New Dark Ages

Heliotrope: Years and Years after the Revolution

Heliotrope: Years and Years after the Revolution The leveling weight of music and weather closes the stores, drives the people underground into cool rooms under ducts and water pipes. There are ways to prove the logic of whatever happens. In a movie, the darkness between each frame proves it. In dreams, waking and lying down into the same dream just where you left it proves there was no accident. But music and weather, this dim life of broken, half-melodies in the ductwork, of heat swaddled in cold air but with the smell of heat still strong, a logic I can prove on my own flesh but cannot feel and cannot tell the woman beside me. A moment of darkness between my hand and the needle-fine mist of her clothing. A moment of waking and then the pull of sleep again where she is ten years younger, in love •with me, and has not closed her eyes once in all that time. But there is no such moment as the air pitches its cold noise into the heat and peasant songs of June 12, a day of clarity. I promised everyone I ever loved wisdom. I know about movies. I know dreams, especially where 1am well loved. But June 12 is cold, an icon with its back turned, ducts and pipes. The stores will never open again. For the rest of our lives we shall make constellations and gods out of the guts of buildings and the stale damp. Noise is music. Half-light is weather. The heart of a perfect woman, the perfect state 30 is a warm logic that does not live long underground. It is like the guitar shape and rainy frontiers of a wife so small in her clothes, so wide-eyed. As I fall asleep, the grassy squares of a peasant song. As I fall asleep, the patient center of a dream gone black. The basements of cities. June 12 so clearly. 3i ...