北京麻雀 (Sparrows of Beijing)
无 Void 2016 - 4
5
Then they're on the last the sheets and waited for her to peel them down and then – the last of his words to flow to her and of the grace that has no name speaking with than words. A set-piece is written so long ago, and far away on a nest – but just for her. For only her – the Sparrow of Beijing, who rides a pale fire on the persuasion of Northanger Abbey’s moistened fertile soil. 1 I slip and sprain a limb as if by a whirlpool constrained by a tent.
The second draft, as true now as it ever was then - a little bit louder, and a little bit worse: whip-o-will in natural white with infrared trim and all is lost in the maroon bleeding intentions – to be mended not at all by premonitions suffered beforehand in a fit of orange-bleary yellow drunkenness (caused by, of all things, pinot noir infused chardonnay grappa by a master sommelier) and then slept through in a fit of green colorless blue ideas; to guide them to defeat; succor to mind in purple haze - one's old tales often told, though dressed to the nines – but half-forgotten in the retelling to your mother ((and other strangers) met in full view of the edifice in which they occurred) and faded to a blackness that has no other name because it is small-minded, because you are gone - and forgotten - by the one who truly loved you as a maid - but did not know it until you left by walking numbly very far away, sullen heel to silted toe in stockings to crouch – court dismissed, though the globe spins proudly on to turn.
I am I towards I, in holding and grasping your face.
-
The stream was darker than the sun
as it ravaged up from a mushroom base
and then trailed a tirade tale
to that neither place that is above the ground
and beneath the sky.
Florid flowered its face to break the whirling bird,
that laden with a hundred half broke eggs
and there exploded into light.
There is nothingness for the first fortunate few.
The rest are tinder to the fire that is child of the flame,
in stages billowing out in air's compression.
Oil dank and soot cascade the air,
and there reigns the kingdom of noise.
Welcome war,
and your grimaces are written on the churning of the products of imperfect combustion.
The onlookers see the motion stop, Only available in a and a sling
and then restart with renewed vigor,
hours hang at the moment between the time where time halts,
and when it rains down.
Half a hundred mothers have their fiercest fear etched on that day,
a dozen more have sons be badged as heroes of the resistance.
Its arc is the arc of empires,
driven by explosion,
and weighted by gravity.
Hello. Entertain us.2
It is dusk. It is dawn.
It is nothing, like the sun.3
6
On this day, 30 years on, when we remember those vanished years, in sorrow4 where The Accident has a name, except in Tiananmen Square in the region known as Beijing.5 The irony and disappointment of men unintentionally contained in this past-date clock went deeper than any language than any tears or laughter or interjection. My work is almost done in the dirt,6with the plot almost over in sequence, and yet the story has just begun to gnaw. The Accident, the Accident, when would it leave her? Leave her for the hierarchy of hell suffering.
Time present and time past to suffer.7 Don't send no private investigator to find me please 'Less he speaks Chinese and can dance like Astaire overseas.8 It is the least you ably can do.
What does one do after one has written the novel of an age? Homer did not exist, Virgil wrote verse, and Dante knew that Comedìa was the masterpiece and died, an option which David Foster Wallace would hurry along by suicide. Danielewski wrote a novel about writing novels in quadruplicate. Pynchon crafted finally tuned trivia with a particular flair. The problem of course is there is so much learning to write everything that occurs in an age.
Only James Joyce proceeded to top himself only to have most people not understand what he was saying. Perhaps the best response was to allow the player's piano to wheeze to a stop.
And we drown in cancer.9 It is white like snow. Foolish of me, I know. Your disapproval.
[And in the margins her pen made a note: “While Marx was a great man of short height, in that he saw the future (though it must be seen that his solution that his solution was wrong.) One of his friendly and funniest remarks was that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Marx was speaking of Napoleon I and III, but I think he would say the same thing about Stalin and Xi. They were both the mediocrities of the Revolution. Kill or be killed. It is too bad that I have none to say this to.”]
And all upon the cloudy sky, it is indistinct as of the dust and obscure. The way Jasper crumbles to hinder sight and hides the face. In distress and shady. Alas.
1 Jane Austen
2 Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
3 Shakespeare, Sonnet 130, L 1
4 Wong Kar-wai, 花樣年華 Closing
5 As note before, in a footnote.
6 Hiroshi Sugimoto as quoted in another context in The Shadow of a Vampire
7 First part TS Eliot, “The Four Quartets”, L 1
8 Penn, Michael, “No Myth”
9 TS Eliot, “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”, L. 131