Carol Frost

who line the corridors and sit silent in wheelchairs before the television with the volume off, whose cares are small and gray and infinite, time as ever to be faced    ... Methuselahs the nurses wash and dress without haste — none needed    ... this one has drunk from the poppy-cup and drowses in her world of  dream    ... Heliotrope, carnations, wakeful violets, and lilies in vases — masses of  flowers — wrap the urine-and-antiseptic air in lace    ... Please wake up; it is morning; robins whistle; the bees dance. Isn't this other one listening from her shell of  silence, and shouldn't she smile at the green return and dappled light through windows? As earth orbits the corridor clocks are wound    ... The last hour is a song or wound    ... Except in this corridor — mother's — where finity's brainless wind blows ash, and ash again blows through their cells: So much silence, so little to say in the end.)

The humble sense of being alive under the towering sun fills the nectary and ripens apricots down to the last one, if Mnemosyne wakens from apathy each moment. It is the soft burly sound of a bee tumbled in fritillary, is it not? But if memory, as if to illustrate the mind was not yours to have, the mind was not given, fails us, leaving us in our underpants in the garden, should we not hate the garden, or the woman whose garden it is? And sunlight. Thunder. Rain. Hardened in heart against what earth compels and seizes, goddamning, goddamned rain.

The dogs eat hoof slivers and lie under the porch. A strand of human hair hangs strangely from a fruit tree like a cry in the throat. The sky is clay for the child who is past being tired, who wanders in waist-deep grasses. Gnats rise in a vapor, in a long mounting whine around her forehead and ears. The sun is an indistinct moon. Frail sticks of grass poke her ankles, and a wet froth of spiders touches her legs like wet fingers. The musk and smell of air are as hot as the savory terrible exhales from a tired horse. The parents are sleeping all afternoon, and no one explains the long uneasy afternoons. She hears their combined breathing and swallowing salivas, and sees their sides rising and falling like the sides of horses in the hot pasture. At evening a breeze dries and crumbles the sky and the clouds float like undershirts and cotton dresses on a clothesline. Horses rock to their feet and race or graze. Parents open their shutters and call the lonely, happy child home. The child who hates silences talks and talks of cicadas and the manes of horses.

They were travelers, plotting river courses, writing the genesis of unknown people, fugitives with a revolver in one hand, reins in another, merchants among the olive trees, euphorbias, mimosas, emissaries, deserters. Some knew the native tongues; they called themselves by new names in the eastern twilight, different parts of their soul never having learned to live together. Skies burned. Dust covered the palms and minarets as they arrived by the incandescent shore of our city, each with his own little dreams and disasters. Some remained, never to be heard of again. Some left with caravans, wearing native dress — ephemerids. Where are they? What are they used to? The only preserved interview — concerning an artist and explorer. Did he ever speak of his friends in X? Never. The only thing he liked in X was his sister. But did you know that he painted? Oh yes! — some fine things: stemware, a series of watercolors of shoebills and Abdim’s stork.