Embodiment of a Passage
Two wasps dash in front of an overlay of pines into this territory
of stings. The chase rises inside his head, whirls, fills his ears
with dissonance. There is no other sensation, only barbs, needles,
and stings. He finds it impossible to move away, like reaching backward
for something dropped through a meniscus—grape, coin, key, dropped
incidentally, notwithstanding guilt.
His skin tingles, each muscle summoned, poised, in readiness to be
transported to the city of water, fluid to be injected beneath his
cracked and swollen skin. He knew it would be long in coming, the
threat and promise of it hanging suspended like ripening fruit, the
fruit dropping unseen. He waits with his thirst grown legion, whose
strength is in its rising, the rising exhausting him.
Because there is an end. Because he is already lying horizontal.
Because his thirst is unquelled. Because the scope of his body has
condensed. Because his hands are indifferent, yield to nothing. Because
they have been precise instruments of murder. Because they have been
most violent and brutal. Because they have been restrained in the
way the hands of a clock move under glass, given that they are regarded
in relation to the movements of the earth.
At the end the world is no cradle, its single axis driven through
the core, rotating crookedly. Double weighted, as if the sky grew
dusky twice. Unlikely he would have known in broad daylight walking
the particular topography of hills that take him to the very edge.
