Beautiful Shirt

Privacy

PRIVACY In the Beloved's eye or less reliable windowframe, see the exaggerated welcome, a willingness to become much smaller if only in a boy's hands, to be pushed forward by little hands into the ceremony and cruel fanfare of a boy's attention. This is the world as I have known it. It has a soft outline and iseasily victimized. It allows too much. It shrinks under even neutral scrutiny and, having been seen once, becomes a toy. I live alone, am thus a child. I can tell you. We enter the tiny village with surprise, having passed through a window or stared too long into loving eyes to credit such unbuilding and pressure,like coming to the real ocean we barely remember to see it broken by red, abrupt divers surfacing. The silent commercial district, the toy trees in pencil ranks, greener as they reach the residential grid and its fewer lights, where am I to stand without betraying it all, without destroying the illusion that makes itlovely? Only begin the stories, deny the dense forward of political cities where Heaven is a private life 2 5 among big people. Begin innocently. I made the table large asI could for the rebuilding of many fates. I put it near the window to retell the invention of small worlds according to a music of no tone. On the enormous table: sheet music of summoning adagios. On the enormous table: the perfervid love of innocence. On the enormous table: the light tools of an occult exchange, father and lover, boyhood and beloved, when it is easy to play God. Hell is a public life among small people. There is a right kind of innocence, a communication of the bodiless at the foil edge of homemade lakes, in the pencil shadow of tiny trees, in the violet lustre of amnesia, private in the midst of giants, pointing to Heaven astoys point to a condom. Only begin the stories, shared with many. In the harmless espionage of today, emptiness is zeal. Only look away to the unpunctuated trainyards between Heaven and Hell, where childhood survives, where leaves cup water, where time is pendant. When I look at anything for a long time, it shrinks down to a toy. An eclipse, my own shadow, darkens the tabletop. In that timeless evening: illuminations, residences, railway lines reaching out 6 3 to cities they have no intention of reaching. Spring arrives in trees it will not abandon, not ever, and when the light returns it chevrons the streets with pencil lines. Emptiness is zeal, and unbelief ventriloquizes liberal nature. And before that? I heard the opening measures of a new adagio. They made me feel that my life was horrible with self-knowledge, sheer size,loneliness. I kept that music a secret, hearing it only in the abandoned middle placesbetween home and work, unending disclosure and revision. When I listened, time pinned itself down like green felt at the corners of a table which is a placid field worthy of the dream of perfect community, America without travel, love without interrogation in the harmless, tiny wattage of the lamps. Everyone lives forever if he keeps his secrets. The unbuilding and pressure of repetition relent as time lies down with the lion and the railway timetables yellow in the toy station from which none departs as none arrives. They have alldisappeared into the middle places. They have all sheltered in the tents of their own shadows, listening to music that promises privacy without end and many faces, nothing to know, no size, much company. Time to forget alllions but the mild lion of the Peaceable Kingdom in the sudden change and consent of a sequestered valley 7 4 where a son isborn and liberal questions asto love's brevity, passion's eclipse, dissolve into quiet rehearsal of the easy hymns of a minorparadise, no longer afraid of Heaven's secrecy, Hell's secrecy and disenfranchisement. There comes a day when you cannot revise your life. It is a beautiful day. There comes a day when the urge to remain mysterious dies into the communication of tenderness, a guarded township of mortalities. It is a good day. Forget the lions. Abstractions that are still true, though weightless, have cleared a table in front of a window, and the construction begins. You could do it tonight if you wanted. If you could become small and...