Chapter 6 The child rode until noon and he passed rocks and ditches and trees and an Indian boy in tattered boots with soot-black eyes who had come from the camp in the hills of Mexico where the last remainder of his tribe dwelt like phantom folk of the sovereignty they once were, everyone there still as they had once been and not some other way and so perfect in the world as if their advice were requested in the making of it. This Indian boy looked as if himself reincarnated over and again so that all the choices and events of his life were vastly weary. He looked as though he had been sitting there and the rocks and the trees had come up around him. Above all he looked to be swollen with a great sorrow. As if he contained knowledge of some tremendous loss that no one would ever know. Some complete misfortune of how it was but will forever be. His tribe said to aspire to be all that you will ever be in the world, and all that the world would ever be to you. And allow always that men’s destinies are given, and claim your destiny in the very stone of the earth and in it claim responsibility. The world could only be known as it existed in the hearts of men. For although the world seemed to be a place which contained men it was in truth a place contained within them. One would always long for the world, even as the world would long for them, for they were one. *** The child stepped across the stone of the desert holding the saddle at his side. The horse had died. The child came to a town and sat down beside a shack in the hour of the sun’s declination and he saw an old vase made from clay and then some unknown hour he saw some other kind of figure of some other kind of clay. The figure stood and set off against the pastoral land against the paper skyline. The child slept. Then the sun rose, the same one. The child was parched and his skin heavily sun burned. The town stood in a state worse than dilapidation and the population wondered about in the streets or stared idly from windows. The impoverished in the dusty street hunched down in agony like God’s chosen anemic. None in that town went into the church anymore. Their faith had been strong. It was all they had had. What else could they give up? Some homeless lay beneath the ruin of the vault of the church, whether it prove sanctuary or sepulture. To the south of the village lay an old graveyard, those within the earth had slept through their clothes, slept through their bodies, were not bones nor dust, were as the unborn, what is left of them? Dream or memory or stone. The clouds migrated north and the sky turned red, as if the sun bled. Far away lightning arced over the lands of Mexico. Thunder and rebellion in the sky, the ghosts of beasts. Elijah is coming. The clouds that prophesied the storm were like a dream of the world to come, the world to pass. The kid stood to stare out to the plain. Almost all quiet. The faint whir of wind past the rock. Beyond the mountains the footprints of dragons. The mountains silhouetted in the setting sun. That God dwells in the absence of sound Who has scorched the earth with salt and embers. *** The child walked through a valley. His clothes were scraggily. First he left the roads, then the trails. He could hear the long wild soar of wind high in the field blowing down the eaves of the world. Rain fell, leaves fell. Vast high country. The seasons had gone before. He strode on and there was nothing but the cold and the silence. He made that night a fire that burned like an enormous heart. Against the fire his shape moved like an anonymous black ballet. That dawn the ascension of the sun shown on the crown of his head in a fleeting sanctity.
Posted on: Sat, 29 Jun 2013 09:27:59 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015