There’s an Ocean around Land, there’re lands around a Land, there’s land around a village, there’re villages around land, there’s land around towns, there’re towns around villages, there’re villages around hills, there’re hills around a wall, there’re walls around cities, there’s a city around a Square, there’s a Square around a Church, there’s a Church around an Affiliated — crucified, he’s been nailed up to hold everything in place, keep it together; this is all pointed out to them, duly noted (understand, that if this tour seems somewhat disjointed, appears somehow confused, then it’s been conducted about as well as any could hope: plopped down with a foldingmap with arrows popping sharply everywhichway, and with all these sobbing disconsolate kinder wanting, needing, to do just about everything…his personalized armband slipping down the starve of his sleeve, icecream melting down the cone of his two fingers holding he’s licking, his parents’ patience tested by the whim, the desire, the demand, fedup, wearing thin, what would you expect — he’s been excited for weeks, counting down the days, blacking them off on his calendar, a secular luach, not many of them left nowadays, secreted under his bed he’d countup the hours, the minutes, the clock the beat of his heart, despite how they’d discouraged); the city’s around a Square around a Church around this mensch, you know Him, an Affiliated, too, crucified, starcrossed, the center of every universe at once, and here, too…the city has a Square around a Church around an Affiliated, an Affiliated has the town around, the village, the Church, the Square, the city, the world, their Guide repeating again and again: a formality, memory; like, how many times do you say a Kaddish — before it becomes less than the sum of its words, its vocables and gutturals, just Amen noise, perpetuo static, no summons? Zusammen! The other Affiliated, the rest of them, though — they always lived downhill, turn, point, where the sewage flowed to, flows, the wounds of puddle, perfectly imperfecting scars (manufactured stains populated with ash, louse, and the vomitous remains of seven species). And everywhere’s like that, with huge fields between everywheres, plains: this quarter of Polandland, bombed, incendiaried, blownup, what do you call it — gone, didn’t rebuild its square; all roads here lead to all roads there and not to expectation, road, the nakedness of late night denuding earliest morning — to stand alone amid nowhere, surrounded only by the sacrosanct and furious quiescence of the ancient, made modest only by the light of late noon…at the markets: there in which numbers, for a moment, a bark or a cry, had other meanings; in which hands, so often put to violence, to death, here merely gestured for profit, the satisfying murder of urge, the gross indulgence of an object desired; at the festivalbooths: amid the gurgle of crated livestock and birds, suspended high amid the scent of the tree and the glow of its lights, always lesser. Prosit! Prost! Servus! Rooted in dregs. The Church here an ancient cockroach grown fat in a crack in the sky…a gargoyled snake (maybe the stillborn son of the river’s or river that cleaved the town, that cleaves here from banking flow to ebb of bank) swallows other snakes and islands, the jutting, falling slips, the dilapidated docks, boats and barges that themselves, in their feathered wakes, cut new forks into the snake’s tongue, the snakes’, corrupted limbless without current, to slow the flood of speech, unremitting, the water of words, as if in punishment for unknown, inchoate, sins. The snake of the river swallows rats and the snakes swallow whole plaguecolumns whole. Waters recede into mute twice daily, at noon and at midnight, then silence reigns again — that great holy and maddening still.
During reconstruction, doorposts had been spackled over in reddened night, the mark of where mezuzahs used to mark, when.
