Devil

I. Dream

She asked if I would murder for love, and I brushed her hair
behind her ear and mumbled, half-removed from lucidity,
“Je suis assassiné tous les jours. Je peux rendre cela.”

We were laying on the floor; the only people in the world.
The remnants of the boys and girls that we had ceased to imagine
were heavy with the dew, like leaves or discarded garments.
Through an idle feat of focus we had made that room of ours
into the only room still standing. Elsewhere out there the time-worn
buildings were all as torn as the paper in school hallways on the first
true day of summer. The sun’s chariot lingers on such occasions.

Even if there had been a god attempting espionage for some nefarious,
vague purpose, It would have been paralyzed at the window.
She would have stood like a sorceress and enumerated the crimes
of these last ten thousand years. Her eyes would rivet It helplessly
to the windowpane, and while It desiccated like venison in the wind
on an October afternoon I would spill a glass of icy water.

She was soaring on a swing-set, then she leapt off and she said,
“I think everything about love is a trite fiction in our heads,”
then she breathed just like a hummingbird and in my arms
she was lithe and wild and carnivorous and I thought that
she might tear through my skin with pointed teeth
and so I waited. The architect of hell twisted in the sunset.

Then she disappeared in the death-throes of a train station
and she hovered on the benches with a cigarette
hanging from her perfect mouth or else between two
thin fingers. It is unsure who it is that we were,
but on a hallowed evening we masqueraded
as two hollow metal crutches and we assisted each other
as we limped across limpid suburban streets
with only painted lines to serve as guides.

We dyed our insides brown with whiskey. We made sparks
in the lanterns of the sprawling caverns of the world.
There were alarms in the early morning that were mimics
of the sunrise. We had locked that inevitability with our creator in a box
previously reserved for a woman of clay. She was strumming
a five-stringed guitar and we sang that we were not yet ready for time,
no, not at all prepared for that infinite energy carefully apportioned
into the spoonfuls of applesauce that wipe the sorrow from our lips.

She stood up and I felt aching in my bones. She took her sweater
from the floor and draped three heavy bags over her clothing and
became the colors of the dawn and the damned as the door closed.
I slowly unfold in the sun like a heathen king of antiquity
and wonder why the dryads in these dying trees
do not take the time to warn of catastrophe.

II. Divination

She was a farmer and in her fields were a hundred furrows
filled with corn that stretched higher than the reach of her arm.
That had been one part of her ambition, to have all the whiskey
that she could drink. Any paradise of value does nothing differently
from the mortal coil, save that it unwinds time like a golden wire
to give to the Chosen world enough to fabricate their heavens.
One of her figments of humanity, now long in disuse, had once
advanced the opinion that results were not penultimate;
that magnificence could be achieved by the machinations
produced in past days without expectation for a future.
Promptly she had banished him, and that night sat with a jar
hooked to her index and ring fingers and said to herself, for now
she was the last, “There is nothing free.”

She went walking the next morning. In the heat of the day
the moon still shone brightly somewhere in the East.
She had a group of horses that she no longer rode. Most of them
were in normal colors but a few were in lurid shades of red and blue.
There were dogs running in a meadow that was dotted
with dandelions that were used for food in centuries past but now
sufficed only to preserve themselves perpetually. Like many things
that also had outlived their usefulness, she did not destroy them
although it would have taken a mere snap of finger to thumb
to do so. Instead she kept to her custom and abandoned them
entirely to their own defenses. Although the flowers knew she no longer
cared for them they sacrificed their florets in attempts to brush
against her ankles or to land onto her palms or, oh rapture,
to be ensnared in her hair. She arrived again at her cottage
and came to her door from her stairs of fitted and smoothed boulders.

She took an Otis Redding vinyl record from its case and pierced
the first track with a needle. She took a drink from a clay jar
that she had cast on a wheel before painting upon it two X’s.
She never slept and she played guitar through the nights that she
permitted to occur and, though she remembered her words
as Narcissus remembers his cheekbones,
she never would sing something the same way twice.

III. Dimanche

He was sitting with a curved iron knife that was licking
the bark from a willow tree and through nights
illuminated by the uncountable corpses fastened
at blinding speeds to the void, every hour
like a clock-worked chime the blade would lose its edge
and he would take it as a lover’s lip between his teeth
and make of them a whetstone and the wood’s chips
became sandstone weeping like descending leaves.

His sanguinity raced itself to pool in clefts
left by an epoch of saltation. His carving
pushed an operatic timbre into the orchestra of dusk.
It beat the air in conquest of lust and betrayal.
Generations of men were pared off in crooked lines,
notched in a binary language that no one could read
and so they returned to carbon and nitrogen
and they had never truly been.

For six days he counted sins from the outside in
and peeled two hundred promises as the fragments
of the trunk ran down his arms like the bodies
of the Armenians on their short drop from shipboard
to the sea of the rishi Kaśyap. With a mighty groan,
the elder’s victory became clear and he directed his voice
to distant clouds. “The man to fell the last tree rooted
on Easter’s isle was daydreaming of girls with blue eyes.
He did not even hear the moment when the branches first
laid their sanguinary mouths to the dark dead earth
that had been a loyal nursemaid long before
the mothering and molting of the tallest mountains."

Though it once had strove like Babel, the highest point
of the last dying contrivance now was three feet
from the ground and, holding his breath, he punctured
the pad of his right index finger onto the spire.

The dull rumbling of static came to nothing
and the spirits of the stones turned to silence
from their elegiac strain and a wizened man
with eyes of pure white suddenly took the place
of the corpus of murdered timber. The god laid
propped onto his arm as if he were sitting for Goya.
He spoke in the low tones of a trumpet,
“My oldest friend, how have you been?”

The shade of ephemeral empire sheathed one of his weapons
and gritted his teeth for an instant before replying.
“Alright. All right. al-Right.” They laughed in the slow way
characteristic of men who have known each other too long
to find each other pleasant. The air escaping the man
with Medea’s eyes rattled like the wind passing through
the abandoned cloister of Oransay and with his maraca
he intoned, “You and I, oh ambitious one, are as proud
and useful as embroidery on a funereal shroud. I told you
of your future. Cassandra’s harp I gently plucked while
your hope degenerated into sanctified demise of heat
and now at long last you see that my soothing was not a mere
creation for my comfort. You can taste the blistered ocean,
hear the sound of nothing living, feel the soil that will never
again bear grass crumbling like palms in a furious
seismic oscillation, and every breath is of a conflagration.”

A sliver of ash was squeezed from the tip
of his life’s cigarette and his soul was riddled with splinters:
a bullet of ice, a club of gold,
a briefcase of things that cannot be sold.

The god chuckled, though it pained him,
took a flask of gin from the ether
and pulled juniper into his heart.
“I know that you have lived longer.”
The sage was speaking in the clipped malleable impressions
left by the cadence of horseshoes on a road of graphite
and crude oil. “I have come to abdicate. Fictitious Peter
at my gate sent to you what never should have been.
I had nearly forgotten who you were and this ignorance
is at my carotid like coruscant spurs and everything
is rust and this earth is not enough for us.”

The devil shrugged and stood six feet tall and blinked his eyes.
A god turned into fireflies that did not know to shine goodbyes
to proteins never meant to fold. They beat their wings
into the unbound cold and with nothing gained
and nothing lost their faces turned sharply into the frost.