Years ago I sat in this garden, at this very table, among the ancestors of yellow daisies that surround me now. I was drugged and happy then. I wrote deep from my sunstroke. Enough of the past. It is a morning in March 1975.
The bumblebees have arrived. There are noisy birds in the rain gutter. One thread of a spider web, suddenly white, goes fishing in the sunshine. Some butterflies want to fertilize my shiny boot. A cat sharpens the top of a wall by walking across it, and then by walking back adjusts the horizontal.
I won’t be sitting here long. I’m in a terrible hurry. I’m going to Jerusalem. I’m going with the happy Israeli soldiers and I’m going with the King of Saudi Arabia to kneel down in the place that we were promised.
A bee enters a hanging yellow flower like a woman pulling a gown over her head, shivering, struggling upwards. The sun climbs to the middle of the sky and stops. It’s noon. It’s the first bell of noon ringing loud from the cathedral tower. The second. The third. Great shovelfuls of sound dumped into the grave of our activity. The sound fills up every space and every thought. The seventh. The eighth. The future is blocked. The past is plugged up. Layer after layer of the present seizes us, buries us in one vast amber paperweight. Sealed under twelve skyfuls of the only moment.
I won’t be going to Jerusalem after all. You will have to go to Jerusalem alone. It is yours. It was given to you by the angels of culture and time. But I can’t go. And I can’t loosen your interest in the war. You will want to see corpses, the oldest tourist attraction, and you will want to “challenge the sphincters of your cowardice under sand and fire.” Goodbye.
I will be here if you look back, at this very table, in this very garden where the bumblebee charges like a bull into the yellow trumpet, and the sun makes a dent in my black trousers, and my wife repeats on a loop, “Did you smell the ambrosia of the universe in my little cunt?” and the birds tune up at last.