Altars of the Eye

Half-Morocco

The kind of book one held at first with both hands, whose fragrance rose unique, opening by opening, endpapers feathered in arabesques of invitation, cream-powder pages lying smooth in double arcs to soothe the stroke of finger and of eye, the paper soft as washed and dried a hundred times, typeface long carved by hand, then many hundred years refined. With what assurance lay the whole, cool and solid in the palm, and offering beyond the senses its mutely breathing promise of terra incognita lying close to hand, its journey all to seek.

Library

The air a spiced elusive dust from countless leaves, breathing, elemental words fusing and transfusing to shape an atmosphere of presences sensed everywhere, forming, inchoate, massed; half-known silhouettes, near. Night vision, Shadow wings gather, interleaving. Absolutely still, inflections move, flood, fade; a voice reaches, knowing that it holds, has always held, refusing you, remaking. Self-suspended, one among the countless gold of dreaming phoenix leaves burns within the very altar of the eye sacramental incense, while, ascending from the ash of blood and dust of bone, spires the howl of birth from a tongued and flaming air.