Charlie Bondhus

I was sitting in Old Town Square with tourists and birds and I was reading Foucault, how “he who is subjected to a field of visibility ... becomes the principle of his own subjection” and all around me the beautiful Czechoslovakian boys moved through the first day of spring like perennially visible inmates in the opening credits of a prison porno. The sun reflected off the glass and my table was an inscrutable tower of light from which I peered, invisibly, at the swan-graceful boys who seemed to skirr across the stones, traveling, it seemed, to something vaguely ridiculous and charmingly anachronistic: cuff link shopping, or brunch with the duchess. The coffee had made me jittery and I was beginning to sweat from both sun and desire. I considered moving to the outer edge of the circled tables, so the boys could see me as I could see them, but then the 600-year-old orloj sounded the hour and the twelve apostles and skeletal death spun around and I was afraid to leave my tower. I didn’t want to be visible in the way those small dancing figures were visible and as much as I wanted a handsome companion, I feared my foot getting caught in a sewer grate or my spoon falling from my saucer and clattering on the pavement, startling the birds into a ruckus. An errant ball of sweat fell from my chin and onto the page. I looked down to where it had landed on the word “reciprocal” which made me think how looking is always reducible to twos — two eyes, two parties, two possible outcomes, and how those who watch from the panopticon’s black pupil may, in any case, not even exist.

These grapes of stone were being proffered, friend. — John Berryman grapes, rough-touched and round, stone- carved, to be squeezed into the fundaments of rock wine. She imagines it would be cold, not sought for its smoothness, and likely full of grit if not refined with care. The satyr laughs carelessly for one caught in stone. The cracked edges of his mouth spill grit as he leers after the loss of his fundaments which fall along the smooth, cold torso plane, exhibiting immaculate coolness at this literal loss of face. Carefully, she strokes his head, as if smoothing the fetlocks handcrafted from stone. Her affection is unforced, a fundamental attraction to those beautiful, gritty things made lovely by decay, their gritted teeth so much more interesting than the art gallery’s cold geometrics, which appear fundamental but fail to consider the careless chaos spinning at the stone center of all smooth creations. And those grapes! Their unsmooth surface mirrors the messy passion flushing the grit- dusted cheek, the hideous mouth of crumbling stone. What heat from the Dionysian’s cold, brittle fruit! The obliteration of all care if she could only perform the fundamental act of eating. She thinks about wilderness, fun, mental liberation, dancing her soles smooth, pleasure as pervasive as care is now, her feet a frenzied blur on the gritty forest floor, shaking and pummeling out the cold as she prances over starlit stones. She does not care who sees her, as she grips the stone grapes, feels the smooth, crumbling cold enter her hand, fingers embracing a thing more fundamental than earth, bone, grit.