path. But what could one do about a beauty that tore down that very
path and sliced it in half, releasing heat like a broken faultline? You
could not turn your face from eternity; if you looked away, it was still
there. And hers was a face impossible to bury with half-glances or
mental parlor games. There was nowhere he could run. He was in
trouble. And if he was, she was too.
He had done his best to ignore her; he so deftly convinced the
others she had no effect on him that they joked he must be gay. But
it was not like that. Now he could not stay and he could not leave. The
limbo stick pressed down on him from all sides. He felt bent over and
about to break.
It began with the laughter of children…
and now it ends
In angels of fire and ice…
For this is the time of the assassins.
Like Rimbaud on the run, or Roy even, Yak did not want to ever hurt
anyone again. The ill-fated French poet, a young man who destroyed
individuals and entire worlds chasing an ideal, never meant to hurt
anyone either. Eerie were the parallels between Rimbaud and his
celluloid homonym.
Jean Arthur Rimbaud, taking his cue from Baudelaire, often
wrote about seasons, the periods in one’s life that start with growth,
end in desiccation and then regenerate. He sought a method to
transcend these patterns. In a confession titled “A Season in Hell,”
Rimbaud recounted a disastrous period in his life in which he
discovered that his youthful idealism had led him astray.
He wrote: “I who called myself magus or angel, exempt from all
morality, I am thrown back to the earth, with a task to pursue, and
rough reality to embrace.”
So he divorced his muse, pleading irreconcilable differences. In
his wake he left a destroyed Paul Verlaine, the celebrated poet for
whom Rimbaud had himself become a muse, and also, among the
rubble, the charred remains of the Western poetic tradition.
But he never looked back. From the moment he left France as a
prodigal teenager, Rimbaud never again wrote another poem with
his hands. Rather, he scrawled his epic verse upon the earth with a
series of peripatetic bootprints.
At nineteen he joined the Dutch army as a soldier, but quickly
ABYSSINIA
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