From "Excavations" Part I, Book III: "Vacated Thrones"

Abstract

105. The photograph He lies under coarse weave on hard earth, both hands on top of his head, saying in a language of angles, I want to live. But have come gradually to know that wanting is a distant signal, a far light or soulpoint in the polite plains. So I learn to do without a life as I learned to do without a meal, and the Big Boss can have it all now. I pay outright, I settle the running total. And smile slightly at the descending hand with the vital pack as if I needed assurance at this stage. This is total heat-loss Mr. Jim. I don't welcome it, but I hope for something to be saved, at least this bit at the top that I shield with my elbowbone, and remember my part, loke down upon this londe here above the eyes up to the crown that bit there, remembers love and can't be misread. This notice was worldly, and should survive. 112. (Rothko: works on paper 1944-1969) Ganesa dances, bearing the head, the head that wobbles and sways and impedes the thought (of the dance) and the sense (of the world) the gross lost head. Dances parameters of science and night. The chalk swirls on the dance floor and spreads to the edge like a script of urgent repair. There in the page held out from the page, and the distance that clads proximity, for it is time to go home. Quietly under the hospital walls to the top of the town. To see the layered music twining into the far fields, and the icing on the multitudes. My Dearest friend the surface is untouched, the surface is clean and intimate and bears the heraldry of love as on a circular shield. OGS unbroken: no pits, graves, holes. All burials placed on it. Entire and clear, salmon mounting the stream under the tissue of war. Blown in the wind, the dust sweeps forwards and back on the piazza through the long night, moon like a dandelion, red wing beating on diamonds and rice, hard cough in the vast gap: the earth plate is steady on its shifting bass. the body of a young child [head to S facing W] with the cremated ashes of an adult arranged in an arc close to the child's back and partly surrounding it. the body of a young woman [ENE-- ,SSE], her face in contact with the child's head, L hand on breast, R hand extended forward from the hip and holding the head of another, younger child. The lower jaw of a young person behind her back. Whole tensed membrane, completely opaque, verbally replete and resonant as reason. Must it then fade and thin? Along the motorway at night with/without you beside me burnt father arched at my back, (my) child hovering at (my) brow the extremities of (her) limbs into the future, above the wheel. The road rides a causeway on the last miles to the city, yellow glows at occasions in the fields, outlying factories guarded by light and convening before us to the slight horizontal strip that means (hope/ despair/ immersion in focus) that means, and passes at once into impossibility. As delight scatters in scalar glist, their helms in the sun massed flexible laminae, really, the reason. I don't know, but the pressure bent to the surface of event and held, in the hand thrust forward from the hip, strikes the diurnal orison until a certainty is recognised. And mounts in clear streams under sweeping ash and clouds of carpet dust towards the breeding ground, the round terminal seething with lunch packs and understanding. 137. (Thesis) Where the person vanishes the god appears. There at the fulcrum of the marked space the node that empowers the tone. Bearing love like a train of falling dust and petals vanishes into a point in seeing where the power over distance resides, that commands every duty. Again and again, appears, There, before you, can't you see him? (it, genderless emanation of, an entire life at point I creates an imago at the edge of day when the light is on the turn, appears then, half visible half a contour of the closing foliage at the field's dark side. (Eurydice, Elaine of the cold white hand! …