The Consulting Detective

The Consulting Detective

I’ve got her shoe, but which way is East? If we stick to the facts, he said. The tone grows simpler, more sophisticated, until I can read a book without holding it. I can walk down the hall. Behave like a number, but which one?

His voice is a mirror, and in the mirror is a bridge, I said. We shimmied down his larynx. She stepped back, and the body shook its word with that urge. The paper reads me and the wax cast disappears. Sun pushed out from emptiness she rides. Case closed. She said: Poetry is exorcism.

A kind of road unfolds you to its sturdy agenda. The number of cups the suit of severed hands that grip the rope at the lion’s neck. Count like the gods. Actions remain. A kind of thinking remains, as the unicorn waits in the garden and keeps us tethered. This is the palace the huntsmen mistook for their captivity. But see, she said, they heal the mud with their feet.

There are other images in whose requirements I find my own. Sit on the rock together and watch the field burn. Individuals are aberrations, but you can manage the whole. Stick to species facts. Forehead on the cool stone, basalt sky of Auvergne. Glass is how you touch the light. Every act describes a sphere. Shudder of blue red yellow green, caught to tell the story again. Like any other idler who has dropped into a church.