a

ANIMALS

1.

That day was Animal Assisted Happiness for the specially-educated kids at Argonaut.
	The workers were bussed in by the fiat of a day of happiness, pink pigs and gray hens came out of the trucks, sand was spread out…
	The day was sunny, Argonaut was clean; clucking and chirping rose up in the hidden backlots, while the rest of the intelligent school worked in order to give society and their parents late-age satisfaction and permanent rest.
	The boy S. was mistakenly transported along with the lines of retarded children; he thought they were all going to get candy somewhere, and that even he could tag along.
	But he found it hard to listen to them, and he withdrew into his own tired mind, trying to have the peace of sadness there. S. drifted amongst the workers in the sandy dust…
	A young man, not having arrived with the workers, appeared from the distances of the sandy haze that covered the faraway field, with little whirls of dust devils raging in the background. He was carrying a big pig on his shoulder, as if he still had to prove he was a god; his uniform was blue; the pig was brown, pink and strong, riding the bumps of his steps as a ship in an even sea.
	Then, reaching the pen of hay, the worker took the pig from his shoulder, tossed it and spun it in the air as a cook spins a disk of pizza dough, showing to the cheering children with his slim strong shoulders the fun a pig could have while flying. Then he set it down in the hay.
	S. followed him and asked him if he really liked the retarded children.
	‘For an idiot stands like a shrub, like a mule that cannot bless-with-children,’ said S, observing him pretending to unload the trucks. ‘How do their parents survive, having to pretend for years that they love them?’
	The man stopped in his tracks and, changing in mannerism so much it was as if he had changed in persona, with gloating eyes, cut a cigarette in the shadows of the truck, and looked down haughtily at S.
	The smoke rose into the dusty air, and his eyes were like cut shining diamonds in a gray fur.
	S. lowered his head, saying: ‘Their parents received their arrivals with smiles turned up to one-hundred percent…but night by night, they grew tired of smiling; and secretly blaming the other, stayed together, in part for the remembrance of love, in greater part for duty.’
	The young man scoffed ironically, ‘Of course we do not really like them. We do this to signal altruism, to impress girls, to lessen our own sadness; sometimes we gain a perverse sustenance by crying and observing that they are happier than we are.’
	S. shifted in place, looking on in the agony of unsatisfaction.
	‘So what,’ said the young worker, ‘if one or two of them has parents who are really proud of them, even of their slobbering? Evolution will one day make them extinct, while you and I will continue living the life of genes.’
	‘I agree,’ said the boy. ‘There’s no need for me to be jealous. Their parents can only pretend to be proud of them.’
	‘And if one or two do not feel disgusted by their child, what is it to you? You speak thus because your parents revile your slender wrists.’
	‘And they are too friendly with each other, the hierarchy of the real world seems amiss…’
	But a bully came parading amidst the retarded children with all the airs of a prince amongst lesser men, raising his arms up for no reason and smiling with satisfaction, declaring he was a princess.
	S., watching anxiously, raised his chin with keen satisfaction.
	The young worker drew close, arraying his tall figure like a shadow over S., so that the day darkened; and passed a hand across S.’s chest, with precise fingers, so that S. was moved to unbearable lust; but the moment S.’s hand stretched out, the man melted into a shadow, sneaking out and leaping into a nearby pen…
	There, when a wind came from the far field, the amorphous shadow, still small, grew fur and softened over, as silver cascades of shivers ran along with the breeze over its nervously trembling brown fur.
	S. went to the rabbit, where nearby there were only a few retarded children, knelt down and was glad that someone liked him. ‘At times people have wanted my soul,’ he said. ‘But I always really wanted them just to eat me up entire.’
	But the handsome T. and his friends came by and pushed out the retarded children; with their fellow children in whom there was no playfulness, they stood guard so that none could pet the animals without feeling gay.
	‘We knew you were a faggot,’ cried T., thrilled. ‘But we did not know we could call you retarded, too.’
	S. blushed and, scratching the sand with his shoe, looked down at his own shadow.
	‘There are all sorts of names you could call me,’ he said softly and quietly.
	But gradually they were distracted by the animals. It was near a play-structure where S. often conversed with the voice of Jesus underneath the webbed plastic floors. The winter oaks raised into the air a natural firmament, the open spaciousness of the ground-world, a flag of cold and spindly happiness.
	S. went to the nearby creek to pee into the cold rushing waters. There, he saw the girl J. standing over the waters, with their friend Jesus peeking out from a winter oak.
	‘I had not known I could see so much, so much,’ she said, weeping.
	S. walked up timidly and hid behind the oak trees with Jesus as they watched the girl weep over the rushing water, straightening her hair with her hands.
	‘The water, sleeping in curls by the dead rocks, shows the image of the sky…’ began S.’s thought.
	‘Beauty is evidence that my parent is not a demon,’ said the child Jesus. ‘My father loves you. Just not your body. His human statues sicken him, preferring the clean locution of marble.’
	S., still not used to how Jesus could read his thoughts, said nothing more, hoping that Jesus would continue to like him. For they were both rather rare and queer.
	They went back to the animal pens. Their friend Soren came by and, saying nothing, stared sadly and blankly at a rabbit, as if were indeed the essence of a rabbit.
	‘I help everyone with their homework, in the hopes of getting class president,’ he said at last, frowning. ‘But nobody helps me.’
	‘That’s okay,’ said S., trying to hide behind Jesus’s shoulder. ‘I’ll vote for you.’
	‘I am absolutely being murdered by geometry,’ Soren whispered. ‘Ministering to everyone, no one ministers to me.’
	‘We are each of us the genius diagnostician of our own illness,’ said. S, ‘which we can’t beat; for we can’t erase our selves. We all like to give advice, but we can’t heal ourselves.’
	Soren said: ‘Everyone is very selfish.’
	‘Yes,’ replied S., ‘who is Everyone, that he is always getting ministered to, without giving back? There is this whole world-system where everyone gives but nobody receives.’
	‘I’ve had enough of it,’ Soren said. ‘Starting from today, I’ll demand money for my help.’
	‘Water says splash splash,’ said S. ‘Cows go moo moo. But humans say all sorts of things, while never saying their essence. If you should discover the human moo, you should heal our language and ourselves.’
	But S. turned aside, for he thought he saw the young worker lying down on a tarp for a nap – as a god will sometimes take a younger boy to sleep alongside and within a river, half his body on the shore and the other half submerged into eternity’s clear, unfurrowed water…
But it was only another tarp wrapped up, bound by cords, like a body upon a bed, twisted in agony, hiding its face in its chest, covering its ears and head with its arms, to avoid the discovery of unspeakable things…
	‘Oh,’ said S., biting his own lip in sadness.
	‘Your cells fidget,’ Jesus said to him, taking him out of his silence, ‘Obey my father, and they become obedient stone, like those lovers who were frozen in Pompeii.’
	Other children had come about. One of the retarded children, squatting by the pen of deer, said in a loud voice, ‘My older brother gives me candy everyday. The medicine packets he receives in the mail everyday always have a salt-water taffy, for me to chew.’
	S., unaware that T. and his friends had come over, said: ‘The world is in the process of healing itself. Soon even the medicines shall taste good, not sticking in our throats everyday and wishing to dissolve in an agony of choking.’
	But T. and his friends ridiculed him so that he stamped his feet, wept, and closed his eyes. Jesus disappeared and posed as the sky.
	A teacher came over and asked why S. was crying, if the other students were being mean to him, if his parents had to be called.
	‘I’m not sad,’ said S., wiping his eyes. ‘I’m just filled with the holy spirit.’
	When they returned, scared off by the teachers like crows by a scarecrow, T. said: ‘Crying is like candy for the gays.’
	‘Indeed,’ replied S. ‘Especially gay people cry.’
	‘Faggot,’ said T., along with his friends. ‘You’re both special-ed and gay at the same time.’
	‘But I have friends who like me,’ replied S. ‘They are low in status and like each other.’
	‘Where are these friends of yours?’
	‘They are posing as the rabbits.’
	Taking him to be insane, T. and the others left off.
	‘The meek weep,’ said Jesus, materializing out of the ashamed wind. ‘My father destroys the strong.’
	‘The holy spirit is full of tears,’ said S.
	‘I made that,’ said Jesus. ‘I made it that way.’
	‘How does he destroy them, Jesus?’
	‘He takes out their lungs, and forces them down their throats again.’
	‘What of their intestines?’
	‘He pulls them out, and binds their throats while the intestines still throb.’
	‘Do their fingers go untouched?’
	‘He uses their fingers to pull triggers and start wars that their children must fight in.’
	‘I am so happy, this happiness is not allowed,’ said S. ‘Soon, I shall have psychosis, and a toothache.’
	Jesus beckoned and they went to the play-structure and crouched together under the shadows, on the tanbark.
	Recently S. had started an anonymous newsletter, read by Soren and J., and Jesus wanted to talk to him about it, before the teachers confiscated it for being suicidal and dark and disturbing.
	‘My kingdom is whole,’ he said with finality, after some harsh words. ‘And this playground, under the gracious God, has flattened the need for your newsletter, or poetry.’
	‘What?’ said S., hurt, realizing that the entire day Jesus had this pent up in him.
	‘Poets who love me must give up their hands to rest transparent in me.’
	‘But I am no poet. Anyway my newsletter is largely unread, it is said to be too nerdy and timeless. I only I, Jesus.’
	‘But there is no poetry in my kingdom, only the angels’ breathless praising.’
	‘So there is praising up there. But this playground, and its newsletter, is for my friends and I. We are too tired, we can’t climb that high, we hear even the bullies make it up there.’
	‘Death to you, Samuel,’ said Jesus, letting him hear it. ‘You have stolen from you and your friends, and perhaps this whole playground, the resurrection and the meaning of life. Already, some bad elements in the heavens have taken hold of your newsletter and mean to start for tragedy and amusement a secession of clouds in the sky.’
	‘But the others just said it was gay poetry and had no content. The girls said it was poetic! They all are not at war against themselves, thus they do not have ears for me. Neither ears.’
	‘I am the resurrection, and the meaning of life. Remember your place – confused reincarnation of a major prophet. Or I’ll have my father hit you in a way you don’t desire.’
	‘The meaning of life is fulfillment,’ replied S., not at all timidly, taking a stand, despite having no one around him to defend, ‘We don’t want resurrection. We want to be happy together, we have planned to become friends at summer camps, and to have the sun rise in a damp field.’
	Jesus, growing angry, had to prevent faraway graves from opening up.
	S. went on, putting his hands on the sides of his neck timidly and lowering his head, like a feeding animal, in fear: ‘We’d like to hold hands without having to die first, and we’d also like that our dogs talk to us.’
	‘To have a nice playground with all the bullies cauterized or dead?’
	‘It is because they speak the language of faggotry and gays, and do not know the happiness of my tongue.’
	Jesus did not reply.
	‘But you were ninety-two percent right, and eight percent wrong,’ said S. ‘My people remain in endless suffering because of that last eight percent. “The fornicators and homosexuals…”Because you put into your scripture one bad word, we have been persecuted to bits with no mercy, and our parents throw up when they think about us.
	‘And though poetry comes from my mouth, still, it is the very meaning of life, soft and nutritious as purple beans.’
	S. went on: ‘Life had no meaning, the pages were blank, until life became luminous with meaning; our walks were better than having children. And the eight percent who were left in the loathing darkness were left as the remainder who remained.
	‘And not just one-hundred forty-four thousand of us overcame, but even our fingertips made it into the kingdom to come.
	‘And not a loser is left in the outskirts. He who was despised has been given a cat, and a swan loved him for a bit, so that he knew what it felt like and it resolved into rest.
	‘Don’t you regret that eight percent…? Don’t you wish you could take back a word or two? – but the rest of your words were truly poetical!’ he inserted, hastily, suddenly afraid.
	But he was not there; already, even before it occurred, he had already left.
	S. was alone in the playground. He wanted to kill himself for he had lost his friend.
	But eventually recess came and he went and found J., who was sitting by the creek, combing her hair, and they went and sat near the swings which were occupied by people who had taken them over and would not give them up.
	Instead, they went around walking and, when they could listen to something funny, would stand in silence. T. and his friends did not approach S. for they were afraid of J. and her turnaround kicks.
	By the bushes next to the bathroom, the older D. complained of having great trouble with girls on the playground.
	His friend counseled him: ‘But in learning to be polite, you may after all find out that you are a good person!’
	The older boy D. replied: ‘I am plenty polite, I tow her on my bike within the vicinity of her house when I drop her off and say: Can’t you just walk back? It’s girls who don’t understand politeness!’
	Now his girlfriend Symphony had come up, and the rest of the friends ran off, giggling in fear.
	Symphony said: ‘Can’t you just love me with your reason, a reason that doesn’t have hands?’
	D. replied: ‘Can’t you love me with affection, which has both hands and a mouth?’
	Symphony said, ‘I don’t want to insult your intelligence by appealing to your baser instincts, for, though you are a man, you are not a primate.’
	S. turned to J. and observed behind his sleeve: ‘Soon, all that will remain of a man will be the top of his hair.’
	J. said: ‘When men bald, they forget their own names.’
	‘Yes,’ said S., a little put off. ‘The name of a man is inscribed in his scalp, and when there is no hair protecting it, the air erases his dignity.’
	Now D. was confessing: ‘I find you hopelessly beautiful. Unlike other girls, you wear no makeup, for your authenticity is so without beauty, that there is no hope for it in the first place and you have dispensed with beauty out of hand.’
	Symphony rolled her eyes sarcastically. But she had already prepared to run away and weep into her hands, so overjoyed to hear the words ‘hopelessly beautiful’ that she had failed to hear everything that followed.
	Thus, leaping and praising God, she ran far away and was never heard of again.
	‘Surely,’ D. thought, stunned. For he had found her so beautiful he was in despair. ‘Girls run away from you when they have fallen in love with you. For as they are Created-Second and less rational species whose blood is concentrated in the nether region, they run away with desiring wombs because they are afraid you shall see them exposing their reality.’
	J. was so angry that she kicked S. in the face and said: ‘Here’s that, for your species!’
	S. fell to the ground, and hugging a tree, lingered with pleasure on the bruise on his face.
	Recess was over; the workers packed up the animals; the bell rang and the children ran screaming into their classes. S., suddenly remembering that the god had posed as a rabbit, thought to run after the trucks where the animals were being taken away, sure that the god had somehow forgotten the retransformation.
	But he could not go after the trucks, and thought with longing about having at all times a rabbit in his bedroom.
	‘To speak the language of elation requires training,’ he thought. ‘I should practice with the tongue of a god.’


END || JAN. 13, 2020

NOON

2.17.2016

1.

Overnight, a million nooses appeared from deep sky, and all through the morning they came down, these long fish hooks lowered from a peerless blue…
	These hours descended slow as falling angels, clean and out of blue, each bearing, in their oakum loop, as gifts of frankincense and manna, a beautiful promise of blue…
	School was cancelled for the day, and my little brother Tomo and I stayed in bed, looking out the high window.
	The sky had risen, it was predicted that something would come in and kill ourselves. When I went to get oyster crackers, the faint stars of morning bulged and burst, spurting streams of white pus through the empyrean blue, which trickled over the city skyline, were dissolved in the silvery glow’s horizon.
	By Noon, the city had reached its apotheosis, the real victory of self-consciousness. Swarms of noose, teeming like worms, touched down; flowed and pooled in so many noodly messes that, up to one’s armpits in rope, through the sloshing streets one had to wade, linking arms and in pairs.
	Beneath the vast blue expanse, the automatic traffic came to a standstill, appeared self-aware; the city stood in hesitant silence. Although none had heard of a wind in forever, a breeze blew, and the masses of hanging noose, bumped here and there, brushing against one another; waving, washing…and in their midst, alone and faraway, a wind-chime, ting-ing, cluttered ding-a-ling…
	Father and Mother roamed through our high apartment, checking their iPhones, sneaking glances out the window that returned hypnotized in blue, their eyes alight with a numinous joy.
	‘No school tomorrow, either…’ Father said, kneading the hand of his wife. She asserted that when so divine a tempest had descended, and on a city so becalmed, it was actually immoral!, not to take advantage of it. ‘And can you remember the last time we saw any weather? I’d think myself to be a child then…’
	She had a point. Our city had so well programmed itself that even the dome of the sky fell under its dominion. There was never weather. A certain numbness preserved our city, as a land perfected on a hill. The streets were orderly. Everyone was given over to an endless leisure in a time without sleep, accompanied by sweet, timeless, monotonous skies.

This Noon weather, though, was a bit strange. If you stretched your head through the loop of a noose, up you would go, lazily into the sky like a lost balloon. Tomo and I, from behind a window, saw our neighbors rising skyward, their bodies flopping like fish on invisible hooks, rising above the skyscrapers and clearing into pure space, all the while twisting along the rope’s axis as whirligigs in bored afternoons; or waking up halfway through and, perhaps regretting their decision, dancing ecstatically like fresh trout. ‘So many fishies!’ Tomo said. ‘Goodbye, goodbye!’
	‘Isn’t that Father?’ I asked.
	Our parents, knotted together at the neck, were floundering in the air, the marital blue behind them. It seemed they had gone out walking and decided against returning.
	It was too bad. We were actually very sad.

So many people were being raptured that day, so many having their heart’s desire. But suicide was becoming quite boring, no longer worth getting rapturous over, nothing to get out of bed for. It was not at all original to climb the ladders of sky, since the stars, and their broken shells, were giving very obvious directions. And there were times when the strange weather simply demanded it. If a midday breeze blew apart a veil of air, you might spy something there as like a revelation; and no sooner than you were marked by its beauty, your neck rests upon the wide bosom of sky.
	The day passed quietly, exuding a sense of sparkling clarity and saintly cleanliness. The airplanes went pirouetting through the air scrawling out messages of thanks, for the grace that faith had longed for. The radio hummed quietly as to itself, a euphoric madman: ‘…and it did take God a while, no doubt. But everyone’s just happy he finally got around to what he promised, the secret covenant at last. We totally agree it was about time he undid his errors, washed the world in erasure.’
	The news droned on, never new. We waited for something more peculiar to occur. A sense of finality would have been the ne plus ultra. All that those upflying disturbances left in their wake were tall stalagmites of air, clear and pure as glass, into which, if you dipped your ear, you would merely hear the raptured still gurgling, strung up in an endless ascent toward death. It was said that only a few had managed to die.
	The radio, when it got word of this, assured us: ‘But this is merely a minor glitch. Not unexpected. After all the Infinite himself has no noose strong enough for himself…though it should be hoped, and we are all together at this hour, that there are nooses strong enough for our souls…’
	No one made lunch, as Mother wasn’t home. I didn’t really feel like eating. The day had never been very interesting.
	I wanted very badly to go outside and try what everyone else was trying, to shoot myself into the sky. Indeed, in my imagination I had already accustomed myself a thousand times to going up like a balloon, to setting sail across a shoreless blues, hopefully drowning where no one would hear…
	Ah, but I am doomed to never get what I really want. As soon as I pushed open the fifth-floor window, Tomo clung onto my leg, anchoring me to the floor. I complained that this impeded my highest desire, that he was being very childish. But he said No, he was not. ‘But why should I be noosed to the earth,’ I asked, ‘tethered by a little brother who’s probably not even real?’
	‘You are not to be not!’ he cried.
	His rascally pun caught me off guard; my brother used every tactic in the book. Though smaller, he clawed with his nails, hitting groin and eye – wrestling for my extremely dear life.
	I got a leg over the window-sill; but no sooner, he reached over, and as to end a game almost out of hand with a power he could easily have exerted before, hit a tendon on my thigh, laming me. When even then, limping, I tried to kick him against the wall, he began to cry, which was even more irritating.
	‘Brother!’ he cried. He said that I was his only brother, it was not nice for me to go. I would leave again and not bring him, which was very unfair.
	Supposedly, I was always doing things like that.

During the afternoon, when Mother usually sedated Tomo with a nap, we instead watched the sky through the window and ate udon noodles at my desk. Tomo sat on my lap, a steaming lacquer bowl in his hands, and I helped him eat. When a noose poked its head through our window, we batted it away with our chopsticks, on which a noodle writhed like a worm.
	‘Obviously, we are eating,’ Tomo informed the noose.
	The afternoon was clean and blue, quiet and of clear air, as if underneath a pillow. We could hear the distant honks of cars, the humming of far away churches, and in the middle distance, the soft swaying of rope, of swings scree-cree and suicide, a suicide of summer and gurgling bodies, slowly swinging away the long, heavenly afternoon…

And all around the city the skyscrapers start to crumble. These skyscrapers, made of glass, shine like the sad noon sky, a symbol of humanity’s sterile flourishing, its reaching for the apex stars and finally attaining its uplifting apotheosis.
	But if by chance you rubbed away a patch of walls, you would uncover, like the magic lotto number of a scratch-away ticket, a giant hidden within the skyscraper.
	As if mankind had always kept under his tall dress of steel a lovely beast of apocalypse, warm to his heart…
	The window cleaner Enoch is seen as if in the sky.
	He uses the arrays of noose to travel along the sides of a nearby skyscraper. His foot catching on an opened loop, as a monkey in a jungle of vines, he swings upside-down and along, jogging through the walkways of rope; and since in the background the skyscrapers rise blue and bright as sky, he appears a man freely walking the empyreans, liberated from blue. As soon as his foot steps off, the rope jerks skyward and is gone…
	All afternoon, he worked from here to there, wiping the glass skin of the skyscraper, cleansing the sins of man, a grimy rag passing over his soapy blue reflection.
	At one stop, he hung upside-down by his foot; sponging and scrubbing he accidentally uncovered an eyelash of a giant. It swung out of the opened glass and licked him along the face. The last we heard of him, he slept blissfully in blues on high. MOLTING WATER



Aloud we’ll sing it, that song of molting water! We are allowed it, we are allowed to talk to our madness; are allowed that sweet intercourse. For the sky unhears it – the sky dissolves it –
	The sky neglects from the face of the earth.
	So, sadman—so—go down to your river, have no shame but speak to the water, and mark now, and see it now, that dying of the skies; you will hear this music, unsilent music, landing upon your shoulders…
	Madness? met with revelation at last! merely meet me at the river. Ah leagues of blue, shades of skies. Embrace me. Madness? revelation at last! But quick, begin the song, the sky’ll soon dissolve us; begin the song that slips the grasp of sky: a song that gives of water…

2.

That sky overwhelmed; I held my little brother’s hand. Were we there again? there, afraid of soaring sky, taking the winding trail down to the river.
	The sky was of a blue descending.
	And the dark trees which ran beside us, the distant sounds, were thinned in sky, narrowed – by a sky which had reached down to the earth and was ready to sweep all away, had opened the dome and with hard blue palm ground away the pointy thrusts of civilization…
	We sought the river for salvation, we did not know if even it lay outside our souls; the trail we trod was unmarked, nothing but a scent of water. And the four horizons shining the same giant blue…
	We saw nothing memorable.
	We would search the sky for a place to rest our eyes – in different times: a bird following a doomed balloon, this our barge of rest – to let the gaze asleep there awhile, its numbness bled away by starry wind…
	All sight, however, is dissolved into that soundless vacuity on high: a gaze that went up like a buoy, set sail across shoreless blues to unknown reaches where alone, sweetly it drowned on purpose, and no one saw.
	And our bodies were altered, necks bent back, eyes peeled skyward, euphoric and deathly. When we slouched, aimless and through darkness, we were enslaved to haughty blue empyreans, ashine in our mad eyes.

The sky grew ever more dominant; swelling; we found ourselves in a clearing, exposed as in a fishbowl round. Here in the opened air, we could do nothing but pray, and stare dreamily at that woman afloat in blues…
	We would pace the clearing’s perimeter, as if this might help us survive the skyward asphyxiation, soon to bring us up in a suffocation in azure; and we would wring our hands, probe our necks for bruises. Above us swelled the same, wet, dominating sphere, swollen with hues of depressing blues, spinning with the sterile dizziness of oppressive sadness. No rain fell, but a cold, incoherent sweat we knew too well. That sky afloat mortared at herself, whirling wet, spinning and sighing…
	Somehow we walked on. And the black boughs swept overhead, we ran through new woods, a water shining in their branches, as if roosted there a sea of fresh bluebirds, another sky of water. We bit our wrists to stay awake, trying to keep from peering skyward.
	Strange, we had forgotten why we wandered; why we walked toward the river each evening alone as if escaping a sorrow, seeking after revelations that only made us sad. We went dizzy and mad under that sounding sky: its silence like that following a scream, a sky always rainless.
	And for no good reason, still searching for the right sound, we desperately wanted to solve the sky’s sadness; if only we could peer into that vast sphere of blue, into that woman rubbing away her unwanted soul; and whisper, ‘The secret to blue is just this, say ‘ah’ and it’ll be solved.’
	As if seeking solace from someone who once knew us, we searched for a sign of recognition, a symbol that the sky was habitable, receptive to our sympathy and sadness, anything but its inhuman and disorienting vastness. But there was nothing between us. Though we were of the same blue, of similar souls, there was nothing between us.
	No revelations fall from sky. No sound binds the blue, no sound survives it. Not even like the absences of speech, when we give up on saying, and instead rest in the measure of our ecstatic sadness…The sky is boundless and stupid and dumb as air. Again do I warn that, though we dislid a word’s magic lamp, we cannot trap anything signifying from the sky, nor seal her blues onto poetic paper: our hands are not warmed in the tending of her. If we keep touching at sky, surely we will go mad and by own hand die and this since we are her children, is what I love.

3.

My brother and I would near the river, approaching it; and gradually, we would stop searching the sky; and whenever the trail wound round a hill, our steps would slow, and tip-toeing, we caught water spirits drifting from afar, blue inside the butterfly net of our smells…
	The river neared; and at the next turn, as if by ritual, slipping into a navy gown, the river revealed herself in deeper aspect, darker shades, quieter disquiet hints at the unalloyed blue. And always, the water-scent, its sensations, always anew: scents molting sounds…!
	We would no longer see that scream that our mother had made at home. Astonishingly happy, we step into a by-path, an immemorial way of slowness, and declaim dreamy, satisfied gazes at the heavens. Tomo’s blues, creaking a lonely swing, splashed at the rivering breezes, slipped into its warm flow sweet notes, rhythmic as an oar.
	‘Mother said she’d make a stew,’ Tomo said. ‘We ought to hurry. I’m sure it’ll be tasty.’
	He received no response.
	‘You know how she is when we’re late to dinner…’
	Soon he started exaggerating his marching tune, puffing up his chest and throwing out an arm:

Wah-ter, Wah-ter
O water in the sea…

	The off-syllable was paired perfectly with the uneven stepping of his feet, the tapping of his staff.

4.

We would walk slowly, as Tomo had a small trouble, and try to forget the river so that, at some quiet bend, like the fountain of an unexpected holiday, there would spout up, out of thickets and azure murk, our river, the one we delighted in – just as it was that original afternoon when we mistook it for a bit of sky sloshing at the top of a ceramic hill. It seemed then the water-eyelid of a deeply submerged, monstrous blue, or it was as though there a finger of sky had dipped down through the trees, and calmly anointed some water upon the earth.
	For some reason or another, however, it was quite difficult to recall the specifics of that first encounter. On account of the sweet sadness the river stirred in us, we would tell ourselves that we had probably stumbled upon that body of water to escape some worser sorrow, and to the water consecrated that sorrow, which was why it retained it. For just as the seas store the sun in its abyssal archives, so did our river keep our secrets from us. We did not know exactly why, as with a sourceless scent, it charmed us, chimed our steps into seeking after it. And why, should we say to ourselves at home, ‘the banks of Galilee,’ before long we’d be unable to stay still, our sight blinded by a glassiness, and borne adrift by water’s atomic restlessness, we too would tap into that secret brook, be swept away in abstraction. A maze of assonance sinewed that blue, and kidnapped by that image, for months she would steal us along hidden neuronal pathways like dew down invisible wires, slipping into subterranean, abyssal wells of drunken joy – say, the phrase ‘girl of blue’ – which we would repeat with delirious pleasure, in whose sound we would lounge indefinitely like otters aswirl in small ocean eddies.
	Perhaps it’s the case that we don’t remember, when we are sad and take our walk to escape the skies, that such blues are also within us. However many horizons we cross on a lonely bike, cutting a clean furrow through mirrored seas of paddies, still, with immense stillness, the skies wrap our travels up with little ado, immersing us as in an amniotic sac, the soft envelope of our very souls. And those external blues laid out across distances by a solitary painter on his walks – the oceans and seas, some hidden lake – when millennia later, after those cerulean brush strokes have cooled and calmed, we trod them, when we age beside them and heap our years on their shores, they, too, lay their sensations in our veins like a sediment that remembers them. The soft passing of waves, the silence of morning skies…Day in and day out, we see blue, and are baptized in our elemental melting, the thinning of us air; and gradually, we become that man half-water, half of ice. The blues around us, sculpt us beautiful. Our biology is sewn by blues, inscrutably sinewed with it, long sharp wires that line our arteries with the awareness of death.
	When Blue blooms us, and destroys us from within, it is not an outer blade of air but that the sound of it, ‘ah blue,’ rings into existence too many of our inner landscapes, distances, seas and adventures – the soft passing of waves, the washing of eternal skies – and we swell and burst without ever truly bursting, like a helium man, a resultant depressing. We may forget, we may lick our wounds. But all that deep residue, coating our veins like a magic rubble, retains itself unscrubbable, remains infinitely sensitive to this infant bluejay singing in the salted air; resounds with assonant salutations. Why else does that dab of feathery blue, afloat in Monday’s birdbath, charm us, if not that it frivolously sips all our concepts long steeped in the azure categories, brewed in profound sorrow? The bird of blue sings us to the deep: we turn inward, are shocked to find beneath the waves that same sherbet globe of hues, our soul turned to its true color, shivering and overbrimming with delight; like the bluejay flown, it’s trying to leap back to its proper skies, straining to undo the wire cage of its captors.
	Ah, but what can we do, when a blue ‘stuck in the house’ wants to know the Romeos from outside? Isn’t our flesh ribboned as they tear toward each other, these selfish lovers? We exist so that blue can long for itself. Yes. Day by day, it seems evermore certain that the color has consummation in our suicides. So the sky makes us blue…

5.

An image from a forgotten afternoon: I am biking by the side of a forest hill, I turn into a lower trail and, before I have realized that here is the lake, a shining body of blue flashes through the trees; letting the pedals run I am quite convinced that some stream of sky has reversed and begun to flow parallel to me, as though I had turned into a small road that ran next to an angels’ highway; and as these minutes, of such lucidity that I could count them and still count myself to be in them, seared by like a wind, like a diver swimming by his legendary whale years after he has given up all hope, so too did I feel as though I had travelled perfectly with my blues.

6.

If we sing our blues, will any remain for us?
	We should feel quite sad, sad in our marrow, if there remains nothing that drips. At the autopsy – which, so we promise ourselves, shall be tomorrow – perhaps, disgusted, they’ll peel open only an exhausted water, the shell of a sadness already molted.
	For we do not want happiness, the end of our singing blues. Let’s keep this drowning that’s the self.

7.

How infinite the moltings of water! – we are so impressed – you but have to know how to speak the ‘open sesame,’ her secret name; and all her associations, the underwater interstates of metaphor, substructure architectures and arch-chambers of memory, like a tempest, instantly begin to swirl, are confused in an apoplexy of wonder…

8.

And before the amphitheater of river and sky, there at last, Tomo silently lifts up his arms, lets the hues drip from his sleeves; and as a conductor overwhelmed by the majesty of his own orchestra, his arms fall limp, he closes his eyes and, holding my hand, begins to shiver and snivel.
	‘I am very sorry,’ he cried. ‘I am very sorry for it, it was not meant! sorry for wanting to die…’
	We would watch that lazy water bathing in the warm gloaming until we had forgotten the time. And over the river’s glorious dusky distances, across its dozing darkstone blue, a late light unsheathed its tones of blades, bayonets, daggers, its celestial clamor in metal; and gleamed there in shimmering, warring swords of gold. Silhouetted in this furrowed gilt of waves, we saw their arching shadows, of waters pleasuring, a dance of shadows bending, dripping: flashed with the scimitar curves of breasts, the synchronized motion of silhouettes.
	And the way they leaned at the small of the back: a flaxen field of wheat, on hot summer days when soft ocean breezes come to burn them, will bend languidly almost to the breaking point; just so these swimming girls lay themselves against the sleeping waves, in offering to their own tragic, lethargic, and violent beauty…
	Tomo would step out over a rock, over the shadows of shallow waters. And there between the rocks, little light yet roved down into a middle deep, where grinned and winked, those girls’ waiting demon eyes.
	Strong in his vitality Tomo feared them not. My brother unzipped his pants, let out the baby noodle of his life; his warm, living stream of pee-pee spouted, arched like a dancer, like a rainbow aflame in the sunset.
	The mere sight of which touched the wicks of those demon eyes, waiting, offended into excited flame. And you girls in perpetual darkness, you found yourself now, surrounded by pee’s magic, enlightened pebbles of gold and amber. How the drifting, swirling then!
	A seal, sleekly leaping through darkness, will cast to its side a million minnow-flakes, silver scales, spinning and in a deep whirlpooling by the swim of the seal; so those waters swirled, with this yellow of cheap gold, sensuous worships of fires, batting of eyelashes…
	And Tomo stands on the rocks with his staff.

But we would have to hurry home. We could hear, traveling over distances on invisible lines, harmful and sweet, vast and spreading, our mother calling to us.
	‘I do not think she’ll be very happy…’ Tomo said.
	As we ran through the woods, a strange wind scented with river, tried to drown us in its darker associations. Tomo pressed his eyes into my sleeves so as not to see; we ran faster, holding hands.
	And Water, drunk on herself, burning the damp wick of her hair, swept her sleeves through our midst in a swimming, shimmering gesture; and the cold darkness dewed, wept beads of sweat; sleeves trailing, on return she passed through again, only to fray into a seizing, shuddering dew, a crystal wake suspended midair; its sound screaming! slicing our skin with little incisions.
	‘Look at you two…’ Mother sighed, rubbing alcohol on our cuts. ‘Suppose this is what you get for being so late to dinner.’
	‘This is what we get,’ I said, wiping away Tomo’s tears.
	‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This is what you two deserve.’