Radiant Ivory

After the death of my father, I locked myself in my room, bored and animal-like. The travel clock, the Johnnie Walker bottle, the parrot tulips—everything possessed his face, chaste and obscure. Snow and rain battered the air white, insane, slathery. Nothing poured out of me except sensibility, dilated. It was as if I were sub-born—preverbal, truculent, pure—with hard ivory arms reaching out into a dark and crowded space, illuminated like a perforated silver box or a little room in which glowing cigarettes came and went, like souls losing magnitude, but none with the battered hand I knew.