At the border, here, the bruised, bloated joint, perpendicular to — the Quarter seems to genuflect to the Square, prostrating itself at this estrangement of knee, this arterial way…Wide Street intersecting Narrow Street, only to become on its other side Ghetto Street’s its name, set apparently straight, with regard to the lean of its living, though with an underlying windingness bisecting the clocked circle surrounding with the secret of its holier, unhanded time — to flow its river of homes, rushed people and the livestock they resemble into an opposite street, bounding, containing, River Street it’s called far toward the back of the Quarter, unwalled to tumbledown at their intersection in neglect, to decay; there to bridge with its loosened cobbles the most polluted swell of this river, whatsoever its name if it isn’t just River, formerly Water: this is the world, roundsmall or it was, and how everything they’d want or need, everyone they’d ever know, would exist inside its circumference, had been encircled in bondage, encycled, bound up in one; this tightness, the throatconstriction, the dizzying breath of containment, overwhelms many, all, the market, the marketed package…and so Miriam takes it upon herself to assure: what you’re feeling is normal, to be expected, and them, this is fascinating stuff…O I didn’t know that, did you, honey, I didn’t — reassured as she guides them, whichever them, with each group the same, these undifferentiated, unindividuated, up shortcuts, switchbacks long around, as handeddown father to son, generationally hand to mouth, dor l’door: mouth to ear, out of mind to its foot in through the alleys and courtyards, Baroque culs-de-sac, rococo loops, maniacally fine and fripperant turns…
We’re heading back to the Square now, says Miriam, for the clock…about to ring us the hour.
You shouldn’t miss this!
A mustdo — is everyone ready?
Let’s all stick together. As much as she sticks to the script.
No use getting to know them, Miriam, no use to even think of them as them — and not just as It, the riveredabout.
And so to begin again, again then all over.
An Affiliated bleeds in a bleeding memory, wilts in a willing memory — dies in a dying memory…dies.
In the Square
The Sandersons arrive in the Square, having passed through innumerable subsidiary squares on their way, through intersections intersecting pedestrian malls, through stretches of municipal openness buttressed by statuary and somber monuments to the most important who cares (Miriam’s stretching, herself — and the feet, they hurt so), that, too, and the Ghetto’s constriction, the poisonous suck, the thin wick through which passes the hour’s glass sand — arriving finally in front of the Clock, just moments prior to its sounding the knell of our noon in twelve tones, halved hollow. Here and waiting, they behold the Tree, which they’d previously known only in photographs, from films, promises, descriptions of print and the mouth; how it fulfills all expectations, exceeds in that it’s “simply fabulous,” though “amazing” is preferred (upon the forms they’ll later fill out — help us help you to force you to fill: our trip was amazing, we had an amazing time, everything was “simply amazing”); earlier, they’d toured another tree, the other Tree, rooted in a lesser as mirrored square rooted across the river from this square, the Main Square, Old Town’s, that’s the New’s: the tree here’s watered larger, it’s historyswollen, greater, obviously the more important of the two trees, the most, they didn’t have to be told after all — despite, even its plaque’s larger, more luminously polished; as for its ornaments, the other tree can’t hold a candle…
Here, everyone holds an umbrella.
