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Another
day dawns on the savannah. The wind sighs in the antlers of a few
static deer, a coyote howls. Aside from that, the savannah is
becalmed and blue as smoke through the lens of the substantial air.
The camera pans in. Here, hidden by a few cans and rags, is the
dilapidated paper shack of the only person alive. The wind rustles
the walls which are thousand dollar bills, the currency of some
vanished culture, patiently sewn together by the shack's snoring
tenant: Orpheus, the poet - a patchwork himself after his sparagmos.
Opening his eyes, Orpheus remembers he has bet the gods that he can
build a city on the savannah by night fall. He has twelve hours. He
gets out of bed naked and walks out into the morning sun and starts
to build.
First he builds the throats of singers, with lungs one end and
tongues the other, and he builds a whole choir of these to accompany
his labour with song. Then he builds a post office. And an
underground or subway system. A whole shanty town of paper shacks
goes up around the post office which, by noon, is milling with dead
letter ghosts come up from the underground to engage in nightmare
horseplay.
The soft embryonic city has hardened by dusk, and as the sun sets
the young windows light up and lead the way home for any stragglers
still abroad in these last minutes before curfew. Anyone on the
streets after curfew will be unmade, like a bed.
[Orpheus washes his hands in tears and thus anointed calls it a day
though it is night]
Darkness falls on the savannah.
Orpheus sleeps. |