Animals, mewling punching kicking beasts and curs. Animals, but animals with beards, suddenly with sidelocks, animals adorned in fringes, clothed in black, in new boots and hats and wigs, which are black, too, and even laundered; their hides the purest snow. Without, everything’s slushy, sullied, trashed. Horse dropping desecration. Old oil on the quivering gelled surface of the eye. Lenses smudged in ember, whorled fingerprints of ash. Gray burrows into drifts of boot and cart. Filling letter slots, mailboxes, even mouths to stut and spit, silence, then, as if in a renewed language, an attempt to expound again. Arguments batter every corner. These animals never relent. As the limousine takes turns, rights lefts, makes drastic swerves, turnarounds, Us and loopdloops, it passes packs of seething envy, parts resentful mobs to leave them in its wake exhaust to breathe on — the window cracks, a stone’s been thrown, or has fallen as hail, be charitable. The city has chosen, it’s changing: bodies dumped to bump drifts of fall long cleared; apartments have been repainted, appliances replaced on warranty usurped. Restoration’s in the air, He’s sensing even without a face…Ben’s limousine swerving as if driven by the quick pitiful flicks of His searching head, His form, Him an entrapped wounded mammal attempting only to window a view through the veil. They hurl into embankments, stagger around in skid to seek a throughstreet, a shoveled path, a route alternate if wild: maps are useless, fit for kindling, to stuff into shoes for warmth. Understand, there have been casualties, with service down if not delayed: the numbers have been unordered, readdressed, the grid has come undone. Junk juts up from pilings midstreet, mounds of sooty clump, dark humps of tar macled with ice in glittery brilliance. The limo takes a wide turn, cuts across meaningless lanes to curve into a straightaway, pacing itself against the Parkside sprawl, lined with streetlamps that’ve wilted from the crooks of bishops into logs obstructing, laid frozen across Fifth Avenue from sidewalk to the sewer. The Park’s overgrown in icicle fang, a flank of clods and butts bearded in white, rising to overflow the walls that stand to stop the spill from threatening the lane: walls of fieldstone, filthed, themselves walled with heaps of trash. Ben hauls over to the window facing, collapses against its blind: Uptown, the arching arctic crests and crowns, the dusted trails with the Reservoir rinked; low gusts winding frost along the floor of the Park, through tunnels, over bridges, then across its lawns, their bushes and shrubs snowed as if to cool and blameless monuments, freshly flush with light. Untrafficked, it’s this pure polarity by day, a golden pale suffused by latter dusk — with a strange and utterly clear crystal coddled deep and cold within.
