Unheimliche. Deinos. Not at home. The pleasures of these entities cannot be identified.

Nor are the inhabitants of this locality emergent forms, extrinisic to some digital matrix, though certainly light specks suggest the presence of little eyes that might of course be Windows. Wind’s eyes.

Or E.D.:

“And then all windows failed,

And then I could not see to see. ”

And yet it would be my delight simply to mark things seen in the scenes of this “sad tableau”:

A sphinx with the head of a bearded thug and the body of a douchshund, on whose back a windowless factory shadow rises instead of wings.

A hill. Horizon and well. A muddy pond, yet clear enough that reflected figures populate that which sits on its surface and that which mires below.

Above the horizon rustic life toils, hanging kettles and cow carcasses, and the silhouettes of untoward birds, or fragments of birds, slinking around things, or fragments of other things the birds have riven, the indelible shreak of a small hawk that will not integrate with the calls and peeps and chirpings of morning birds, an portentous avian agony streaking across bucolic thrustings towards happiness..

In the apartments below, a shredded leviathan, a running man, a ladder under a dead tree from whose perilous horizontal branch a scaffold dangles.

A bull sacrifice

hands on

a spit,

the proper cuts of the beast not yet submitted to the gods: no smoke goes up, no folding of fat and thigh pieces, no ululation of women with arms upraised as the pitiless bronze does its business. Rather, an ant man

with a cubical head

extracts large chunks of the roasting animal

in defiance of ceremony. Ceremony

nevertheless

is everything.

It is a moment in agonic time

populated by large birds that only fly once

———————————–

Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 24.08.08