The cat, white, with a yellow back, ate a broken little lizard on the roof. Her paw was around the lizards head, and she had eaten half its body - the front. There was one little spot of thick blood on the white plaster patio.

A month later, the lizard's black and shrunken head was still there, boring now, but impossible to remove, eyes long since turned glazed and white now gray and shriveled like dried currants or peppercorns in a rattle. Snow came all at once, and buried it, and when it melted in spring, the head was gone also. We were a little sad to see it gone, and said so, and the cat too seemed to be suffering a loss in its own way, staring at the other roofs rather than at the cars and people below, lying in corners when there were rays of sunlight on the rugs, mewling quietly to itself at all times.

Here was something new. He touched the wall where a painting was done from a stencil of three rabbits running in a circle.
His hand took away a little white paint dust, and he rubbed his three fingers on his pants leg.
There was a pair of busted chain links on a daffodil growing from a  crease in the pavement. They were rusting where they touched the plant: from dew.
Two men in old jeans were sitting on milk crates over a board game and one spoke softly about something else and the other looked upwards and crossed himself and they kept playing.
A pair of brown trousers kicked on a clothesline crossing the street above alongside a white bed-sheet and cloth diaper and a sheer blue blouse.
He moved around until the sun was behind the blouse, so the sun was blue. Then the blouse blew up and the sun went into his eyes.
He pulled his three fingers along a chain-link fence until they felt numb, and a dog barked from a couple yards over.
There was pigeons circling a crumbling piece of a doughnut and a rat looked at them from a cardboard box.
A young man with his shirt buttoned low walked past, proud of his hairless chest, daring anyone to see.
An little boy on his stoop had finished a bowl of something, and hit the tin bottom of the bowl with his spoon whenever he saw something.
When he walked past, the boy saw him, and hit his little bowl.
All the while, cars were driving past, though not very often. They seemed to be hot in the heat the same as everything else was.
A fat man in a sleeveless shirt ate a steak at a wooden table with a white tablecloth in an alley. His mouth was full while he was being mad at someone on a black phone, the curling cord of which was stretched tightly, disappearing through a door. He slurped wine and choked and was mad.
He slowed down as he passed a building where a woman he knew had lived, a long time ago now.
A condemned gas station with wooden crates broken around a dumpster and pallets leaned up against a wall.
Under the shadow of the pallets a man wearing lots of sweaters slept or was dead.
A sheet of newspaper tumbled past making big circles. It was car advertisements.
He reached his house at last: a room with a sink and a stove and a table and chair and a flower in a glass, a room with a mattress and a window and a bookshelf.
He lay down on the bed in a diagonal strip of light.
It swung across him as he slept, growing larger, then disappeared into the opposite wall.

Milk billows into Clay's coffee like submarine smoke from a fire in the earth. Clay wonders at the memory in his youth, when a boat burned in the night on a motionless lake and the fire rose upwards in actuality and poured downwards in a dream. Where is the memory?  Does something billow upwards from the milk invisibly?

Clay wonders, and soaks his buttered roll in gray coffee wondering, as the baker lifts the open book and reads the poem there.

Citadel - Chapter 1

"Citadel"

Chapter 1


Beneath a stone archway two devils in footman’s coats were kissing, and their reflections shivered gently in the canal below. One’s hair was cut very short, the other had a long, pale neck, and both were blue where their skin showed in the very early morning light. A flock of silent birds went overhead, their flapping wings the sound of running feet on rock. Icy air like cold and rounded river stones collided in the chest at every breath, an anchor held aweigh by night and knocking on the planks to wake the sailors from whatever soundness sleep for them could muster, lost the same at sea or shore, at sail or stilled, the same, that beckoning knock demanding in the calm of night the final gift be given. Such frozen air to pause the blood. A morning made by God for men to die in bed of failures of the heart and lungs. For quiet death. For men to mildly die of too-long life, forgiven or forsaken, their final sighs drawn from the depths of the well first struck by a birthing shriek and emptied then, with that last strength, resounding in the minds of watchers-on who hear that straining gasp and know the day will come for them the same, the same. Full of fear or fearless still the same.

            Henry Clay thought so to himself as the day lightened, as he stood at the middle of a short stone bridge. He had been standing there, watching the devils kiss and seeing it with just his eyes, since the canal had been a pit of ink and the homes through which it ran a flimsy raft bestrewn with emblems to assert the strength of life aboard. Clay was not a man so given to despair that he felt himself the endurer of a burdening wisdom, nor, in fact, did he regard himself a very brave man at all. But at such a time of day, when lonesomeness presents itself not as a fact or as a weight, but presents itself to simply say I am, and here you are, as well, and what’s more here is all the rest of everything, and what do you make of that? he is a fool who pretends he is distracted from its voice by something else more urgent, and so it is not bravery that binds a man to this, but something more alike humility. And so helpless Clay was bound, gazing at the kissing pair, and seeing in them something which there wasn’t to another eye than his, as in the blue dawn becoming red they too became two costumed men, not devils, as the devil in them was banished by the quality of light.

            His absent fingers brushed the coins inside his pocket and at this he glanced away to see the sweepers cleaning up the leavings from the carnival last night, the blown-up fireworks and paper bits a child’s wealth of taffeta and candy wrappers gleaming as the little winds that woke them from the brooms and bins in tiny lurching bursts dandled these expended treasures like a niece upon her uncle’s knee and made the cursing broom-men jump. A hoarse laugh came from Clay to see the dancing of the men; he quickly turned back to the archway, to not dishonor the thoughts that had mastered him there, but as the devils both had vanished so too both the men were gone, to wives or sleeping homes or both together,  though whichever, they were gone, and gone with them, the spirits in the arch, the glimpse he’d had of something that had likewise been in him the same and now had been forgotten, returned to hidden kingdoms that it governed and returning him the powers he had lost. He felt now, with the absence of that mind that thought through him and used himself as its reflection to reflect its formlessness in form, the full nature of how powerless he’d been, how fragile, and that fact demanded action of him now, and so undestinied, he left, simply to depart the place of that tremendous mass.

As he went, he remembered a disease of which he’d learned that stole the minds of mice to make them easy prey for cats, in whose stomachs was the nicest home. The germ would mix two thoughts so mice confused the scent of cats and scent of sex to draw them near. A Hamelin plague to play the song of instinct incorrectly, wrong the sound and wrong the wretched meaning leading mice to dance the danse macabre and maketh them to lie down in green pastures.

            Maketh the lambs to hunger for the lion, Clay wondered as he went. But it seemed too accidental of a thing to put the thought that way and make of God a piper to be paid.

            Or steal the children if he never is, he thought, but still it seemed too big, he shook his head and tried to lay the thought aside, but the more he tried to leave it be the more insistent it became.

            The buildings rose on either side like silent sphinxes. Even this, he shrieked in silence, Even this is grandiose and mocks itself and me by simply standing. Every thought is like a diamond, he said, and wrung a grimace at this accidental mystic piety. From any side its viewed it offers only partial glimpses; this facet in full and these others all in pieces. And then also the barely guessed-at vision of the other - unseen - end so poorly apprehended through the uncut heart. There’s no knowing it at once. And even gazed at long, it offers no completer knowledge. Each diamond is only poorly seen, the accumulation of a million impoverished glimpses and never one entire! and never one less incomplete than the last. And for the sake and on the strength of this or that more mutual glimpse, wars are fought by men who glimpsed it once and misbelieved a wholeness there. And then, too, these are wealth! Richer far the man who spends a life within a single shoddy stone to plumb it well than he who hoards and makes a flattering of gems a gilded mirror to reflect in every angle of those endless compound eyes a dazzling happy likeness. But death will take each one of them at once the same, and at his death that sparkling store will show his dread in multitudes, and amplified, and mock in him his fear with mindless glimmering faces; poor the death where rich the man, rich in thoughts or rocks; these fossil souls of some intestate heirless gods that died and left their puzzle in the earth! Whereby Man, usurping some primeval primogeniture has inherited the woe of thought, unresolved and irresolvable, looked upon but never through, a window in a lighted room out into a moonless night that can’t be pierced and only shows a shadow self gazing back upon the gazer. Insular and inescapable the room, the life, embellished with the runes of memory, idolatrous snake oil to soothe the pang of mystery. Small wonder then that man has set his stones in rings and crowns and scepters so to hide the dark forbidden side of these raw moons and think the side we see the whole affair and likewise sets the thoughts in armatures of state and church and study. (How lately did we think the spheres were coins!) And then - if this were not enough - even these are cut by men from their exhumed condition to better suit the image of a mystery! What thing is hidden from the eye inside a diamond is the same as what is hidden at the heart of every notion, the unattained thing that makes a vanity of sight and thought and life if it sought to fight the very mystery it is.

            Exhausted by his fugue, arisen from the nameless place, the same that transforms fortune into torment by a sideways motion of the mind, Clay flung down his hands and stomping down the stairs into a basement bakery hung his coat upon a light-switch and plunged the little cellar into darkness. There came a shout of shocked outrage.

            What’s the big idea?

            Sorry, mumbled Clay, who took his coat and put the lights back on. As the lights came up slowly, he saw the fat baker, his side whiskers dusted with flour and streaks of wet dough decorating his burnt-brown forearms and though he did not want to, smiled helplessly.

            Vandal! cried the baker, then also smiling, Wudde ya want then?

            Breakfast? said Clay, brushing a thin topsoil of grainy salt and flour from a thick wooden cutting block in the corner, where a folding chair was set.

            Hum! sniffed the baker, brushing his forearms with his hands and paling them completely. Still soused from the party, expect.

            I don’t drink, said Clay, and felt his pockets, hearing the cheery clink of coins through the woolen.

            Hum! luck for you then the damn drummer woke me up and the loaves baked early. Any louder and he’d’ve woke the loaves as well, the criminal, and I’d be robbed a living and a sleep. I prefer that sweet music you’re making there to a drummers din.

            The baker was apparently very satisfied to have someone to talk to, and Clay didn’t mind, it kept his thoughts engaged. He smiled and shook his pockets again.

            Ah! there’s the sound! What a magic creature, man, to fit such huge and pleasing bells in his trouser pockets to ring the morning. Matrimonial bells! Rolls and butter! milk and coffee.

            It was hot as a smithy in the little cellar.

Monsoon. Humidity  is 100% and I sweat at all times, doing anything. I walk up the stairs to my 3rd floor room, and sweat from places that did not have sweat glands until I came to this place. There are a thousand different scams and I only get around OK when someone uses one I already know.Then, it is easy. The name of the game is friendliness. And to be rude in response, or short with my temper, is to risk further harassment. Obsequiousness, false friendship, are tools employed. To prevaricate is the rule. It is hard, being a man used to taking someone at their word, to learn suddenly that this is not the rule with foreigners of my particular stripe.

Its strange to discover that naivete in me, but I have, and hope it serves me well, at least so long as I stay here. Delhi I hear is different from much of the country, but I am glad to have started here, where the learning curve is steep, so that what comes later I am prepared for.