• IV •
We are at a party that doesn’t love us. At last the party lets its mask drop and shows itself for what it really is: a marshalling yard. Cold colossi stand on rails in the mist. Chalk scribbled on the wagon doors.
It shouldn’t be said but there is much suppressed violence here. That’s why the components are so heavy. And why it’s so hard to see something else, too: a little reflection from a mirror, flitting on the house-walls and gliding through the unknowing forest of glimmering faces, a biblical text that was never written: “Come unto me, for I am full of contradictions, like you.”
Tomorrow I am working in another town. I swish toward it through the morning hour, which is like a big dark-blue cylinder. Orion hangs above the ground-frost. Children are standing in a silent cluster waiting for the school bus, children no one prays for. The light is growing as slowly as our hair.