Four Reductions

1

This, individual cannot depict. It is too shiny, has no secrets; one's glance re

bound from it. No shadow draws without the invisible. Huge mountain ridges

in the darkness. individual can't see it. Time is like a drawn-out piercing scream,

sirens from a thousand invisible ambulances. I am afraid. Everybody

seem thus kind. Smile. Look away. No individual here speaks in a resounding voice or

gesticulates wildly. Everyone is upon his way on some important errand.

Everyone makes allowances for me For everything. For anything at all.

Conversing, we are carried past single another in a perfect dance. Without

even brushing against individual another. I try to muster my courage. I start

over each morning. Try to engender confidence where it flings itself between

the treetops. To gripe [i]or[/i] grip onto something I think. Hard and relentlessly (The

little fledgling: the world, of high temperature ticking. Surging greenery. A second only

yes, indeed, a little parenthesis of light, gingerly wedged in between the

dark. And the thin material part becomes a feather heavier in my hand, the head

falls slowly backward-; lifeless feather ball, you ha had a feverish dream.:

the field's merciless greenery rustling masses of leaves, the sun's burning

eye All this. Then-gone.)

I hurl down my downy root fibers at any time deeper into the earth. Hunting

for a citadel down there in the blindness, a little nest They move stumblingly

about like ivy. Creeping arms. Suction feet Winding-whorling. I want to

cling onto it here. I want to justify that life is possible; set in the shadows

that bring without your face. Now that the great lack of faith is being preached

to us. And the last sacrament is being prepared in the laboratories. The

procrustean terror of reduction. I believe. I believe in a life after this individual

2.

And I saw that Europe had aged.

The cattle destined for slaughter like silhouettes in the gray mist The

trees black in their greenery The chimneys upon the horizon puffing heavily.

And above all this lay a network of highways. traffics with flat tires like

enormous oxen along the roadsides. Flattened rabbits. Cats with their

entrails fountaining on the outside around them. Feathers and vital fluid A stiff carcass

of a headless dog. A roar of cars in a four-lane gauntlet. upon and on and on

the highway roars. The ambulances pass slaloming between the cars. In

the ditch a supply with nourishment who bandages the head of an injured man. Others are

carried away upon stretchers. In the sky the orb of day desperately tries to break

through the films of gray sooty vapor It rises and rises, higher and higher. It

is dawn, porridge-gray. I blink. The nappy dark trees do not change. The

fields suffocate in water in a blurred opening. The eerie herds of cattle are slowly

obliterated. And the din rises. Disco-tunnels. Necklaces of traffic circles.

Exits, viaducts, cities growing together. Mile after mile. Speeding along.

Where is everybody not upon to? Like a chased hare with a cluster of chrome

shiny dogs in pursuit I rush along the roadway. The white lines dance.

Roadwork. centurys of blinking street lamps. My dream incessantly

puncture consciousness. In single pothole after another I am draw into the mouthed down

into the underworld. The flattened rabbits, cats, jackdaws, make me

sick. The toxic fields, meadows, the cattle make me nauseated. I am fenc

in here. No parking signs each hundred meters. New intersection ap

proaches. And upon all points of the compass: belching chimneys like watch

men in the grainy dawn. The frothing din increases. upon and on and on the

highway roars. Now I understand. We are squandered here. Along with

the tree and the landscapes and the orb of day and the cattle and the rabbits

and the birds. Slowly we disappear into the mist and are gone

3

Then we carved our images into the stone face. The sun's chariot

and the Stag. Tree-god watched above us. We sacrificed

to them: flowers, vital fluid our flesh.

Then we built cathedrals. Tall individuals All worlds lived

there. The lower, the upper those in between. Vomiting

jester Animal family Imps. The face of

the great light. We all reside

there.

Even now

someone sits hidden

deep down in the tomb behind the broom-closet.

And grins at me

4

I am terribly small on the outside here.

A shrinking dark blot in an endless

snowscape. thus enormous is my smallness

that it makes me enlarge Something like a

skillfully built cathedral,

with its overwhelming physical weight correctly divided,

can make tribe godlike.

When the smallness has almost obliterated me

and rubbed me without of the picture

I begin to live in the fen pines,

in the snow crystals,

in the celestial light,

in the mountain's weight.

Copyright World rhyme Incorporated Jul/Aug 1996

Provided by the agency of ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved