Atop the viewing platform of the spirant spire of the easternmost and yet also northernmost, as it’s alternately compassed it’s breathed, magnetically imposing tower of the clockfaced, clockhandtall Town Hall, Mister & Misses Sanderson the two of them, Misses especially, in excellent physical shape, more than able to manage the centuries of steps spiraling their way to the culminant top…a dizzy cornute, a shofar’s staired chute — they stand gazingout through the telescopes mounted: they veer far to the mountains first, focus, the hills, stomachlike imperfections, these pregnant, tumorous, cystlike, or otherwise cancerously raised from the pale of the land skinned around, and then further, focusing, squinting…behold, a stretch of spines, prickles and thorns, ensnared, ensnaring, as far as east and as north, their sprawl left whitened out of the maps once provided, the map they’d purchased at the aeroport back in Topeka, which they’d been required to purchase, a provisionary splurge — a whiteness, which seems, initially, only a haziness of the eye…this glaze, glaucomally dim, the gradual graying of day, the freezing dusk of an incoming headache — I think I have to lie down…a patchwork of briar and bramble, hooks and snares and of starthorns. Here are the quarters of Polandland they haven’t the time, nor the permission, the permission that is time, to visit: the Lumber Yard (everything here’s labeled, and large, signs in every language to satisfy even the most impotently compelled of the curious), in which the wood’s apparently, according to their Guide later asked, dried for clarinetreeds, for the planks that husk the hulls of boats; then the Gut Mill, in which strings for violins are made, alongside the workshop for knots in the suiciderope…the Ink Distillery, the Nib Works — and then further…if glassneared: out warring the mittelground gone already lost, overlooked — this to which they’ve been made the mere witness of two whose testimonies would stand if only together, as observers only if twinned and with the testified third taking the trinity starred, with them left alone in a garden in which to observe only the sin of each other, it’s said: a son possessed by a wife who’s a ghost, a holying spirit, a soul incarnating a faithful entwined…it’s all coming together, a convergence of sorts, dazedly stooped atop the Town Hall to squint themselves stupid against the gaze of the darkening wind — the cloud pouches, the black rim of their squint: a horizon that’s a hill, with a swarm of night presently tumbling over its height…young kinder with their camp counselors, too, matching in their white & bluecollared shirts, screaming and shouting and having what’s been called, oy, the time of their lives: they’re streaming down the slope latterly cleared of alders and catkiny birch for their gallows, to fall down to the rocks and stones of the valley below and its shadow, the sun’s risible grave — even their orphaned kinder have been ingathered, too, each to their own special programs, their own particular schedule, sensitive to their limitations, whose not, forsaking history for the unique requirement of the young, those at heart. This hill, lastlit, and membraneous as if the rising of the moon — if sectioned conically, maybe, if we’re to be obliged by these workers espied, just off to the forests (in a veer of their scope, working their ways around the shroud of the sky — though with no further focus on what this all means), carting with them their twohandled, manyteethed saws as if the trussed remains of wolf trophy, its flesh for the sacrifice, then the feminine meat of the pelt with which to hide nakedness from the lusts of those whom that flesh would sustain, and their gods…there to clear land for whatever facility’s next, wherever’s next stop to last — if sectioned conically, we’re saying, this hill whether concavely or convex, into a crosssection, a slice taken out, only a sliver, a glassy rind or a peel: that portion removed would be a lens, and so perhaps could shed a ray of light, could straighten and narrow the light now dying, upon the tumult planned just beyond.
