Last latest evening the Square gets klieged, shorn and drowned, the ganze obliterate: an oblation of light, beamed pitilessly from behind spires and turrets. Hordes of tourists walk in walking shadows, footed to shade, shuffling, limping, walkingshoes and galoshes, weatherproofed, wellheeled on tank-treads: a Miss Angelica gets herself caught, between two cobbles she trips, falls and sprains herself hurt, that evening to consult with this goy named she forgets who he once posed as a Goldlust, one of the handful of old Unaffiliated lawyers still around if out of practice of late, to ask him about the intricacies of negligence, liability: ideas of suing Polandland, Inc., gosh darn it all to heck, she says to him, while we’re at it why not sue the whole religion, the race, the world, to which the lawyer will have to admit ignorance of international law obtaining, especially now, though he’ll ask her a few questions she should ask her insurance provider should she ever again find herself home and alive. She can’t walk, the Group continues on without her, no one hears from her again, not a postcard. Here to make the circuit across the water to the Castle, house roomed to house from Square to Bridge felled — not the trafficked bridges where the cars would swerve to avoid the trams, where the trams would stop to avoid the horses, where the horses would throw riders over the railinged edge to avoid trampling the lowlier passing: but the pedestrian bridges, the historic crossings no vehicles allowed, the oldest spans, of ancient arches, their ways lined with statues, of saints and others, the saintlike, the sainted, the saintly, those beatified and still waiting bruised with rust in the purgatory of holiness, Salve; St. Whomever who died whatever death, who knows or should, St. What’s his name or hers who they were martyred together in each other’s arms for something under the reign of another. Polandland, Inc. knows they’re in mourning even if they don’t, and so Management’s gone and covered the statues of the Bridge, and those of the lit and touristed Square, too, with these flattering red tarpaulins: untenable to let those old Saints out alone into unsupervised night, to grant them the honor of a moon, who knows what miraculous madness they’d get into, what they’re liable to do damagewise; crosses and swords, crossed swords bulge out from under their coverings, Cupidic arrows and roses of silver and bronze. At night, the Bridge’s statuary, like the Square, shot through with a bright river of light, an air luminous and rare above the dark river flooding below. Here on the Bridge, there’s the miraclerub, that in the light, be it that of the sun, moonlight, or artificial, flashed from the bulbs hidden behind the statuary plinths, shines more golden than anything else. A handful of stragglers lift the tongues of these tarps, to get a glimpse: how they’re turned to stone, into statues themselves to bridge high the banks, above the rocks that fork quartered the flows: uncovered, they’ve beheld eyes without pupils, faces without noses, cut off to spite, torsos unlimbed, dismembered by weather; swordhands of St. Who Knows holding tulips wilting and yet petrified, frozen, fists with macle for knuckles, or jewels, their emptily suppurant settings; a starveling dog with a mouthful of genitals prowling still at the feet of St. Anyone bound in crystalline vein. The plinths, the pediments, which are left uncovered and so visible to everyone, haven’t weathered well either, hundreds of years of thousands of precipitations would do that, and worse; as always, words are easier to efface than the fame that is form. A few, though mostly the clerical crowd, stop to make themselves rubbings of the fundament Latin, which is inept, terrible, an imported language of no one now, having been churched out of existence, its conjugations scattered, and muddled, frozen then thawed into incoherence, again — epitaphs to the stone itself, themselves…
