A red. Through cramped passages, through the old town and the new town, through brick and cement and interjections, city speak: there is a labyrinth, a music, the red follows. Though at times seemingly crushed, beheaded, disembodied, entombed, the glowing ember unfolds from the blade of the city’s slippery breathless compression.
For a while respectful of lineaments of concrete and glass and new structures, now the ruins none see deep beneath, or down to vague potencies in the arrangement of stones we’re kicking even now: the red alternates through this and then that in a passage true to another city. Two cities that meet in passages from one to another, red itself records.
Dear Atlanteans. The red is a red wispy beard set off on a smooth white face, or at times a red bird, or a beach towel, or worse. The red is met in passages around which crowds of consonants are crushed, pressurized in great masses, they grow hot and into mineral walls; cool and airy passages implicate in the scheme of things. The tendency of artifice melted down and recast in the lightning flash of the diamond intention.
In the cramped city something edges forward, a glimpse, ye spectador, of red from the back of a taxi. It lifts a spoon of soup to the personal chin and blows whistling lightly over. Soup and thick white bread.
A sense around the corner, where it’s been, or will be. How could I know that? My own sense of person, my metaphysics is the distance between myself and this many-faceted conspirator. Red plot of uncanny presences, filial or foundational, or any flimsy plastic conch in which to hear the absence of myself and the purity in which it waits, and sows the seeds of that plant that is Waiting.
***
He was gone by the time I paid the cabby and walked back. He glided through the leaves. Leaves and concrete, stone, sand, water, aggregate, cement. Abstract forms that dream in their old patterns still, and pretend to be our own. He glided through the leaves of one forest into another. In that forest there is a clear track, and in its weathers and stochastic growths the red birds pleasure their individual need.
“The words strike us in the cities of the mind’s doing.”
Say something red.
***
A red comes to suggest a cyclicity. A forever busy watching us return. Evidence this painting. The evident knowledge of copy artists, trained to paint clothes, or hands, or heads; but not the hand or head, only a look alike, in which false head is a foreign forest, ourselves put there. Evidence. A red glow strikes out across the face’s portentous features, that strike a reverberant tone, sometimes fatal, in the spectador’s avid bell.
***
The man with red hair, like in Arthur Machen’s story, is a charlatan and a murderer. I’ve tracked him through a string of murders in this beautiful ancient town upon town in order to guess his master. Homoousion.
Contorted hedgerows. Crowds of citizens brush along a narrow thoroughfare, with the cantus whose individual wave lengths harmonize in a forgiveness, working at the steely brittle sun, that in synchronicity gives way, differences give way into the true harmonic of the architecture. This is a great detective story. The city sings its own destruction. The insanity of crime discovers the founder’s vibratory field; as if it were a mouth within this mouth. In a flash of coincidence, something red is glimpsed, and a shout is heard. Who is talking?
***
We return to the scene. There is a necessity that calculates all coincidence of angles, of perspective from the center and the circumference, to open up commas within the twist and turn of streets and corners and abutments.
After his lunch in the café he walked across town, through the park, with a rest on the fountain, slowing and speeding as suggested by the moment’s charge, to the measure of a music. He was as calculating as the sea.
Measure, that is, to mete-out, a treatment, the music’s rhythmic pattern. The red tide angel moon pulls away to mete out to the music a red treatment from my eclipse. Rubedo. Red Mercury. On my desk a red squirt gun. We return to a scene.
***
She reads some sense into me. An opening, to her credit, her glory, my absence be a memorial to her, where she cleaned me up, and to either side is a rubble, and yet apposite is an integration. Love is to live in two worlds (at least) at once. (The first number.) A passage. Red bridge. Durations. Another sentence enters the mind. Now say this. Words are dying to say, slip from the mind into the lies of this discourse. Another bird comes with new instructions, a vocabulary the durations endure.
A red glow comes and goes as I read. I follow these dubious assertions and cramped abutments, apartment buildings, angles angels into sudden fullness of a place remembered. The red car that slept outside my window one year, wrapped in black tarpaulin. The kind you see when you lie down on the warm asphalt at night, listening silently to its radio.
The detective is a ruse for such reflections as hunger towards the mirror, to induce the presence of the music by empathy, or contagion. Cantus. To sing awake the spheres.
Reductions, self-references, illuminate the bridge to forgiveness. A light to show the night. You are late, but they’ll forgive you.
Your red bead opens the circle in which it appears as both center and circumference, and the snags of the city are lost as a thousand little faces rush toward the light.
***
The real is not reasonable, and permeates this mushy citadel of light, building manqué that invites a perfection. Transmitters crumble at an imparting touch, dying like bees, or close themselves off in a rush of cold air. Martians can be seen through walls, or in openings of sudden sight, where they vie for control of the sun’s setting.
The durations endure.
