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The longer that I stare, the blacked-out expanses grow more hard to look into— unlike the United States, unsheathing its gleaming Floridan sword, its rash of yellow citidots. The earth is on fire south of the Great Lakes’ blue pools, grows more black, but not empty, out through standing mid-west corn, block on starry block, swept to the Pacific’s violet edge.
There, shy Australia lies on display. A single lemon necklace, loose from Brisbane to Adelaide. The monumental Asiatic blacks, their spilt drops of gold spattering Europe, where it grows lighter from east to west. The cobra-squirm of the Nile is a slithering focus to a blazing delta.
We are those who show ourselves most clearly when we sleep. We become like children, sprawled, unconscious and equal to the next lamplight. The world in numerable parts. Our dreams, a ferocious inequality, as no-one lives in the Icelandic inky black, the soot-back of Canada, the Arctic, ebony of Antarctica, the emptied Amazon basin, the Russian steppes, Himalayan pitch.
Whatever life goes on there, it keeps such a quiet light. A few red sores of flaming oil-fields. The indigo of burning forest in the bulb of Brazil. And across central Africa, fat Africa is the body of dark I hear cry out the kind of catastrophe it will take to revive the night’s wrap. Let darkness fall as it now appears: beneath the close of twelve billion lids, the monster is asleep and dreams of stars.
Drop-jawed and pink-tongued with what appears pleasure, though it’s unlikely. Long drawn love of a shell’s chill desire. Scaly touch. His gasping breath and her earthbound silence.
What if every tide was drawn drily barking one to another? Claws, tendrils in cold oceans get a purchase on pleasures lying buried in prehistory. What if two stones can be tender?
So little evidence left of hours in which the sun set and turned up the volume on the sienna of the hillside, as we sat in the garden and saw unleashed, the deeper blues of sky and strewn the white of stars that rose to us irreversibly, while we too lit candles and settled about the tabletop. We ate, drank and watched, in the absence of gods, benign, as the world shrugged and sank away on all sides, pared to the flick of a bat’s black glove in the eaves. Then the whole earth had shrunk to the table and we, some immured museum, marble séance, our great feet sunk in darkness and grass, accorded the simplicity of head and torso alone, our poorly lit busts beside human remains of a meal: a circuit of illumination that later unwound, paraded to the back door, a triumph of unsteady light, of iron and plate and glass, the little shadows we know.
I go to Spar and Mr Adams who drops his small hands beneath the counter where it's already wrapped in white tissue paper. Crisp, soft and undisturbed, I carry it close to my chest, the length of my forearm, palm flat to one end. It’s like something asleep. It seems crisper today— the pressure of my fingers telling the birth-smell of heat, yeast, risen air. The confining tin held sides to softness and the crusty burst, split down the length, sharp-edged and breakable, caramelly across my tongue. And each bite a glimpse— one leading to the next till I'm nuzzling in, jaggedness on my cheeks being bitten, biting deep through crust to white flesh as if there were a heart unconsumed somewhere I might lay my hands on bring back to the house.
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