Elsewhere
1.
And so at the
end of remembering, pungency falls like grief. We walk the streets
again: brittle walls of chalk, a child's gray-white dream, the clamor
of persistent desire. See, sun lies brittle on the tiles and iron gates.
Black wings hover. Voiceless, as we wait, the stairways knot themselves,
the alleys smell of dry water steaming from blind sockets in the
stone, where insects whine, their maggots busy with decay, flies,
wasps, mosquitoes, midges, gnats. The poise of silence hangs like an
udder, small, parched. What are these gates? What are these walls?
2.
Sun has
torched these streets pulsing them flat. Shadowless, they do not lie
outside the windows of our dreams. Instead, they slide and snarl on
our nerves. We fear what? the voicelessness of wind? dry ashes that
scrape hot tongues dryly over dried pores to crack lips in slivers of hard
blood? to freeze salt across our lashes bringing no tears? Or is it that
we fear the dust which crackles an eddy at our feet to snare and pull
us down? Or is it gray shadows, the bare-bone dogs slinking behind
each gate, eyes with ice white cores? They never bare their teeth.
3.
Dogs are gray
with the sunlight's grease stiffly slimed across their sharp and pulsing
ribs. They are raw bones and their tails are whips which twitch in the
moment's rest as if a command might slash their acrid bite across our
eyes. Meanwhile their eyes, like uncertain stars pitted in the black
basins of night, are thirsty and white. Like candles playing shadows across
dim courtyards, the dogs glide. Sleepless they crack no voice to tear air
in rags. They slink in narrow circles and edge the walls. Their
muscles twist and wait. Why do they watch us from each locked gate?
4.
Perched like
weather vanes, gulls raucously stare down, or sweep and glance off the
cliffs: giant bats on the harbor's wall--stiff weapons plunging the
ocean's wide face. Silence is cut by their knife-slice cries like
elastic pulled to its stinging break. What is the menace their screams
awake? curse perhaps? chaos? gouged out eyes? Cowed beneath their
squall in the sky, we wander through streets leading down. Gates melt
past our eyes. And walls shift like drapes. At last before us waits the
slate sea flat in its bay like a trembling stone. Our feet touch the
foaming of its tongue.
5.
These streets,
steep stones, tiers laid on a cliff, shelves stacked up the chalk walls,
are blunt white. They twist downward towards dizzier light, the liquid
lap of radiant stiff sun-glare, water where gulls on poised wings
dive, then climb sky to cut it apart until a violence of blue smarts
our trailing eyes and the white sun stings. In what old dream have these
streets been? Why, like memories, do they beckon? We long to silence
the screaming gulls so nerves might plunge their zero of chill deep
through dark ocean's blank flat face, dumb beneath its grinding grinding
voice.
6.
But the ocean
grinds up bones for us to finger, mute and calcined statues in our
hands, like memories that chew time up, later to glare in the press
of the sun, glints of elsewhere, snapshots of someone else's life gazing
back from frenzied smiles, from glazed eyes. Like facts we fondle
them in our hands' small heat, hard things tumbled from the breakers' lash,
ground and polished by the tide's slow wash, flat and gleaming, like light
on a plate. So within our nets of loss, we wait, our own faces washed
to an ashen sheen, wear the bleach of salt, the scorch of sun.
7.
And still,
ocean spills sad aftermaths upon our feet where eyes are searching.
Kelp and foam hold the harsh shapeless gong of grief. We wish to mask our
aches with lovely artifacts. But chaos floats up as if burned in
sudden tombs limbs were gnarled by intense bombs the sea was blistered
beneath a fierce heat and the air's abruptly shattered time has clung
its mutant to each pulse and bone filling our footprints in the sand
where we stand with rancid bilge, green foam. What begins begins already
dead to flower in pristine tender dread.
8.
At last we
cast ocean's throb to our backs; the village streets stand up before
our eyes on the cliffs, twisted, slender, wind-chiselled, white. And
alongside their spines, houses hang like sharp hawk-skulls staring
down from their black hollow eyes. Have we waited so long that no one
remains, or have we come here too soon? We wake into worlds our dreams
unfold. We sleep within dreams our wakings build. Still the lean dogs
crouch along their walls while the abrasions of restless gulls call.
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