happy birthday chriso
Wars been bad for business.
He speaks in tones as flat and without feature as the dreadful plain on which they stand. The stranger turns to him.
Not if you’re a doctor.
This second man the Surgeon has hollowed cheeks and eyes sunk deep beneath his brow in vain retreat from some appalling scene. Beneath his feet the earth is bare and wrinkled and on it lies a bullet. The Surgeon bends to pick it up and on its warped and twisted form he sees writ large the impact of bone and shredding of flesh. He puts it in his pocket.
What strange seeds.
Luck getting them to grow.
The Surgeon leaves on foot to reach the land where between the quick and the dead there is only a technical distinction. He makes his slow travail across the claybrown heat and the dryness taught by thirst. The sky is all a cobalt blue that speaks of rainfall as eternal past. He seeks mock shade beneath sparse shrub embittered by the sun but dead trees give no shelter and no water sounds from stone.
Past stark wood pales leaning curved and drunk like the great furling ribcage of some antediluvian beast. Where soon carrion defines the dust its rotting smell the air and it draws great black birds careening into squalls of primitive frenzy. Still he goes westward where now the blessed coming of the storm makes a flat grey lid on the horizon.
He picks his way through root and pathless rock where sheep bones lie candescent in the dust like seeds sown from a farmer’s hand, both evidence and auspice of time’s perpetual mandate that the earth bear witness to no thing it does not intend to destroy and on this stark reminder the Surgeon thought until the ninth night delivered him atop a blunted hill where all was obscure and darkly vague for in the space between the stars reigned a blackness that was older than night and overhead the hunter’s moon flecked with fiery ember. Beneath that hellish promittor stunted trees stood like ghostly sentinels presiding over that small forsaken village which lies at the edge of the world and so too beyond its contemplation.
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Night follows quickly and completely on the heels of the men as they ride into the village. Sometimes on foot they arrive or in armoured trucks and they may be outfitted in furs or hide or ferrous plate or hooded mantle of obscene livery and they may encounter a village that is at othertimes a town and is sometimes called Jerusalem or Athens or Odessa or Alexandria but always do they carry the cult of moonlight war in their breast and in this they are the same.
Always too is there a General of some kind or other name and this General’s mouth is carved across his face and his grin splits a seam of carious teeth to ask what stirs here and under whose protection and in unspeakable answer out runs a boy from behind the walls of a mud baked house he will never inherit. Down the General’s blade bears from his arm to separate the boy’s head from his life and from there springs a violence that is its own propagator burning through resolutions like cloth as legs are wrenched apart like a wishbone and the mothers have no sons as men’s scalps are cleaved from skulls and the wet heat of viscera from torsos slitted pours out like spilling grain while jointed roads of lightning tear the void. Down death’s ravening hand reaches to grasp and grab at his remittance that mounts piles doubles and grows again with every score of bone or rifle shot or arrow loosed with hunter’s aim as sterile thunder shakes the sky and the world is cracked again with madness. From the space between its shards seeps cloudthick wrath and attic black and whatever other matter hell was made of so the earth was nought but that, and the waters of the acheron fall as rain that has no wish to wellspring life but some left living call then to prayer and even those who held no gods before the killing started do (kneeling) lift their faces skyward. Palms raised in supplication. To pray the same way trees grow (up) where in the vaulted firmament Orion wheels around but does not speak, so there is yet silence in the heavens while the red of running blood usurps the senses. And underfoot deep crimson blooms in pools to choke the earth and those who lie upon it paint it and they lie in tangled limb, delivering with ransom breath their dying benedictions until day dawns over whited sightless eyes and none are left to mourn the wind that crosses now unheard.
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The Surgeon arrives as the rising sun claws up mountains folded to the east. The unremembered spot is marked with red and encircled by the black of swimming flies and it shows like the grievous wound upon a body over which wickedness or one of its infernal instruments has continually passed. The light of the morning is clear and splashes like water on the dust but there is only rock and no water and three lonely posts driven upright in the bloodsalted ground from which no seeds except those strange would grow, but the Surgeon is like a gardener and like a gardener he cannot tend to dead things and so he turns to leave that place on foot.
Death is perennial
in the desert that
knows not of comfort
or ocean deep current,
where it reigns without
respite of changeable
season
It is fallen out of memory
so far it does not stop
until it falls to where the
heart of silence beats.
No-man’s-land surrounds it
so broad it has no end
and that is where the dead
have lost their bones.