Memory begins where everything else ends, though there were moments that will last forever, stronger even in the dim vestibules of fading recollection. Standing under the last, impasto sky, a terrible hypoxic blue, as if the gods themselves have been strangled by their own chains; crows screaming like newborns, they rise, releasing the secret of love’s inception, from the toxic fumes of extinguished desire, dancing against the whitewashed horizon, until they completely disappear into clouds, haphazardly smeared as a child’s finger painting.
It had to be the brightest day of summer when you saw the last light, blinding as the first. But with this blindness comes the vision that is impossible to depict with even the rarest and most resplendent pigments. Long after the paint is dried and crumbles from the canvas like scabs from forgotten wounds, these secret passages, these paths in the wheat, worn down by the weight of a thousand other skies, and seared into the eternal landscape of immeasurable other lives, will never fade orburn . The path will always be there. It has no beginning, and no end.
She approaches slowly. It has been a long time since he has seen a woman this close up, and never a woman this beautiful. As she walks by her long shadow cools his face.
I swear she had arms once, and hands that were beautiful and soft as she ran them through her auburn hair that shined in the sun like the bronze shield of a warrior, as he stands against the endless legions of the hills to the north.
She lay in the shadow of a laurel grove, says the Sculptor, about his Venus. I remember her fingertips as they pulled the wind from a lyre, and made the darkness into music.
She lay in the shadow of a laurel grove, says the Sculptor, about his Venus. I remember her fingertips as they pulled the wind from a lyre, and made the darkness into music.
The early moon rose above the olive trees and floated there, briefly, surrounded by summer stars that glowed like the pale faces of children, bemused by the rustling, metallic leaves that shimmered in the light as if signaling someone, or something across the rocky landscape.
Even stone can feel like flesh, if stone is all there is, if it is all you have known and loved so it is no longer ridged and cold, but warm as skin against your own skin.
A goatherd, his face tanned by years of wandering around these hills beneath the relentless sun, catches sight of her in the distance. He waits, bent over milking a she-goat with his crooked fingers, that are twisted and arthritic from years of grasping at this life that is impossible to catch hold of.
A goatherd, his face tanned by years of wandering around these hills beneath the relentless sun, catches sight of her in the distance. He waits, bent over milking a she-goat with his crooked fingers, that are twisted and arthritic from years of grasping at this life that is impossible to catch hold of.
From here, if you look across the plain you can see Dodona, he says, where the priests read the shimmering leaves of wind-shaken oaks in the valley of thunder.
This is how he remembered her last years. The windows always open, even in winter. The high, coffered ceilings added an operatic quality to her normally soft voice, and though most of the time meaningless, her words were like lyrics to songs only she could hear. The way she drew pictures of herself in charcoal and hid them in drawers throughout the sunlit rooms, sometimes not finding them for years; and then shaking off the black dust like lost shadows as she fell apart piece by piece, her small hands always stained, pale and delicate as the dogwood petals that had whitened the trees overnight like summer snow.
This is how he remembered her last years. The windows always open, even in winter. The high, coffered ceilings added an operatic quality to her normally soft voice, and though most of the time meaningless, her words were like lyrics to songs only she could hear. The way she drew pictures of herself in charcoal and hid them in drawers throughout the sunlit rooms, sometimes not finding them for years; and then shaking off the black dust like lost shadows as she fell apart piece by piece, her small hands always stained, pale and delicate as the dogwood petals that had whitened the trees overnight like summer snow.
An endless wall of faces like masques; the terrible arms and torsos of dismantled mannequins like pale, dismembered bodies glowing in the moonlight; beautiful, all of them, their murderous eyes, medusa-like. A mistress who is now no more than another figure in oil, a grotesque study of the lapsed virtues of the well-to-do. A lonely baronesses, whose true desire is revealed in the faint brushstrokes that become her eyes, thin and fleeting as birds driven mad in the gray distance of a storm ridden seascape. The elegant shape beneath the dress, beneath the skin; she wanted him to paint her from within.
He sketched her face while she lay on her deathbed.
Not two days later, he succumbed to the same death, strangled by his own lungs as if he had been washed out to sea, drowning in the colors he so loved.
The last metronomic sounds were not footsteps, but sounded more like someone dancing. Another life going on behind the scenes, just inside the walls.
Another past, haunted by other apparitions, irrevocable oaths, orisons for the not yet living.
The supplicants screaming, scratching like rats to be released.
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