another, rotating and merging and breaking apart and growing
larger. One black, one white. Tumbling resolutely toward ecstasy,
dread and deliverance. And as he dreamt with his eyes open he
pinpointed his true location. Had he not been the nipple on the end
of that enormous cosmic breast? The seed of the opposite that pulls
the black half towards the white and the white towards the black
again? He was the asymptote. And his madnesses were not all mad.
And his misery was not all his. He was the fountain through which
the milk of immortality irrigated the world. What was he doing here
then? In this paradise, this walled garden, this cabinet where the
liquor was locked up. How could paradise be just that? The poetry
was in the seed, in the juice, in the sap, not the place. The fruit had to
be planted all over the world. He saw now that he had to get the hell
out of there. God did not throw Adam out of paradise. Adam ate the
fruit from the tree and saw Eden for what it really was: a jail, a
lifetime sentence, a living death. God the loving father begged him
back as he stepped over the threshold and Adam gave God the finger.
That’s why they weren’t speaking any longer. And God was
heartbroken. And Adam was lost. And nature took over the
enterprise. And the ideal was abandoned.
Roy stood up from his place in the woods, walked out to the
water, naked and blessed as a Buddha by the brook. Raising a hand
to his forehead his eyes measured its expanse and turbulence. His
blood boiled and his teeth glistened. His head smote the river and his
wooly hair sparkled like a crown of tiny diamonds. Sliding through it
like a fish he felt the hands of the goddess lure him back to her liquid
bosom. All was forgiven. He pumped his arms and legs and pulled
and drove and tilted.
But merely reaching out wasn’t enough. Slowly, the wheel
churned the milk into butter and its heaviness gummed up the works.
Everything was moving slower now and Roy found himself utterly
exhausted. In the middle of the lake now, with paradise on one side
and earth on the other he realized that his body could not fulfill the
imperatives of his soul and he also knew he could not return. He
would have to float there and trust in the current.
He rested as he rode and the sun became a black star as his mind
eclipsed and enclosed around it.
Broken capillaries of fleeting pines crossed their limbs and cut him.
The bifurcating cascade of unexpected branches sliced the surface of
ABYSSINIA
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