no hour

And then there were

Nights

Vacuum clad

The image, and the image

Portraiture moulders. The pose now a posture a whole way an arrangement of fingers and elbows torsos and arms. An architecture as armor, amour and the life between bodies, eyes and their mouths.

Every image a grieving for what has been lost but also forgotten: this house, this street, these stumps in the cement.

Grieving, like satire, is impossible, because the thing that has gone missing was never quite here.

Sun-drenched and dust, no sand on this beach. Bouquets of greenglass and needles for stars. .

“How many times already, how very plausibly even, has Europe in the face of the Orient, of the arable chaos of every great religion–become a circumscribed peninsula whose destiny remains to seek contacts in order not to grow cold in its smallness and purely intellectual attitude, its religion anemia. Nevertheless, to the Greek-European arrogance of complacently normal eras, the world, the history of the Orient–which certainly once formed a whole, and which in Isfahan possessed a center as it were, a medieval Olympia to which Tangiers, Tunis, Cairo, Istanbul, Baghdad, Delhi, indeed even Peking sent representatives–has tended not to become known even in outline.”

Fourteen, thirty-two