Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

   The Great American Empire is the story of a man who has grown up in America during the time that America was a successful country. Now old, indeed, dying, our hero has decayed exactly as America grew into an "Empire" and decayed.

   The novel employs a literary technique especially invented here which can be called "the mirror-image." The use of this technique allows the author to make the easy transition from "The American Empire", to the Roman Empire, for purposes of comparison which will be clear to the reader. Thus, as Rome decayed and died, so "The Great American Empire" is both decaying and dying.

   After all, the death of a man is of so little moment to a world filled with people. There might even be some relief, if a stranger, in the knowledge that now there was room for one more.

   He had always suggested that cremation was the best way, clean, the ground was after all so cold, the ants that build tunnels would come upon the flesh. Did they carry it away in those small morsels that they carry before them to their warrens and there store it until the cold, the winter, and then did they feed upon it? That was it. That was why he did not care for the ground as burial, better like a hero, an old hero, Beowulf upon the pyre, the mourners in a circle; but, of course, his possessions would not be burned with the body.

   His brother snickered and elbowed his wife, his own, a coarse shallow vulgar one dimension, eye on material such as a dress, a relative who might leave them money, children that she brought forth, one of her own from an earlier marriage. She always rather misunderstood and secretly despised the scholarly victim, the deceased, because she was like so many in the city, a vulgar shining attractiveness so that wiping the mouth of her child she bent over in a short skirt revealing starkly white underpants, also very short, clean, with a lace edging at the brown thigh, a thigh tanned in the sun, bent over purposely so he could see it and he saw it but somehow the attraction of the sight was only 25% of what it ordinarily ought to be, and there was then nothing wrong with his senses, that is, at 45 he had still been both attractive and attracted.

   The vogue for hair was well on then, before the next phase of shaving, shaving of the shagpot, so to speak, the scalp now carefully cut and shaved and polished, both men and women, the whiskers gone, sideburns, moustaches, even eyebrows, for both sexes, smooth as billiard balls and very smart and modern indeed, quite suitable to the people whose style of life had brought them colonies on the moon and on mars and one of the things that got in the way of simple hygiene on the planets was hair, and so it had to go, since both sexes were going and coming and you couldn't put all that hair in a helmet.

   But he was now missing all that, lying still, smiling, with a beard Vandyke style, the old sideburns to the bottom of the lobe of the ears, the moustache still heavy and blond extending within an inch of the sideburns, he had been a man with a sense of dignity, a man of letters, of the old school who had accomplished the modest, it always seemed to him, accumulation of five published volumes of a new combination, new in those days of prose and poetry which a newspaper critic in a Dallas paper dubbed the "Neo-Narrative." And that was his small contribution to the world. That is what he had left, and not very many people had ever heard his name, read his books, knew or cared for a new combination at all, and still less did they value the thought that energized that which he had spent his life forming, forming, indeed, with a hope born of a struggling youth that somehow life could be made richer by freeing the feelings of the post-Victorian era in which he had grown up.

   It was America in the 1920's that had formed those hopes, indeed "ideals" that he had dreamed of and been nurtured upon as a boy, a long time ago. That window out of which he looked, barred against illegal entry, that air even then permeated by soft lead, the smell of a new pencil, the soot that fell three times a day from burning incinerators.

  He determined that discipline alone would carry him to success, a success that was a dream, a world tiny and round with an irregular surface, the clouds of atmosphere that surrounded the greenery of a globe lost in space yet a prisoner of regularity, of form and law, the law of spinning and turning, the law of distance from the sun, the law of energy that emitted the golden touch of life, light, heat, the law that informed the fabric of the earth itself, the water, crystal clean, cool that bubbled from the heat of the earth's core that over the centuries had cooled and warmed life into bodies and brains and organs that had penetrated as did his ancestors, the caves, the rocks, the nights, the penises, the clitorises, by the millings of pounds of seed and energy that slowly rose by law, the demand met of supply and hunger that had finally evolved a creature of the 1920's sitting at a window of a slowly disintegrating city, writing poetry. Man is a poetry writing animal, indeed.

   But nothing would succeed, nothing he could do about his inheritance, blond hair, blue eyes, a large nose, sensitive lips, a well formed chest, large, manly, thin hips and legs, short really, five feet six inches.

   The hope of a life is the dream such as led him of leaving that house, that window, those bars (on the window), that air, that odor, of leaving his body which he wrestled with as a prisoner in a cell, that cell that body which occupied that moment of time, that chair before the desk, that desk before that accursed window, that door through which he walked to his bed and to her as he waited for her downstairs in the street.

   Why was she late? What kept her? She was always late. He could hardly wait.

   Still a poet, the youth and energy of his body, a boy of 23 demanded that connection, warmth, sympathy, contact of touching which thundered at him through the loins, the legs that twined round her, the arms crushing and pulling her to him, the want and need of a thirsty man crossing the desert in a merciless cruel July sun that turned down and dried out the tongue and gums until to drink seems the greatest pleasure, and so to drink of her, at 23 as they mounted the stairs, the confidence of possession and pleasure just minutes away, her breasts and founts and entry and penetration and relief and swallow and breathe as she lay upon the white sheets, white, black hair on the pillow and poetry and woman seemed quite one, so strong was his belief in himself as a poet, and now confirmed by the experience and reward of her, that in his body he was a man.

   Very few people attended the funeral. There was his father, now almost ninety, still hearty, his brother and his brother's wife and both of them came gaily to the burial because (1) they were still alive and well, (2) they were burying him, (3) he died unknown, as they preferred, and (4) now that he was dead, all of Father's fortune would descend on themselves and their children. He was the main obstacle in the way of their inherited fortunes. And the one good friend and his wife and their two children, the friend and the one friend he had managed to retain from his friendship-making days, those days of seventeen, the very height of friendship, the time to make friends is when you can give all to a friend, all your time and energy and attention, all your worldly goods (since you have no possessions or entailments it is quite easy) and all your shared dreams in which you and your friend are active and equal partners.

   And those were all who came.

  
   His death was real all right. The flow of blood ceased, the magic of the heart exhausted. All of it slowly promised year by year by organs sluggish, needing help, the legs moved more slowly, the eyes not focusing, the back weaker, the muscles after exertion taking longer to recover.

   Now, absurdly he lay silent, a captive of time, the spring unwound, the organs' last redness and freshness, turned grey and ceased, and whispers now, of those still on this side, those too about to part, but for now, here, to mourn his passing.

   In spite of all care, what had he left?

   Those dreams of spirit of an earlier time when he was young, hope is abstracted from time, it exists as a smiling force of spirit, of adventure, of love, of semen that is built and stored and pressing and pressure that forces outward onto the world which is female, Nature all female, as the sky, open, the streets pass the bodies down through as canals, the trees spread their branches, the Bermuda grass emerges and runs outward joyously filling the level space touching runner to runner. All outward graces smile roundly, female and womblike, as the round earth that harbours and nurtures and feeds and succors, set as it is in a round universe dotted with planets that urge invisible forces upon one another, now that we have measures of those fingers, running toward and away from each other as do the runners of grass. The female of the earth as a waist of heat, an equator of division, of the head and bowels which when he crossed it, dove into the heat of the tropics, warm, moist, a womb of wet earth, the water of the Philippine- gulfs and shores that lapped on the beach as he undressed and threw himself into the silver water to swim with the slim silver fish that the fishermen pulled into their boats.

   And so outward, possessing tools, as a man, he had followed the unconscious urge to swim, to feed, to breathe air, to cohabit, to shoot forward and make an impression in Nature, to shoot outward from the loins, to embody all that the tools of the eyes saw.

   From the Jersey shore, the New York skyline was there clear and silver. The buildings rose in erectile silver issue from the rock, the wall, albeit impenetrable, saw streets slowly running traffic, clear mornings when the sun was hot, clear air that came from the Western hills of New Jersey and freshened and cleaned, moving slowly then, it moved across the water to a city that female as it was a port, received the world at its lips, all the ships pointed to her bowel, all the load of merchandise from the old world we all admired, from whom our genius had its source, a love affair with Europe that ancient, slow, historical, clean, intellect, the Greek lips that told the Roman how to live and think and worship and value, told us, as Europe did, and we hungered for the Mother, the Mother, the female, the plant, the melons on a stalk, his hunger as young was green, all the Nature of the city was long since swept away to make way for the history of a new giant spawned by Europe, and he was the son of that Goliath. Thoughtless, powerful, with arms and machines, with ships and machines, the nuts tightened on the bolt and the armature began to whirr as the water sluiced over the cement into the channel to turn the great fins on a wheel attached to the wires and core that had the tentacles and brushes absorbing the turn that crackled and ran through the veins, the blood of electricity that ran overhead immediately after processing into the thick rams of heavy coils and thence to the cable that ran up the steel tower to the journey of 800 miles to the city to run the motors and heart of an electrical giant machine whose large machines ran smaller and smaller machines until you felt the energy in your eyes, youbreathed the movement, you took the vibrations in at your feet and  it ran through your whole body and you ran faster and faster as the pace of the motor ran faster and you were part of the complex, of the machine, and the machine ran the city, the lights, the signs that flashed light and smoke, the cars, the oil, the black tar roads, the hydraulic hammer splitting rock, the buildings beginning to rise under the fingers of the few men on the job seated at their spectral cranes, lifting girders of steel that would make the cage, man-made steel, thin and lofty once in place, heavy and immoveable once in place, warrens of cells and cell on cell all pointing inward, under roofs, Nature, as a tree swept away, the cement, stone, glass all became part of him and less and less open, more of it closing in all the time, as a giant frenzy siezed the populace of the city from which he turned, to get air, got into the tube, rode on a train, he rode on a ferry over fresh water in fresh air to the cliffs of the Jersey shore and scrambled by hand and foot up the rocks, grabbing at trees and roots of trees, holding to clumps of green and dried grass between the rocks by foot and hand as the Indians climbed from their caves to the plateau above, bare toes like fingers set in narrow ledges until he reached the top of the Jersey cliffs and one more pull, he reached the summit from which Jersey went West straight out, and turning, standing upright, he looked now at the silver city, the sun at four o'clock striking a thousand windows, glinting like the facets of a city glints from a thousand eyes, and he raised a single warm blooded human fist and he threatened that city that he would destroy it, that he would either break into a window and stand triumphant, part of it, or he would destroy it by smashing it in his mind, obliterating it by going away, deny it and destroy it for its prison structure, take aim and retaliate in the name of Nature, seek revenge for every tree that now was a corpse, the tears beginning at the eyes, he hated it with all his soul, but he felt puny, defeated, outlawed, prevented, and he knew that his attack must come from far away as his soul resisted incorporation, and being 23 he did not yet know quite why.

  
   Before the end, the question of leaving had consumed him and while all the other questions seemed to him at least to have answers, this last question only seemed to suggest life long intuitions, 3/4 truths, hints that tantalized the imagination which mysteriously came at him, the hints did, in writings, messages through words particularly, poems and feelings that he himself experienced, but had been experienced by human beings before him.

   Such heroes as he had then, were those who were dead, ancestors and fathers in poetry and in essays, those whose experiences were humble and "felt", like waiting on tables, college, the loss of a father through disease or by drowning at sea, the vague thrill of seeing before him as a grown boy, with the vision of a boy, yet, who saw himself as a lofty lonely heartful responsive eye and heart, the heart that melted at beauty as one did at Spenser whose many hours of labor at a hateful job in a foreign country, surrounded by eyes that were foreign, mean, hurt, poor, while he had tenure in the army of occupation, and while he labored in the vineyard at work designed long ago by others, by Generals, Presidents, Queens, while the solid walls of government rose up high, stone on stone, the mortar made by man, laboring to reach above the ground and above the trees, while steps led upward to the highest chambers and bedrooms, the warrens of government by arms and by men, by stone and rampart, by imposing the will of whatever wisdom the queen possessed, still it was one Queen, one woman, and while he, Spenser, was sentenced to a castle far away, his dreams of perfection, his loins of love, his need to succeed, and yet this other need persisted, this call of beauty that was of no price, - what possessed a man to renounce the money, the government, the stones, the mortar, and to interpret the singing of the birds as something beautiful and decorative when in fact the bird is singing his heart out, creating the liquid beauty of a song unlearned, in order to define his territory. The male warning off other males.
 
   Beneath the civilization such as Spenser found it, beneath the civilization such as he, now dead, had found it, beneath all that the impression of order creates, he found a hostile country, full of hostile people, a castle on the hill that was empowered with and by that order, all the measurements for land had been taken even before his birth. All the fences were put up before he was born, all the houses defined behind their gates, the knowledges and history ordered into centuries, divided by workable courses, men trained and trained well in that order, the minds and heroes of the past doing one of two things: (1) either working within that order and bringing more of it into focus, or (2) possessed by some vision of past attainment, or of some future less divided, more resiliant, a time when hostility might be less, and by this vision, and apart from the recognition and success of working within the order founded before his birth, to bring forth an unwanted guest, a new idea, and vision that would hang free, related to Nature herself, as the civilization was now no longer natural, as the order was now a rule unto itself which most had the good sense to hang on to, an order which respected their fences, did not break down their doors, left the roof over their heads, and more important still, order was necessary in a culture based on food and agriculture. You could have all the machines you want, but if there was no food to feed the factory man, the industrial man, the machine would slow down and finally stop. It was this order, fence, door, building, land agricultural crops grown without interruption to harvest time: this was the order deemed, if not best, at least workable.

   Now that he was dead, it did not matter that he had chosen wrongly. He was "Guy" without luck, unsuited to luck, as Guy was stupid, a dull man, a man who understood the nature of things, a man who had the talent to make peace with the order of things no matter where he found it, unrelated as that order is to justice and truth, whatever you made of it. Unlike "Guy" - and they were legion, not in the majority, mind you, the majority, the vulgus was quite another matter. Indeed, they mattered greatly, were a great force, a corpus of many heads, and many legs that instinctually were fitted with a genius for adaptation to that which caused less pain. Unfettered with the future or the past, ignorant, indeed, of both, they were hungry mouths concerned with jaws that chewed bread three times daily, ideally. The food came quite orderly in flow from the watered earth that with care and effort by the skilled husbandryman, turned a rich green with leaf and root pushing down, a brown dust watered into mud turned chocolat that fed and swelled the root, fed by chemicals (the farmer did not reason good or bad) and the air, by the sun (these at least compensated for the chemicals), rose up slowly, spread broad finned leaves and then a head and sheaf of corn that pushed the stalk higher and the cob appeared and kernels of seed and in October the whole was cut, the seed separated from the leaves, the leaves pressed into food for pigs, and the kernels of wheat or sorghum pressed with water into meal, the meal fed to cattle and the cattle slaughtered to be cut and divided into portions for dishes that came by the waiter from the cook to the fork of the fat-legged man, his wife, his four children, two boys and two girls, and all raised and lowered their jaws and the fat man then praised the order, the government, the Queen, the laws, the constabulary as he belched, got up from his chair, idly brushed his lap of crumbs, went and closed the door, put the children in their rooms and fucked his wife. He had good reason, he thought, for displaying the flag.

   He, O fortune, had not been made that way. Something told him it was temporary, doomed, changeful, lustful, designed to benefit the few who lived fantastic lives devoted to luxury that magic of wealth that carefree, that tissue free of all concern, the acquisition of drape and rug and ship and plane that surface of the earth all theirs, all islands reached only by sea, the comings and goings filled the magazines with pictures, the Queens without brassiers, hot and loving it, the freedom of an old man with young women, the owner-
ship and possession of crews and captains and planes and ports and castles and armies and clean and dirty for fun, unrelated to philosophy and related only to gold and the possessions that gold brings, the ambition finally watered down and awarded as the wealth is to sons and daughters who cannot imagine wanting and yearning and ambition and love and need and fear that fear that entrails grabbed that holds like a cat the claws that squeeze the mouse, the victim, any day the victim by virtue of slavery and color and birth that insulated side and top from the extremes of weather. Is it any wonder that whatever progress we have enjoyed has been the gift of the poor, the beset middle class sons and daughters whose rage and anger and ambition has been to make the world better and easier.

   Such rage was over now. He lay there. He looked in repose. He had failed since he had not been given that talent for pleasing, that body that fits success, that stupidity of Guy who merely touched a vine and made it bear, watered a tree and it prospered, invested a dollar and reaped twenty. He had not been made to solve that mystery and so he had labored with the thoughts of all that passed and he had had intimations of the devastation to come and he had labored ambitiously and quietly to give birth to a single small idea, a song, a joyous revelation, a freeing of the spirit within and he labored with only the success and confidence that comes of knowing your heroes, whose real son you are, whom you were before, and what you had said and done before.

   His own father looked down on him and shook his head. What
manner of man were you? he said half aloud. What motivated you?
What God did you believe in? And where are you now, with your
Mother in heaven?

   And his brother and his wife looked and snickered.

   Now there is no one standing in the way of our fortune, they whispered.


  
   His body lay silent. He still looked as he had looked in life. His beard and moustache were white, the side hairs even with the bottom of the ears, thin upper lip and full perfectly shaped lower lip, full, sensitive, large energetic nose, high forehead full of judgement, receding hair, thin and light brown, eyes closed that had once been blue and calm and they were never aggressive eyes. Shrewd, slant-lidded, crease marks beneath and laugh lines at the corners. The forehead was remarkably smooth and free of wrinkles for a man, well, not very old, but certainly he died when he was well beyond the middle age.

   The success or failure of a man was judged by how he lived, how many people he contacted, what influence he wielded. His life was clearly a failure by any standard such as these. He had chosen to be a writer in an age, so unfortunate for him, an age that saw the demise of literature. Books became increasingly numerous, but letters were clearly failing.

   He chose to become a writer as a very young man because he thought himself possessed of an unusual intelligence and imagination, that in a world such as the era of the American Empire, would never be called upon. This intelligence was an energy that possessed him, a fire of investigative and critical development which saw the world in an unique way. His parents, for example, were strange to him, concerned with everyday matters, intelligent, practical, city people whose personal lives were lived close at home, devoted to the children as they were, clean, virtuous, but not religious in the sense of being habitual church attenders.

   The shallowness of their lives, the concern with immediate details, health, dinner, the weather, short vacations, a total acceptance of the city, its people, family affaires of the most trivial sort occupied them such as the illness of a relative, the jealousy of a cousin, the money grubbing of a sister.

   In what way was the accident of his birth ever to find its form? What life previous possessed him, what History haunted him? His life ceased being lived in a room, by a window, breathing the stale air of  the city, hearing the growling traffic: what occupied him was the nightmare and shadows on the ceiling which seemed to threaten him with the same life as his parents. What concerned him was the life of the past, a man who left college, went to live with his Mother, possessed of a critical intelligence which saw men as having beastly natures, a selfish uncle who denied everything to a dependent nephew, a Mother alone and bereaved, lacking the will to make another life because her neighbors condemned her to widowhood and she acquiesced.

   Or a young man waiting table, whose father had died, a man dreaming of God and truth and looking about him in the church found only petty greed, men denying God, a church devoted to signs and portents, worshipping idols, denying that God of wider scope, his scope, as he surveyed the heavens, saw the puny earth, harkened to the stirring of life in outer space and saw God was God over this as well.

   In the American Empire of his day life had grown increasingly rigid. Work occupied men but it was with great stoicism that they approached it. The old ideals of work, of idle hands causing mischief still dominated; the workwas divided "scientifically" into its component parts, as much as any man of "average" intelligence could handle in a single day. Work was accomplished by clock hours, the 8 hour day deemed redeemable in terms of efficiency, and profitable in terms of a man finding some little leisure for himself before he had to go to sleep to build up energy for another 8 hour day.

   It was considered enough for a man to sell bottles of liquor in a store by bringing one bottle at a time to the counter to be wrapped and the money collected and registered. Another man drove a bus, stopping for passengers at every other corner, up and down the route four times in a single working day. Another man drove nails in a roof, looking only for the cross-beams, driving home the nails, extracting single nails from a pouch he carried on his hip suspended from a belt. Another man allowed gasoline to escape from an under-ground storage well into the back or side of a vehicle. Another man sorted letters by holding a pile in his left hand, he read the numbered addresses and by number deposited the same together in a cubicle.

   Another man ran the movie reels in a theatre by watching the machine, substituting a full reel for an empty one, 8 hours a day. 

   Most often the work was done in ugly and uncomfortable surroundings. The movie operator worked by himself in a temperature of about 85 degrees. The cook in a restaurant prepared food in an ill-lighted kitchen, unpainted, steaming from the stove and the dish washer. The factory hand worked in Dante's Inferno. Smoke belched from 30 brick stacks and covered the area in a blanket of unbreatheable cloud, the heat and ugliness of the work table was, well, 85 degrees, and he worked with the scraps of metal, wire, paper, bits of wood, tape, broken plastic, covering the floor, the walls unpainted and cracked, for 8 hours a day he soldered a red wire to a red terminal, a blue wire to a blue terminal.

   Or rolls of shining linoleum were rolled out of the presses, rolled and pushed to a counter, there examined for flaws by one man, labeled by another: examined and labeled, examined and labeled, until the pattern was cursed, the paste looked and felt like watery shit, and both men, red-eyed after 8 hours emerged into the smoky night air dangerously set for physical violence. An unreasonable divison of day and night, work and leisure, all of it operating at the intelligence of a dog retrieving sticks.

The Empire flourished this way as no nation in history ever flourished, but the intelligence grew dulled, taste became vulgarized and coarse, the machine brought about a devastating brutality that dominated most men's lives and the growth of work divided by warren and by hour and by separation into components left men rootless, unfulfilled, full of the imagination left untapped by their work, they became submissive to the machine, angry with a sense of oppression, and unhealthy by virtue of the stagnant air, and water, the water polluted by the very machines by whose side they bent.

   What was he to do with his hatred of the Empire, his fear of the machine, his opposition to the pollution, his knowledge growing with his reading and education and his application of knowledge to the problems that mounted higher and higher as the pinnacles of buildings rose around him swollen with the profits of the work of thousands of hands, all seemingly devoted, all seemingly orderly, all accepting the machine, the noise, the ugliness, the savings on paint, the ugly piles of garbage thrown in heaps, the empty rusting oil drums, the yellow phosphorescent wastes spilling onto the flats and running in active rivers down to the broad waters, the smell coming to the eyes and nose like a grapple tearing at hairs and membranes. None would ever want it, he said. There is no use for it, he said. Thought is dangerous, they said. Not to conform is subversive, they said. Not to be like the others marked you as queer, they chorused. Accept it they said and repeated. And he knew they were wrong. It would all fall, he thought, the buildings will be emptied out, the folly of variety in manufacture will produce an ugly surfeit. The pressure of the machine that does not rest, will corrupt. The pressure to unload the heavy burden of goods pouring out the anus of the factory, the work of many machines tended by blind ants who do as they are bid will finally prove too heavy, too costly, the stockpile built, the goods moving too slowly, the costly machines demanding to operate, the land rents rising because of the expansion of the factories, the wages demanded, the rise of cost beyond a man's daily wages, the increasing saving of cost by allowing the surroundings to deteriorate in order to keep costs down, the costs must be kept competitive for world markets, the Empire seeking more markets, more world, more mouths to clean their teeth, sweeten their breaths, shave their armpits, wash their clothes, shampoo their dirty hair, spray their curls, whiten their red eyes, carpet their floors, shine their woodwork, slop up their spills, towel and wipe their asses with trees, cook with chemicals, eat the canned vegetables, spray their beds, cream their cheeks and sweeten their cunts with dry powder: all this the Empire felt its genius and energy to spread and market and conquer, conquer peacefully if possible, conquer with arms and might and men if it could not, and defeat the counter culture, "the other side" bent upon applying the machine to every need, until the man is only an arm or an eye beside the machine, dispensable to make way for another, the spirit of the machine and the genius not to tire, to pour in an endless, nerveless, unfeeling stream, the men to work at their single gesture to be the eye, the arm, and nothing else, to even devote his 4 hours of free spirit to the mechanized genius of the mechanized state: all conspiring as in his youth to call the imagination Dangerous. Extirpate it. Lock it out. Put it in prison. While the Empire was more subtle: "Do not in any way encourage it and it will wither and die". As indeed it was beginning to do when he was no longer young. As it already had clearly passed away with him, the last of the Noble Romans, the last man of feeling left in the American Empire.

 
   What wisdom is about to die with us? he thought, when he still could think, thinking enabled him to know that he was indeed alive -yet, he asked not to think, so many times did he think critically, so many times did he compare his thoughts and solutions to what actually existed around him and so many times did he feel like weeping like raging (even shooting and stabbing - but he was a civilized man and the thoughts were suppressed successfully).

   So many good words and good thoughts mounted into his head unbidden, private, in words, in words that were pictures and concepts, in the desire of dreams that came welcome and beckoning. At night the animal tissue became tired, the organs slowed down, the limbs that once were young and never knew fatigue, or knew it as an amusing relief, a desire to slip easily into rest and sleep like a soft blanket that gently covered the limbs, to slip into sleep nervelessly, came in later life, beginning at 9 PM an ache in the knees, a hollowness in the stomach, a fast beating of the heart such that the body demanded of the brain that it slow down, lie down, close its eyes, lie without movement, dream, of the persistence of peace, of being almost alone, the dream of being the only man, the foliage of the dream island, sand, clear blue sea, the golden and brown silky limbs of welcome of women hungry as in a dream, making passionate appeals, making the limbed "V" sign of welcome, exuding the sweet limbed flesh smell of moisture and slit and open and clean and the night, surrounded as at a bath of flesh that rippled and moved and beckoned and turned a shoulder and lips parted and smiling as at a bath of the feminine, an inundation of dream and clouds of flesh, of soft voices, the only man, the action and physiognomy of male flesh and male organ, all denied and trampled and deadened in life, now alive and moist for the taste and smell, that sweet swell of flesh and hair that reckoned with its own sweet needs, absent of all guilt, shameless as God displayed all the delights of a real garden, real desire, real benefit.

   For an old man before death, how he thought of the present was in terms of his unconscious youth when full of strength and hope he was full of the muscle of tireless enthusiasm and above all of Hope. Despair was a hag that came knocking at the door like the rent collector, or an old man, the landlord, who looked at his wife and her smooth limbs and in his mind played out the dirty joke of a dirty old man who looked for the opportunity of exchanging the rent for wifely cunt, as no doubt he dreamed, when he was in bed at night beside his hag of a wife. But that was another old man, not this one, a vulgar old man with no soul, not this one.

   What he saw in those last years was the absurdity of all of it, not, mind you, as a philosophical position that had once been popular, but the absurdity of hope now that hope was delayed and attenuated beyond human endurance, Hope stretched on the rack, slowly over the years, not as the medieval torture of a human being (He could never stand the concept of torture nor the acting of it in popular movies. It was too vulgar for his imagination), but as the nerveless silent tearing of a ghost, which now, to him, Hope surely was - a dear young woman with long legs, the promise of a delicious moisture beneath her short skirt, hair hiding her breasts upon which over the years he had suckled, a child suckling at his mother's chests which, according to the style of his own babyhood his Mother had denied him) not the false bottle of a false food Empire that was clearly poisoning its own people from infancy - but Hope had had real breasts, askew, purple where they should be, he had been there.

   The Hope of all of it was absurd, and there was plenty of proof, besides his own intuition. That spear of intuition had been strong with him all his life, it had antennae that sniffed the air beyond his poor vision, that was like personal radar 360 degrees in a constant flux and investigation that for him at least gave light where there was uncertainty. And what he saw as an old man, before his own death, no longer made him fearful, nor sad. Numb, yes, But not melancholy. Stoic, yes. But not hopeless. Like the Romans before him, life became increasingly clearer, with that strange loss of energy that comes with superior knowledge, knowledge that began with the loss of heaven, as the Romans never had that naive delusion, the delusion of soul transfer, the delusion of soul altogether, the delusion above all of the hopelessness of a belief that he was here before and would appear again afterward, and he was free of the delusion that he would again meet his mate in heaven as she beckoned to him over the heavenly gate, her gown open at the throat, her snowy breasts at the full. The insight that overwhelmed him was the Roman Stoic Vision. A material body, with all its limbs exactly like a steer, an entity that needed water, grass, to survive, that sought shade from the extreme heat, the heart beat, that loved its fellows in an ox-like manner, licked its sick eye that was now partly closed with swelling and pus, and which the flies tormented, the relief of a rough tongue, one such steer in the flock actually was a medical doctor, had that talent, and you went to her with your sick eye and she knew how to relieve you. Copulation, only sometimes enjoyable, nearly always leading to pregnancy (in steers) and the calf that struggled to leave your loins enormous head first, then falling out with the greatest relief to pain, licking, remembering its sweet smell, depending upon and loving it to relieve the heavy udder of milk, and so on, season after season, until the stockman separates it, sells it, it gets special fatteners and softeners and then without ceremony, dragged, slit, bled, divided, ground, then butchered and masticated by ourselves. Do we speak of its soul? Are we at all concerned? Is there a cow heaven? Its calf has taken its place, the same exacting process repeated, each one a complete cell, a complete entity, acting with the instincts and feelings and attention of a cow from its birth until its butchering, and its collection of cells, unique while alive, has its place taken by another unique cell, another unique steer.

   All the dreams and hopes of better things arrive as ghosts, the progeny of "Hope the Mother". Please Mother, make us obey something in this chaos. Keep us orderly for the sake of the farm, the corporation, the collective State. That has an undying soul, a house that well-made will go on living and breathing through its machinery after we are gone, the corporation that but changes mastheads, the state with a new Emperor at its head. While the old man, having played his absurd part, having cast his vote, taught his pupils, signed the last paper for the rules of play that umpires and courts can approve, while the Emperor struts and acts like a governor, having been assigned that part for 4 to 8 years, and his cheeks grow sallow, his neck sags, his arms and knees ache when the wind blows, the dust blows, the sun arrives at the window in full August heat and we had to be awfully cunning in this hot climate to defeat his glorious attempts to reach us and warm us, and our real Mother dies one day and we are so old, so separated from her young tissue that gave us form, that it is as nothing, we are numb, a sign of old age, a father who is a stranger, men offer so little to the formulation of their children, only an excitement or a shock to the ovaries, and the duties of the actor in his part, that is, his part now is well learned, he smiles, moves more slowly, gazes with numb interest on the young, prepares his mind for heaven by which dream the steer need not be refreshed, waits for his American stroke, his American heart-attack. Dies with the calling on Hope for a God and Heaven that he will once again enjoy his material possessions so very painfully gathered - and he departs. The door closes. Hope dies with her husband. Always young, always gracious, always the charming companion, Hope the Mother is the only mourner who is sincere, at the interment. She knows that her companion will provide, along with his coffin, good manure to the earth. Heaven is no longer needed. God will never be called on again. The old man's uniqueness is now silent, no longer on radar. It is a final end, a complete end, a silence, the mourners go away. It is late in the afternoon. The sun will soon set again, night's coolness and relief will come. Bones and brains, of those living creatures, will again call for 8 hours of hibernation. Living man is a daily hibernating animal. More bodies will be made this night. None like the old man's. His form is exhausted. New calfs will soon eat the new grasses of Spring, frolic with their elders who are under sentence of death to the slaughter house. They don't need heaven.

   The old man is now, at last, in need of nothing.