begging tears for her mop. There are none, for none here weep. Her demands, kneeled, torn at her hair are answered only with solemn shakes of heads, whose eyes beg for a shadow without cross or hysterics of women. She raves at the crowd till some in half-mock offer their spittle to her cause. She scorns this, returns to her task but the blood is hard; she embraces, kneels, to the stains of riverlets, the fog rolls, and engulfs.
When grey again ebbs, as the tide carries treasures outward, she is gone.
Some hairy bulks, men in hides, furred to their necks come take down the cross. It is broken into pieces, piled in a pyre's mound. The oil cast, the spark struck, the flames seek the father, sun. Yet the oil consumes, the flames die. The wood unlit, uncharred. The men are harrowed, trembled to touch the godly apparition but the leader threatens duty with a axe, showing the handle chewed with calloused hands.
A hole is dug, the pieces buried. Instantly green spins lush on the mound
a boy crawls to this embrace
fragile leaned towards hunger
he feasts on all fours
this grass nurtured to ripe
and wooden agonies
Fuller his limbs, his eyes gentled
there appears near
a cage thorned of build
the thorns point outwards
the rays of holy nightly petal
inside a dove of wound
blood of the broken wings
The boy crawls to it, yet he has become tethered a leg to a round stone. His fingertips just embrace the needle tips; the dove beyond his grace. He curls and weeps; the grass withers at the rain of his bitter salt. Yet, as he lies, a fierce one legged hawk flops to the grass and begins to peck viciously upon the throng taut between stone and boy.
With this linger of vision, the Beggar awoke, curled, drenched in sweat, his eyes stinging as if he had bathed in salted heavy waters.
As he walked, his feet, the open and closing, the blinking of eyes shaking away the dust of old things too stripped of their painted rails, worn at the stubble of cheeks or the whispers of faint mustache as everything old molds to the same.
A preparation for the sculpture of maggots when all faces of animals joined in reunion liquidise as an army of boils crushed by some upheaval. Some religious hurl of stone. Death is revered for it unburdens the eyes to witness this decay paraded outrageous and repulsion in its sags and seeps. For blessed are the young, to die clean of face, unlipped in jowled beast of glutton. For cursed are the old things, denying their place of heart, blaspheming with the ashes of destiny defeated, piled on their crowns, spewing the effrontery of their fetish cling to undeath.
Must the grandsons and daughters be polluted in this inheritance? To know the deed before life has even first tried?
How thus can ground do more than accept a shovel and stay blind to the torch. The old thing stalks with the curse of human hand folded, clasped only to cover its organ withered of decline, they walk away always hiding their heart with their hands from the world.
The past always in plunder of today, as trees dies for scaffold built for yesterday's sin.
Enough! Enough! Chant the feet, the eyes. Drag us hither from this murk of old putrid limbing that prefers to rattle itself: Man. It is a thing rooted from a grave and Lo! Behold! The grave begins suck back issue like a reluctant womb reels inward the birthcord some drunk of midwife left vacant. This city is long past the birth, the scent of sun (brief though its lick was) and now, old things, gather worship away from dank clefts but are drawn in none the less for they end their legged clay as they gaze at chipped walled horizons and for seconds their brows smooth of wrinkles as the earth swings on their jowls, a grave pull, they inching return and can be enclosed in a second's quake.
So let not old things keep the debris of yesterdays upon a babe's fragile cradle. Let old things in old places lay recline before the young and display graver thoughts then stretching limbs can bear. Let there be no utterance of 'Guard such' or 'Honour this'; for the past needs no guard nor begs no honour. There are more dead amongst the dead than living can number, so what use is living into the dead?
Like daily beggars, the eyes look forward, the dead are dust trickling from heels, that which was is unknown, that which is to be unknown and that which is remains as solid as scented wind, as delicate to the path as burning sand, as calm as terror's eyes, as forbidden as a sister's kiss.
There becomes only the passion of 'is' and the 'dream'. As if 'is' drifts across the wilderness of dream, a hazy spectre unmoving, shifting, undulating up down to the dips and valley, rises and deserts, seas and maintains of the 'dream'. For the 'dream' is of truth the only landscape to include 'was' and 'to be', albeit the 'scape changing of 'is' and to 'is' like a fabric shading to countless here dependent on view. Where are the beggarly toes leaped or scraped here? Does the mind float in 'dream' while the body sway upon 'is' like a sailor given perch on horizon's mast?
Yet the 'dream' has captured much in past body but the mind gathered no fruit. Yet the mind knows some of 'dream' and much of 'is'.
Can the solution be to decree 'is' the perpetual dream? No, as shallow a thing as the sword of an insect defeats such feeble charge.
Pain ‘is’ and reminds us clearly well.
What may be said is where there is 'is', there can no dream. Where there is dream, no 'is'. Because 'is' remains burdened to the real path of physical, the reality and allows no vision but merely the sight of what 'is'. The dream creates, it allows all that was, is, and will be to encumber, to burden, to decorate the sight of what 'is' and thus bears vision for the traveller.
Creation, then, weighs unbalanced. For does it not seek the small amongst tiny or places the one wing of yearn upon the curl of stone. Does it not carve the air to magic form in dark isles charred in burns of sea? Red? Dusk?
Does it not drink love in wrinkled blue eyes or stand joy tearful of childish embrace? Does it not weave hope in the slap of brotherly hand clasping below the thunder of evil winds? Can creation not read a thousand words, a thousand beauties, a thousand crimes, a thousand paths in the stance of a ragged young eye, bold in the streets with a stick? Why such unbalance this creativity? Why to see 'is' and envision what sadly was or in defiance shout what should be?
That all in unbalance is the tremble of the invisible; a web this hunt and a mind clings to all and thereby all is of one mind as one mind links to all it envisions, the vibration of passings.
Is not then reality balanced? Perched as a sated rock upon the earthen cradle? Reclined and unmoved. Reality is dead in the eyes see why stillness unlaboured in breath. This is the closed fist of reality. No threat yet the null, the void, the blank, bleak, empty often of its stillness, is a death. A death to motion.
For who has not seen the still tree, cast off its lethargy of waver and step to become a camel, a man, a lion? Or who has not watched rocks shimmer to the same, or horizons spill not to plunging drops but rather slight declines. What maid has not changed a name in the turn of a head? What man no longer brother when closer by a foot?
What has the traveller seen when only movement captured the beckon? What has the traveller missed when stillness remained virgin to any gaze?
Creativity unbalanced yields movement, as if a certain colour of wind that points from the high to the low. That which moves to break horizons, creates horizons vision and unburdens the traveller starring at the unlink of a day's rock in stale, swallow.
The dream bleeds in and out as the pulse of inner outer vision. All that is unbalanced is created or is creating. The landscape of a world; follows the contours of brains; weaves the paths of dreams. The rock of dreams yields the cities of a desert or the question of a thought. To raise a fist is to raise a storm. War is but the worldly man's anger. The wind is yesterday' breath.
The traveller envisions the landscape ahead and thus peers across the inner of his skull.
Though he has not heard in 'is', the dream drifts him the screams of dying slaves; the ground rip
ples its disgust; the sky chokes pale gray in its weep.
As the steps taken, all ahead parts to side, falls behind. All changing, enlarging, reforming, distinct in new casts. The emotions weave out and give their menace or delightful wave; give roofs teeth or broken neglect. Vision has hardly seconds and then must then discard to memory, as if saving wheat grain by grain from a burning barn, so fast are creations lost to a herd of past.
The unbalance of vision starved from madness. With the withheld of a final crumb, no: 'is'. There stumbles no mark of physical reality in movement. No reference, no sign to mark a traveller from tripping off the usual course.
As if, he falls in a bottomless pit. Not alone. All else falls with him. The walls dark, unseen. In time, who would not seduce the fall as just another windy day?
For the traveller to stop, cease the motion, close the eye of vision which only opens to the drum of pounding heels, creation peeks from the air as a fly might unwing itself to assume the disguise of old larvae. Reality sets before him one object at a time. Yet being balanced cannot move itself. Thus cannot change before his sight, thus his sight is given no wine of change to sparkle a mind already dulling. It's as if the bottomless pit was turned into the endless tunnel. Light lanterns no where. The face of rock his groping world. This the valley of 'is'.
The traveller continually given to choose. A beam to a right, left yields unbalance, motion,
The Seven Days of Wander Page 52
