The Stones This is the city where men are mended. I lie on a great anvil. The flat blue sky-circle Flew off like the hat of a doll When I fell out of the light. I entered The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard. The mother of pestles diminished me. I became a still pebble. The stones of the belly were peaceable, The head-stone quiet, jostled by nothing.
How can I go, meeting and exorcising my own ghosts here! I’ve made some new ones now.
Only the mouth-hole piped out, Importunate cricket In a quarry of silences. The people of the city heard it. They hunted the stones, taciturn and separate, The mouth-hole crying their locations. Drunk as a fetus I suck at the paps of darkness. The food tubes embrace me. Sponges kiss my lichens away. The jewelmaster drives his chisel to pry Open one stone eye. This is the after-hell: I see the light. A wind unstoppers the chamber.
Of the ear, old worrier. Water mollifies the flint lip, And daylight lays its sameness on the wall. The grafters are cheerful, Heating the pincers, hoisting the delicate hammers. A current agitates the wires Volt upon volt. Catgut stitches my fissures. A workman walks by carrying a pink torso. The storerooms are full of hearts. This is the city of spare parts. My swaddled legs and arms smell sweet as rubber. Here they can doctor heads, or any limb.
On Fridays the little children come To trade their hooks for hands. Dead men leave eyes for others. Love is the uniform of my bald nurse. Love is the bone and sinew of my curse. The vase, reconstructed, houses The elusive rose. Ten fingers shape a bowl for shadows. My mendings itch. There is nothing to do. I shall be good as new.
I buried my face in the pink velvet facade of Jay Cee’s love-seat and with immense relief the salt tears and miserable noises that had been prowling around in me all morning burst out into the room.
Tonight was awful. It was the combination of everything. Of the play “Goodbye My Fancy,” of wanting, in a juvenile way, to be, like the heroine, a reporter in the trenches, to be loved by a man who admired me, who understood me as much as I understood myself.
From here to happiness is a road, flat, upright, distances in between blotted out by vision, yet realized by intelligence.
He fathomed her, enclosed her. He did not see, or did not care to see, how her submissiveness moved and drew him, nor how now, through the steaming, suffocating baths of mist, she led him, and he followed, though the rainbows under the clear water were lost.
Rain on roof outside window, gray light, deep covers and warm blankets. Rain and nip of autumn in air; nostalgia, itch to work better and bigger. That crisp edge of autumn.
He felt the ground frail as a bird’s skull under his feet, a mere shell of sanity and decorum between him and the dark entrails of the earth where the sluggish muds and scalding waters had their source.
A stiff breeze lifted the hair from my head. At my feet, the city doused its lights in sleep, its buildings blackened, as if for a funeral.
Now I am surely becoming an incurable romantic.
So you will rot in the ground, and so you say, what the hell? Who cares? But you care, and somehow you don’t want to live just one life.
I was thinking that if I’d had the sense to go on living in that old town I might just have met this prison guard in school and married him and had a parcel of kids now. It would be nice, living by the sea with piles of kids and pigs and chickens, wearing what my grandmother called wash dresses, and sitting about in some kitchen with bright linoleum and fat arms, drinking pots of coffee.
I hate it, find it hideous, loathsome. I have built it up to a devouring, malicious monster. I am letting it ruin my whole life. My reason is leaving me, and I want to get out of this.
Sun, seeping through the blinds, filled my bedroom with a sulfurous light. I didn’t know how long I had slept, but I felt one big twitch of exhaustion.
I can only hazard. In the back of my mind there are bombs falling, women and children screaming, but I can’t describe it now.
My mother took care never to tell me to do anything. She would only reason with me sweetly, like one intelligent, mature person with another.
And I think as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault.