They tell each other stories, lies composed as dreams and always in the colors of dreams: rust, chrome yellow, coral, chemical green. Of the dying figures, loosely assembled, by a riverbank. The gatehouse. A journey by train through beautiful countryside, indescribable countryside. I was there cut in half, only to survive. A young dancer, standing at the third-floor window. Cobalt blue, argentine, bone white. What we called that hour in those days. He means to say that on that same hill Goethe and Eckermann would sometimes walk. "Always the old story, always the old bed of the sea!" He means to say, The music of moths, the small lamps. She stares from the window on the third floor, toward the square below. He says, These are yellow-hammers and sparrows, but there are no larks. Come Whitsuntide, the mockingbird and the yellow thrush will arrive. Here at the heart, a small pond, stagnant in the shadow of smoke. The late flowers. |
© 1996 from Four Kitaj Studies