#136

Let your thoughts slink back to shadows now. Here, in the winter inter which is Stephen. Ard and angled. Posting fences. Posting. One thing leads to others x-ed and o-ed. The more you carry, marry for the more. And another with 'is air fan down like gold. Remember: the obscuring light of snow.

If I will sever see him once again, I will break and brick of what he's left me. Profile it away, profane it. His hands, his ands, his arms and chest. Infer. In suit. In situ. Or in such. For Stephen, let us play him up as proffered. In the halls or at the urinal. A curled reminder for he of little hair. The oil of a snake. Susposes S at least, that day. By the sink, by the mirror. Chat or chit, chit or chat. "Best," he thinks, "if we all do just what we are sold."

#135

Some skyscraper lounge, in the off of time, eight years ago, in situ. Where Stephen sat observing. The stretch of shadows cross the carpet, mottled red. The sun, behind the windows, setting. What, oh what, did Stephen write, confronted by this grandeur? Not a thing did Stephen write that night: not a word, or mark, or figure.

Imagery, and reverie, and Gods and fighting men. Rifkin and Ryan’s Literary Theory. Perloff’s Poet among Painters. Closet, books, a plant or two, chocolate doughnuts on the desk. A coterie of stuffed beasts upon the future poet’s bed. And where, if we could search for it, would we find his writing pen? By the bridge, on the East, the third of Moloch’s hard-edged fingers. On the fourth floor, looking past.

There were, as there are still, thin voices in the white of winter heaters. There were, in men, the bare coherence of bone and muscle. Teachers taut, and minds still hollow. The last frail clutch of fathers, sons. Here we have our hero, not at birth, but prior: one of those bare paths that took him out and back behind the present, and left him, gray-eyed döppleganger to the cause.

#134

What say you, artist, to this long absence? Were the lines and limits drawn too close for you to find your way? It was a late autumn evening, if I remember well. With a moon no larger than the paring of a finger-nail. Tantum ergo Sacramentum. Hands at the door in prayer. You said, History, Magic, Alchemical. And your charges cocked their heads to listen.

The writes of the Father; mirths of the Mother. And the hearth between their stones and sibyls. Detournment and such, you showed them. Spells. Four minutes, thirty-three of robins’ song. “You’re ‘ere, my dear; appear. And tell me what you hear.” In the basement of Bennett Hall. In the hour before dinner and dark. Your poetries in human guise. Sufficient for the nonce, artist? And longer still in rhyme?

For now, there’s only thanks to letter. Your six long months behind you now. In the woods, by the stream, the house of doors has stood in preparation. I have kept it open, ready. And a visitor waits for your attention; a piece of crystal in his satchel that was found where things are still. It’s a piece, artist, belongs to you.

#133

A good thesis, he was always telling them, begins with a question that you cannot answer. But a poem? That's a questions of questions entirely. Light in the spaces between buildings, Greek temples of the city's three train stations. Not efficiency or persuasion, but song. "Wait...So you're telling me," said Mike, "that things have more than one meaning?" What would Square say in response? thinks Stephen. To his students, rocked and buffeted by noise. "And they have more than one you-ning too" perhaps.

No no - think on your letters instead. Brush off blankets from the stiff of white beds. You are letting the dark back in slowly. So let it. There are seasons for what you must do. Believe. All this thinning and pacing at ends is for citizens. What remains yet remains to be seen.

#132

I am on track. Or what you call the line. Stephen in those harder days – what it was he knew at night. There are vistas past, lights on posts. I stop, or I might still, to watch the rain refill the river.

In Blake’s room, Adrian cuts along a square path the photographs he’s taken. A pile of picture-pieces heaped in the center of the table. #27, #156, #322: supplements. Blake’s 1000 stories folded thrice and stamped. Is it tea they drink or coffee as Adrian works? Translucent envelopes and sealing wax in the bag he’s brought (the bag Blake lent him). Lamplight. And Blake with camera rises, the snips of color in Adrian’s hand. From a chair, he snaps a picture, down. A portrait of an artful scholar.

So what say you Adrian, from your place in Van Pelt’s center? All the Modern times, their congregation. Your frame the frame that shines. Oh, I have seen you thin and silvered amongst my books and in my class. I have made your story mine.

The wind. It is a father’s hand. And what am I but wild? Kingly in my folly. Even Evan would laugh. So where are the haunts of muses? Bustle briskly by, they mutter. Bustle briskly by.

#131

Fraenum Linguea. Ah, ah, open for the nonce. And the night wind, and the zephyr stole. Beleaguer. The book is books. What says him, Stephen to the Stevens that surround? You are you, say, now in France. You are young, say, coal and grille. Or the bedroom, say, where Keith did lay, and speak that day of Cory. Square, his real name Simon. And John, my trusting Peter. Je ne crois pas that tongues are cut by crosses. Or so Rebecca’s seen. In vespers, slits: one’s got it, got it good.

And careful, author, that you do not lose with all these tongue-tied phrases what it is you’re after by them. What it is you’re after for.

#130

Poets these and artful dodges. Opening gambits with biographemes. Stephen in his cornered prose admits: the bards have left through doors. Unto. And such and so on. While John in the bibliopile strikes through a diffident note. Line and liens to order in hardback, in triplicate, vellum: thrice. Face out and open. While the bowels of the libraria are scattered and scuttered with roaches. This, thinks Stephen, will be key to my story of Elaine and the fire God.

And so I let him do the thinking. For this, my poet's ear, is swollen still with echoes. Were I these words were woods, say, and Keith were with me there. Or the glorious gate of Sabot, and what the market offers. Footmen with books that line stairwells. And my hand at sixteen, which in prancing curves observed: that it was in the faint wind of a failing September...

Then, and ago, did I see already amongst swans and funerals Cory's form in rough shades? The lines of his face in Keith's writing? This is what will be, when it is, what it was. That younger me in red sweatshirt and arche-page. Runnin' back from the trees with the Sidh behind 'im. A-turm, a-tum. And love: first a rose even older, remember?

#129

What tired musings, whisps of cloud and dark foreshadowing, arise with Stephen on the second day? A sliding mirror door: wardrobe, flesh, and artist. The office windows a palimpsest of rain. Of rain, thinks Stephen, not yet but certain to come. The red-and-green umbrella from the wooden box by the landing's door. Moss-green sweatshirt as he walks, its empty hood not centered but flat across his left shoulder. Rain. In pinpricks. Wind. There, in the west, is a dark cloud grumbling. And with his steely mind and patterned paper and books aplenty in his bag, he enters The Chapterhouse, orders a coffee, milk - decaf - and spreads on one of the back's square tables what we might call - why not? - Stephen's genius.

He writes. Not of the spinning fan's three blades above, nor the dog - a mutt - that licks at crumbs beneath the empty chair that shares his table. Not the man in sandals, hole-y jeans, the Times spread open in his lap. Bespectacled, who reads in rapt attention Tuesday's pre-election news. But Stephen writes. And neither of the gray-eyed woman, dressed in red, a seashell bracelet, her body hunched forward, studying. A children's book on birds: white crane alone in a shipyard; next page, an owl at dusk. She reads, but Stephens writes. And the bearded gaze that comes across, dispatched from the corner's cushioned chair, falls on Stephen unobserved, and finds no place amongst his words. For he writes and does not read, and all his phrases are bare, are ethereal in their transcendence.

Which is, as I try to tell John over tea, the point of Stephen's folly. The mis-taking of his inspiration. For when, I ask him - citing Joyce while Erica, in tickled indifference, steams cauliflower - is one an artist? Amiable, with Anglican ease, his tongue dismantles what mine sets forth. Politics, economy, material production. And Erica, placing tomatoes and green beans on the table before us, tells us, her eybrows contracting, "Do not eat them all." The afternoon is ending, stretching slowly into evening, and my mind goes with it, so that my spars and sallies are suddenly too tender for John to heed. "Transcendence," he says, the battle won, "is fantasy that begins and ends in history." And Erica nods, a broad impish smile, as she takes John's dinner from the stove and gathers her things to leave.

The dark, my bed. Trees. And flowers in vases. Window frames. My bare apartment full. Transcendence. Here, in the movements of my body, in the rush and flow of my blood, there is the presence of another. And along the back and forth of time that surrounds me, there is every moment something outside: the pledge of another's name. Inspiration. Mine. And his. And this is Stephen's error. This is the when of the artist. "Transcendence," I say, rising from John and Erica's tiny kitchen table. "Without it, how can there be love?" They falter, stumble, laugh: incredulous. No such thing, they answer. A social construct. Familial conditioning. And - they concur - a marketing ploy. But I have them, and as the three of us part - John to his dinner, Erica to a restaurant in Chinatown, and I to the gym - I can hear behind their words a silence. An affirmation not ready to be sung - but an affirmation that echoes nonetheless far beyond - and even prior to - the moment of its sounding.