XVII. L'hiver à l'ombre [la tête du défunt repose sur un oreiller bien conservé fait de feuilles]
It has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. At this or that twist of it I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than I care to probe.
—[CENSORED] (1955)
November 30, 1968
Except that it won’t kill you. Anything’s better than anxiety, right? When it comes, the chest tightens, and there’s a familiar musty smell in the thing that used to be called the soul and is now called nothing at all. And the lack of hope in hope. Accepting things without entirely resigning yourself. Not confessing to yourself because there’s nothing more to confess. Or there is and you can’t because the words won’t come. Not being what you really are and not knowing what you really are, only that you are not being. Then comes the helplessness of being alive. I’m talking about the anxiety itself, the malaise. Because some anxiety is inevitable: whatever is alive—precisely because it is alive—contracts.
—Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson’s 2022 translation of Clarice Lispector’s Todas as Crônicas (2018)
Dolores: Into the bowels of melted lead ceiling of the cathedral (15 April 2019), so tell the 63 minutes of the perhaps, intentionally-set conflagration, and the sickening spectacle chyroned
With estimates from the twelfth century’s 52 acres of trees felled for the roof beams—To the basement where fragments of the rood appear to have been carefully interred for Eugène Viollet-le-Duc's spire (18 August 1859) with crown thorns (1860) vouchsafed into a verdigris rooster—
With plans to reenter this feat of architecture; not for the permission to be redeemed, this tangle of thorns, entrelacs d'épines I often say under my breath, the route of a garden thorn's pedestals and columns of platelets meeting at the wound bed, at the basis where the probed fourteenth-century canon’s lead coffin reveals the occupant's head resting on a bed of leaves—Instead of starting with Dom Pedro’s aquamarine
Unlike chromium-stained emerald, with trace impurities of ferric (3+) and ferrous (2+) iron, the latter imparting amber-tinged adulterant—While transparent beryl, ein Beryll, yields German eyeglasses, die Brille, if the turbid blues are heat-treated by unscrupulous jewelers to simulate sapphires, the Maxixe-type (1914) beryl azure thwarts admirers to fade en plein air, except for the fantasy cut of the Smithsonian specimen (2012) so solidly captures all the cinders and lights into seawater-colored crystals
Of Minas Gerais—Thus we submit to this pattern of forever bent-back branches; we are the least able to leap to their defense on their plates, of the scallop's frilled colonnade of two-hundred guanine-based eyespots alighting at least twelve opsins embedded in proximal and distal retinal displays (2018)—Remark then on increasingly infrequent written application while once again they come to the fore, the mineralogical scaffolds and modes of seeing into the dark vaults of the mind, and that particularly Brazilian turn of xodó
Of darling; upon first hearing, inseparable from exodós, catches up to the literal meaning, there isn’t one—That seemed the most true in tent-making vagrancy recollected in Sterne's Sentimental Journey (1768), which recalls a captive starling in the Bastille, adding the three years Mozart kept a starling (1784), the referential texts risible to the uninitiated—How then that structural color and refractive scales of your Common Blue (Polyommatus icarus) with nano-scale lamellae; dead but exhaling under their pins awaiting their curtain of irises except for Rilke's panther tensing behind its bars of the Ménagerie of the Jardin des Plantes (1903), cages
HH: Appropriated from Versailles (1794)—Let it be said that you handed me that clipping of the Parisian ape, whose first charcoaled sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage—
That I perhaps lack the fortitude to read An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures (1968), what then of your notes on the back of the tear-away calendar days, of the cosmic streaks that substituted for understanding (33), as I was, too, apprenticed all this time to your hermetic moments, instead of the chyron
Of kidnapper—Two fugitives on silk-smooth road in the States or guided to ancient parapets; Saul Bellow’s borrowing from Paul Valéry trouve avant de chercher (1975), you have this experience retaining a rare moment of equilibrium in the specificity with which you read, mesophyll as word introduced by Ulisses, as that faded chlorophyll-laden mesophyll of the sinuate white oak leaves pulled from your bag, meaning to show-and-tell from last autumn's palisade parenchyma in larger, thinner, and less lobed shade specimens versus the smaller, thicker, and deeply lobed, and antioxidant saturated to prevent sunscald, leaves of the exposed upper canopy—Found before searching, the Italian-Brazilian contemporary, Marly de Oliveira’s A Suave Pantera, one of whose four editions (1962-1968) found its way to the Jornal do Brasil column (6 March 1971), lines as if interlocutor inscribed, Há esmeraldas de silêncio / nos seus olhares acesos (lines 67-8), There are emeralds of silence / in their burning eyes—Petrarch’s gioia and the Portuguese jóia for jewel to blissfully coalesce, your xodó
No longer suffers an imbalance between supply and demand of angina with collaterals, and then communicated through an economy of language—One of your choice topics of heartbroken syndrome, Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, whether a condition of insufficient vasodilatory nitric oxide or insensitive endothelium wincing from catecholamines resulting in the acute dilatation of the left ventricle as an octopus fishing pot—Turning to me, you once said that octopus is superior to us, with its retinal cables and plugs entering behind the photoreceptive trampoline, and no blind spots—Having grown overdetermined with age, there is that pause with feigned distraction of the headlines that GPT-4 in charge of payroll and actuarial calculations for dependent risks—The Framingham cohort (1948), now in its third generation, whose longitudinal findings stratify risk, nevertheless thought of while freezing before a meal to contemplate sub-type A-antigen blood group, clotting propensity is not a direct correlate for heart disease—Building the incandescent crystal
Of the night until the boardwalk where the black spots on the comb of the free-range rooster’s
Histomoniasis treated in the first and third worlds with arsenic nitarsone, a not insubstantial input into the food supply—How society is a superorganized poisoning; with the only available remedies but to flee from it—Reminds of Leontief (1973) input-output theory of energy, labor, commodities and their residual pollution; undergirded by human capital’s popularized plainchant of largely female constituencies for allegedly little more than a plumbing problem with little applications for either the underage customer or the statutory partner, and end-result of the systematic disappearance of communities they claim to serve—How you routinely upset the darlings to point to the Ermen and Engels investment in the Salford weaving mills, the latter reflects on the conditions there (1844), supports his protégé, and with decades-long proceeds, pursues foxhunting—That ghastly clip of ceramic takotsubo beguiling octopus on the seafloor, until processing en masse by the Japanese fishermen, the most intelligent cephalopod with arrays of chromatophores and Moore’s dots of cyclamen-red and maroon (1924) deceived by what is sought as refuge—Heard secondhand, but reproduced faithfully, the namesake syndrome evolves with initially negative deflection, the Q wave suggesting transient wall motion abnormality into a balloon, which forges a path first from the platform chicken cardiac mesoderm developing from the first streak of heart field under the bespied eggshell; no matter, the mylar and vinyl pieces deposited there, too, in the marine-casualty longshore drift of Block Beach to Ipanema—United into a principality after Napoleon (1794), Idar-Oberstein is a region that boasts pocket watch manufacture and alpine pistes, where Munsteiner incised rays of the Ondas Maritimas aquamarine
Dolores: Reported by those in the know, the millions-diminution of the rough most suited to the oblong cut of snowmelt overflow; our adopted touchstone, with its shavings the sewers ran rich for weeks—While the source of the Fabergé aquamarines
Belying the Azov and the skaters’s eggs, the color of Courbet’s uncharacteristically becalmed ebb tide (1869) is that Siberian mine enlarged by Catherine the Great— The Empress, who made her opinions known to the Prussians, and beyond, in letters dispatched by public post; like those instructions to the executioner (January 1775) of a mercy of beheading before the proscribed Russian quarter-draw of a rebellious Cossack commemorated by his survey of Kazan in flames (13-14 July 1774) from promontory of a solitary oak tree sawn and reseeded again in Meadow Mari at the pilgrimage site—After this barbarous turn, the Peter III impersonator; and what is the physiognomy of imperialism than this undergirding of genetics, Pugachev is lead to Moscow in a cage
Still, this signpost bears some sting of this act; the Empress never again contemplates in her plan of modernization affranchising the serfs—Her attention turns to the Orlov diamond from Golconda, the mine which boasts another Winston investment besides the Hope (1949), the nine-faceted celeste through invernal cloud-gap, the Idol’s Eye (1946)—Besides the elucidated atom-level lattice substitutions, these treacheries of subjectivity, yet what are we still left with, Weber’s specialists without spirit, voluptuaries without heart (1904)—Pleasing to know that Nordenskjold's Ural alexandrines (1830) seemingly redeposited in Minas Gerais (1987); now, with the Safiya and Vespertine designations for this emerald day-lit transformation to incandescent-kindled ruby—The goings-on stems to the margins concentrate in the aptly named, idioplasts, which are purpose-built armories, or specialized vacuoles, replete with tannins, resins and gums whose detection of which is limited by only the memory's cataloged aromas, therein the electron scan finds formation of calcium oxalate crystals
The signs and wonders of plant signaling; particularly, their knives-out trichome defenses set against herbivores, and further abroad, for us, a diet of what was once an unintelligible hash of data—Chyroned
Subject heading, hash-tagged for the Divine agents Gavriel, like gever, rooster
Specifically, a black rooster disperses the Light, yet is heard at midnight by a select few, and then by all, only by the dying—Overtly simple story about a grandmother hearing the crow retold by the sage of Ukraine to die in a gulag (1950, 1952), Kahanovich's writings some of which are secreted in Chagall's picture frames, and xodó
HH: Another name, the Unknown One, Der Nister, whose writing remains while the details scatter as frass from the eclosed caterpillar into chrysalis, and for you, the dismaying future signifies feeding inputs, your temporary exile always from something and the regained last resort, xodó
The tetrachromatic jungle chicken with nictitating eyes never develops night vision, evolving from saurian predators with no need to hole up as small mammals—Hypergraphic Dostoevsky; and Van Gogh in his letters, particularly the one dated 28 September 1888—The sky is aquamarine
Above the gas outlet and yellow blocks of Arles of the constellation Ursa Major over the Rhône, whose minor counterpart, the all-important Polestar, cannot be seen from the Southern hemisphere, yet with Brazil’s flag well-represented in the modern day in 27 constellations, with Rio de Janiero, São Paulo, Bahia, and Minas Gerais each forming one of arm of the Southern Cross—Precedes a portrait of internist Félix Rey (1889), who, guided by a colleague, Aussoleil, typed the maker with a mixed pattern of epilepsy, and the picture mends a side in a chicken coop until its final place in the Pushkin Museum (1948)—Alexander II, who liberated the serfs (1861), is mortally wounded stepping out of his bulletproof carriage in St. Petersburg by shrapnel, by the People’s Will (1 March 1881); this reformed oprichniki having missed the bomb-throwers, as they tossed the contents of his St. Petersburg apartment, Dostoevsky was in the throes of pulmonary hemorrhage; whether tubercular in origin or severe left-sided heart failure, a small matter compared to the uprising since the spring fires of the City so-called the Red Rooster (1862)—
So little in evidence, the hoards among the kunzite diadem and the golden twig studded in aquamarine and diamonds among the KGB inventories of
Tobolsk (1917)—
Last photographed in the bank vaults of Kazan (1933), perhaps lost on a derailed train into Irkutsk, the Southern point into Lake Baikal, where a Trans-Siberian car and 1600 gold-bullion-lined cage
Upturned into the deepest freshwater lake fleeing the Red Army; momentarily saved by the Whites, and its cargo ultimately divided by the guards— Upturned into the deepest freshwater lake fleeing the Red Army; momentarily saved by the Whites, with its cargo ultimately divided by the guards—Everal ice melt on the rift lake tent’s is broken by lunar tides and hydrothermals; among the bechurned Siberian sturgeon, where the Dahurian larch drops its needles to fortify against snowdrifted branch-brake, which in the summer becurled with the grey budmoth (Zeiraphera improbana) and common emerald (Hemithea aestivaria), yet the rapid girth of larches in the first centuries thrives to perish in the thin silt of exposed permafrost—So the enclosed microclimates; so the chyroned
Long-term weather sayers restate; if an echo in Icelandic is Bergmál, a language of stones—Perhaps the unreachable human mind remains bedazzled by the Brazilian gift (1953) to the expanding British parure—Benumbed; too, numbered among the bone-idle from scrolling, those who hurl soup against what January produced, Sunflowers (1889)—The outrage against unjust commodities; to think that individual achievement can be pie-sectioned, and what for the society capable of immunoprofiling and immunoscoring inflammation-driven coronary artery disease; not the precepts behind broken, dead seed heads of Anselm Kiefer’s Tournesols (1996)—Such is the complaint with the materialism of Tanaka’s Nantonaku, Kurisutaru, or Somehow, Crystal (1980)
Dolores: The upset of the spiritual passing forecast by the earlier Natsume Soseki's newspaper serial (1914) that became the novel, Kokoro—From the Kanji radical 61 Kokoro unicode (U+5FC3) for the heart, which achieves pseudo-valentine symmetry anteriorly, ex situ, yet the right atrium and right ventricle of the reclining Japanese base stroke mimics the organ in a more naturalistic setting—Tanaka’s student pursues Japan’s upmarket brands, just moving intellectual furniture, a philosophy as a consumerist item auctioned as Zalszupin’s Dinamarquesa chaise (1959) or Banco Onda lounge gracefully planed in jacarandá-da-Bahia known as the commodity Rio rosewood (Dalbergia nigra) retaining a glass-like rap and spider-webbing grain with rose perfume naturalized in the Tijuca National Park replanted by Dom Pedro II (1961)—Insights probed beneath the overburden the astounding beryls of aquamarine and emerald native in their tabular hexagonal crystals
Three axes 120-degrees aside and scantily-colored by elemental substitutions a preponderance from the pegmatite formation in Minas Gerais—Within Kokoro (1914), the young find themselves incapable of such offerings and ordered existence of the passing of the Emperor Meiji and his general, Nogi Maresake and wife, both of whom commit junchi during the funeral procession, and commemorate it with a poem (13 September 1912)—Proust; vacillating between titles of the provocateur by name; his valet, feminized, Albertine disparue versus Le Temps retrouvé (1925); and his publishing decisions altogether ignored by his brother, reverses to a time of those intolerant of the tears which they themselves have provoked (V.416), as the condition under fury, fever, and street drugs unmasks, which is the frequent term in the medical literature, the autosomal dominant sodium channel defect in three subtypes of Brugada syndrome (1992), one of which is the characteristic saddleback T wave in precordial leads (V1-V2)—Nogi, the Count and General at Port Arthur (1914) assigned the nickname Nakito composed of the two Kanji characters mujin signifying “no one” imparted to one destined for an illustrious career the requisite humility, perhaps then to thwart jealousy in the formative stage departing from the particularly Brazilian xodó
Dearest nobody; in Japanese, unmanned, uninhabited, no man’s land, mujinchitai derived from the Mandarin character for wood, mù—Yasajiro Ozu’s granite mù gravestone of nothing is humanistic, and to Western eyes the trireme and four oarsmen cleaving water to signify the filmmaker ferried by Charon at his birthday (12 December 1963); not self-deprecating, circumspect on the Meiji capital renamed Tokyo, and scene of Tokyo Story (1953) adjusts the lens over the smokestacks reprised by Antonioni (1964)—A caminhada Pico da Tijuca with the rock-incised staircase to the promontory offering 360-degree views of Rio the king of Brazil refused in life for its ease, and chyroned
Across views of 117 step ascent that closes after 2 pm, to allow descent before the park closes—Relying on the visitors’s adherence to timeliness, the hiker’s vertigo overcoming, and not as it was imagined of just letting go of the chain rail and precipitous fall into the leaf litter and rotting fruit of the agouti tree—Not the aquamarine
Bracing Icarus in that painting by Bruegel (1560)—Awake, tingling near the print of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s allegory of the apes loosening their cages
Pillaging the Pedlar (1562), with that particularly Flemish brand of coarse humor of the scattered wares of indulgences; perhaps thought to the Bolsheviks of the confiscated Maria Fedorovna’s thirteen-piece, diamond encrusted Nécessaire egg (1889) from Wartski’s ledger (19th June 1952) recording the final London sale to a stranger for £1250—One can surmise the ingenuity of the contents in another Wartski accession, the Fabergé buried clasp and mauve enameled keepsake (1906) with a sterling swan automaton on its aquamarine nest basket now resides in Lausanne in the collection of the estates Sandoz, whose first blockbuster drug was Calcium Sandoz (1922)—The primary electrolyte that synchronizes excitation–contraction coupling of the intercalated desmosomes, fascia adherens, and gap junctions of cardiomyocytes, which in the rooster
HH: Boasts greater efficiency within the slender arrow of its four-chambered heart—Svelte, less capacious ventricles with less friction, while the anatomy is larger in proportion to its body plan than us, like most avians with increased metabolic demands—Beating recorded at 400 bpm with roosters
In the makeshift arena adorned with gaffs improvising another gratuitous act—João Guimarães Rosa’s Ave, Palavra (1970) hailing the Lusitane epics from the backlands of Minas Gerais, where he traveled the rains shadows of sertão, far from the Atlantic forests, with the open-air sewers and naked children, where his ophthalmoscope ascertains the crystalline
Deposits of drusen scattershot of macular retinopathy in most the sunbaked and squinting laborers, with no less than each abode with a flower in the window and a singing canary in a cage
e a saudade: azuis e sal. / Que eu sofra noites florestas / e minha culpa, por al (lines 15-16) or may I suffer forest nights / It's my fault, by the way—You once remarked on the unreported bridge jumpers in periodicals, for fear of encouraging the impulse now taking a confused turn to mass self-sterilization—And beside the waters of Léman in the dolphin perimeter and aquamarine
Largest freshwater lake in Europe; surveyed where the cogwheel train goes from Montreux to Rochers-de-Naye, and in this enlightened air, where the tourists pause before the thistle’s common brimstone (Gonepteryx rhamni) endemic to the place; bitterly, of the Graystar you sought to escape—Did you know of France Antarctique (1567), the colony off the coast of Rio de Janiero, a site which hails impromptu from the hyperspace and from social contagion of the next thing, just one step beyond the censurers—Misconstrued from the caressed details with the present-day view of grooming the tame thirteen opening chapters, summarized under the chyron
One cannot even use the name, the transmitted grace of metamorphosis in the dead leaves of Francis Ponge's D'un papillon (1942) of the combustible sugar from the stem, black cinder of larva, la véritable explosion d'où les ailes symétriques flambèrent tangled in the inflammation from the cage
Of the crouched Brazilian jaguar (1915-18), a literature born adult, and imagined from the partition of a bank and now, from the xodó of Clarice Lispector, who greets the poet Wilson Alvarenga Borges, the Jorge Luis Borges of la zarza ardiente (1964); no relation, transacting business at the counter of the Banco Nacional de Minas Gerais, and his successors you seem to imitate with the finance calculator with the True Value of Money keyed in exercises in stability—Beyond transposition of narratives; not digits, toward some bestial use like the rooster comb hyaluronic acid injected into arthritic joints chyroned as the curative for arthritis, and injected every three months—
Searching for the aquamarine lineaments of the thing itself like the rarefied carbon-14 isotope in the sunflower; and instead, you read,
Xanthopterin is a crystalline substance in the male brimstone’s wings transformed into folate into the iridescent wingspan the complementary wavelength of ultraviolet light—
