Barker
it seemed to be dancing the rough waltz it knew, & then as it fell it muttered something almost in a woman's voice-mea culpa or sic semper tyrranisno one could say for sure, but those who heard it broke out in an icy sweat in August & felt a sensation in their bowels, something barbed & cold like the gills of a monstrous catfish ... I felt it, yes, the sensation of the heart flensed from the head & the shadows of both passed through me in one great peristaltic wind that cast my breath down like a rotten net into the muck of the body so that I had to lie down on a bench gasping in the dying light of summer as the plucked hearts of the world leapt up out of the grass at dusk, crying out like carbuncular toads & the severed heads of history nodded gently from the branches of the oaks like so many frostbitten oranges. It was like this, yes, & the shadows of the world so thin, stepping out, shifting shape, the snoring of bone as the bear's paws were sawed off & the gall bladder ladled out into a copper pot while a bevy of vultures coasted over the rooftops, dragging their bellies, their slender fingers of hunger through the blue smoke of the textile factory ... My children, listen, you were there, you are here, each of you stretching out in the narrow corridors of your own painyou who secretly enjoy algebra; you who were a pelican in another life, you who were a housewife, always sweeping; you who fell in love with a tree once & told no one; you who will be killed in war; you who dreamed for weeks on end of turning into a cloud; you who will become a priest, a lawyer, a ballroom dance instructor; you who love the word dissipation; you who played a robot in a school play once & were happy; you who slit your wrists & were overcome by the smell of salt, remembering the first time your mother held you up in the surfyes, each of you, e pluribus unum, glistening from the wounds of Che, Lincoln, Christ, where the flesh peeled back smolders the blue of a Chinese plum & reveals the oblong pearls of putrefaction & your cries like white noise sighing through a syringe 10
FUGUE #34