He displaced no shadow in his advance, betraying an audacity soon burned out, although his step was rather commonplace. Those who miss their beds in the night’s early hours and then lose sight of them until the morrow may be tempted by resemblances. They try to break away from stones too wise, too warm, wishing to escape from the hold of crystals of fabulous claim which daily usage secretes, in places of its choosing, with a shroud’s light touch. Such was not this man who appeared to be unhindered by the low-hanging veil of the lunar landscape. The raging frost brushed his forehead lightly without seeming personal. A road extending, a path diverging are consistent with the forward thrust of thought humming. In the winter night miraculously clean, because it was common to those dwelling in the universe who did not penetrate into it, the last player would no longer exist. He had lost every tie with the ancient swell of springs favorable to questioning, with the joyous bodies he had pleased to quicken near his own when he could still assign a summit to his pleasure, a snowfall to his talent. Today he broke with sadness, now a thing inured, with the dread of the accepted. Earth had warped his belief, earth, with its somewhat limited pace, with its saffron-hued imagining, its attrition rifted with the acts of monsters. No one would have to forget him, for self-interest had never aided him, had never sketched him whole for another’s gaze. Across the whitewashed ceiling of his room, birds had passed, but their flash had melted into his sleep.
The veil of the lunar landscape, now lifted high, unfolds its aromatic colors above this personage of whom I speak. He comes forth lit by the cold and forever turns his back on the springtime never there.
[MAC]