As for me, I was hoping the window led out…mystically, hoping above the above, upstairs-upstairs-Upstairs, but no: it’s new town, old evil; new village, only the newest of ruins…eastern form razed razed razed to its very foundation; inhabitants unable to be raised despite the hurt of my howling, whether they’re in hiding or dead, hiding in death, who’s to ask. Skeletally stripped, rippedopen staircases spiraling turretwork, tower’s marrow…what’s a spire and what’s a smokestack, what’s a building or was and what’s grave or a tomb; from this vantage, resembles a cemetery. I lean, I’m leaning, to search, to find, to root amid roots, to moon amidst the maternal…deeply, too far. Finally — painfully, I birth myself from out of the window, tumbling to snow, then down the flank of the mountain, which flows into this plot’s main and only prospekt, when I have none to speak of, and that as no speech. Though even if talk I had in me how, there’d still be no words for where: bombedout, clearedout and out destroyed, then salted with ice so that nothing would grow again, ever. Fallow without jubilee. I fall from the summit of the hill behind me on down to egg the nest of its valley: as if a wedding’s lost band its circumferential containment, the ring of its bind, my mother’s and tarnished…toward its Square down its slope I’m hurtling steeply through the Square proper, which is unpaved, packed earth — only to land slammed against the pediment of a spire forlorn, a towering topple…its Plague Column, I think, what’s called a Pestsäule: a bestially marbleized swirl.
Not quite (which was Aba), have patience as Ima herself would’ve said and I’ll tell you: it’s a schlong…you know of what I’m talking, she’d say, it’s a putz, that’s what, the kind that crawls down below…without legs, to forever beg on its belly for affectionate time — it’s flaccid now and so distended from its plinth, hanging stubbily shrunken atop the dust as if lazily asleep, unaroused. A clotting of vein and frozen gray uncircumcised fleshiness, I’m looking it straight in its eye, without sense. I get myself up and stand a little, then long; entranced, waiting to expect what, I don’t know.
From sunrise on the next morning, which is the Shabbos, the holiest day of the cycle against which this dial’s intermediary shadow has been erected opposed, it begins to fill itself up, to pump stiffly with life as if sucked from below: taller and thicker it grows, its foreskin retracting, until an hour or so before the highest pitch of the day, and there as if dinged struck, stricken at the headhuge clap of the sun, ringing out the sky’s call to account, everyone rise — it’s up fully, and fat and hot, too, melting the weather from around the platform upon which it’s risen, a puddle, a pool…pulsing immaculately in the midst of the Square, and then above the village, the town — expanding hillhigh, extending mountainously and yet soon, as presently noon, casting no shade to speak of: pinkening then fully red and rashy as if alarmed angrily, made mad, and heftily hard, too, with the undiminished course of blood urged up from the earth — life spilled being absorbed again and again into time, and its telling.
At this twelve with its ring donging above from the bell of a church…it explodes into seed, in all pulpy seeds — which hit the rounding, impotent sun, in a great spot of stain…sticking only to drip off that orb as latterday fug — throughout the afternoon dropping away in failed viscous globs.
As nearing sunset again, what’s to expect…it’s gone flaccid again, snakes around itself as if to sleep away a next dark, fenced in and gated safe by its wild pubes sticky and hard at the foot: these wickety weeds I’m stepping on, these slatted stalks I’m stepping around…to smite one off and step on with a staff.
