Saturday, March 02, 1996

March 2

Figures rise exhausted by night’s companion, departing for an empty space in a state of chronic boredom. The entire world displayed, the memory of all previous minutes in this masonry built without song. Lost in this century.

Flakes of snow. The long shadow of death in the drift of eastern grey. Darkness intersects the freezing sun on the zinc roofs of Europe. Part of an orderly routine drawn with astonishing accuracy. Citadels dissolve, the murmured patterns perish, simply to look at them. The infinite enacted. In this fictitious harbor. The drowning, exhausted, die in silence.

Those who will have lived through it burning as usual. Disturbed by an absence. Alive and debauched, stumbling through the room in the intervals, moving in silence rapidly towards a conclusion. Railway cars moving along rails to so many cities and countries at once. Cast-iron refrains in the fragile silence everywhere. An acoustic relay through darkness back to memory, sparks from a slab of marble. Leaves unhooked from trees. Figures, pale silhouettes moving on wires through polar air, frenzied stars, the dark surge of uniforms into the corridor.

Prearranged text, a colorless room, all speeches clinging to the walls. The blind, barred window-pane.

The body stands without bones, restricted to simple sentences, never to leave the city of the flesh.