New Dark Ages

From the Outside

From the Outside Someone lives a much better life. I can hear her inside the extremest note of a violin piece smooth as runners over snow or as the smoke detached from the snow, the only sign of life in the distance where a town should be, and in the town a violin player whose untuned strings make a noise like some richer afterlife. Happiness vends a kind ofgenerosity that keeps its distance and wants nothing beyond the little village and its scraping a few notes together under the smoky, circling winter light indoors. I was thinking that I \vould like to be everybody in succession, dying that way but retaining the memory into each next life. I want to be unhappy as the dissonant wisp of music inside each person, unique to that person. And I want to be sure that everyone whines under the wintry percussion of what I have done, of where I have gone by going so far out of my life for envy's sake. I am the suicide of that Dutch painter. I am the nameless one 34 opening the screen door into the warm pastel of a house in Florida, the slatted shadow of the blinds distinct across the gold-yellow carpet and the famous murder victim in the furrows lovely and nude, the last sacrificial innocent of the 19403. I go disfigured by pathos. I go unconvinced and unmarried by that tuneful scraping of the village fiddler. I was thinking that I would like to be everybody because of the isolation, this living apart in modernity and love's cruel going— bundling her sunny hair into a hat, settling into a little sleigh and leaving me. Someone lives a better life, and she is my sister life, a chill atonality. 35 ...