signals that nature is finished with the organism and we just begin to conceive the use of women (having been all this time more enamored of the fountain than the cistern), we retire to nursing homes, whether they be kaleidoscopic gardens aimed like a blunderbuss of hermeticism at our neighbors, or a desperate dream safari through old Zambesi, where the suicidal waves of angry natives give the illusion that we are advancing rapidly, or the crow’s-nest of this windless office block where the cook is already boiling the last sail. And sitting on the bench like a snowfall of beard expectorated by a cloudy hat, we consider the byproducts of life, such as (to name only the least offensive to the nose) the body itself when it has finally reached that eminence from which all is visible and from which it nonetheless feels the need to move on to a homestead of its dreams like an abandoned chicken coop on the sandy streamside under the tulip poplars, and to words, which result from an instinct for what is impossible: to soften the blow for others, including ourselves.

She notes in the poem she's reading where the disembodied voice speaking encounters "an ugly old woman" just momentarily, in part of a single line, in one of the many long corridors and sharp turnings of the poem, so that she's quickly lost to view. That's me, she thinks, I'm an ugly old woman, I who sit here reading this poem and its ugly old woman phrase and the poet, when he stumbled over her splayed, swollen legs, registered her presence, her inheritance, her baggage of limitations-ugly, old, woman-but never knew, couldn't, because who could know, who can stop and know her ... And this reader keeps thinking, loving, understanding, trapped in her eye following the voice on and on while somewhere back in the poem in a blank passage an ugly old woman sits against a wall.

The man was white, grey and pale brown, the colorless colors of a used-up earth where water has sunk down, sunk down so low and risen so far above the grey-white pale-brown heaven and shrunk so far within itself that it will not come back. What can moisten a shriveled water, or can a clod of ash regain colors from the identical howl of a white powder sun? Not in me, he said, ever again, but in the street with engine and worker petals, not papery, more fragile than that, there will be color. My eye will reach color, all colors, every one together, which no one will see in me ever again. I turned to the sky then and it was all one blue, the color of seeing, and yet was as many blues, as subtle, as tones of stubble in the most sunken cheek.

He glanced around to check if the treacherous gods had really given him the reward promised for his accomplished song and there she was, Eurydice restored, perfectly naked and fleshed in her rhyming body again, the upper and lower smiles and eyes, the line of mouth-sternum-navel-cleft, the chime of breasts and hips and of the two knees, the feet, the toes, and that expression of an unimaginable intelligence that yoked all these with a skill she herself had forgotten the learning of: there she was, with him once more just for an instant as she vanished. And then he heard her from behind the invisible veil, absence: a shrill and batlike but lexical indictment. Why had he violated the divine command, why, when he had seized all song to himself and robbed her of power to open her own oblivion? It grew in volume and now seemed to spew from an insane old mother with one breast hanging like a huge withered testicle from a rent in her weathered gown, who was being watched by a tall woman, copper-helmet-coiffed, richly suited in salmon colour, a mythical allusion, since salmon were long extinct in the bays and rivers here: songs never brought them anymore. The young restrained breasts and the old free one oppressed him equally and he went to live among men, waiting for the crazy and the competent to join forces and come for him with their scissors. Orpheus listened patiently to my poem and when it quieted he said to me: That wasn't it at all. I sang outward from my face to blue spaces between clouds, to fern fronds, and men and women sipped my song as you drink from a stream going by. What I sang is lost in time, you don't kmow what it was, all you have is your own old stories about me. And if women tore me into pieces, maybe that only signifies each one keeps part of my body, which is melody among visible things.

Child one with the sun in trackless fields of yellow grass and thistle, scent of humid heavy air and the wing music of bees and flies. Child, slender nakedness to itself unknown, true colour of the light dispersed invisibly or glowing around the black hulls of distant thunderheads, around the grasshopper’s countenance, solemn, vigilant and wise. Green apples, poured full of density, of crispness, float unmoved under leaves on the slope. Brown fallen apples nest in secret whorls of grass. The apple tree: alone in so much space. And below in the woods by the water a sweet dead branch cracks lightly in the shadow in the wind. But here is an old track through the grass head-high to a child: who made it? They must have passed and passed by this one tree, by the abandoned, tireless car where rabbits peer out, and the circle of black embers, cans, springs, skeletons of furniture. They too passed here many times on their way from the street’s end to the oaks that screen the river. There the sun is nesting now, night rises with pale flutterings of white wings from roots of plants and the black water.

We won’t pretend we’re not hungry for distinction but what can ever distinguish us enough? This country, this language won’t last long, the race will die, later the cockroach, earth itself, and last this beer bottle: silicon fused by man, almost indestructible, like a soul: it will go spinning ever farther from the nearest thing until space, continually deepening, drowns in itself. Yet we keep a hungry eye on old schoolmates and everyone born in the year of our own birth, and spend the nights in ranting over them, their money, fashionable companions, pliant critics. To live just a little longer than they do: that would be triumph. Hence exercise and diets, and the squabble over who will write the history of this paradise of demons casting each other out.

Her hair back from the wide round face flows, almost a girl’s, so thick, caught back in combs, racing and curling through them with blackest vigor, although it is pure white. Cracked face, dusk-colored: not red but with a deep red struggling under the coming night. The eyes shift quickly, the subway train jerks and rattles, green vinyl, light flickering, silver poles. Eyes driven from ancient calm, which may fear but is never frantic and says nothing, such as looks out from the old Indian portraits—calm is the one thing missing from the beauty of her face in the black window. Those unresting eyes there talk plainly: there’s no money at home, men young and old go wrong, life almost at its end is still day by day harried and perplexed.