St Diodore, the Archbishop of Cappadocia, desired to have the single word, Acarus, which means an earthworm, inscribed on his tomb, and this was done. Is that not true?

How they demanded, in the mountain bogs where they lived, to breathe uneasily, to tremble tightly with fear (thinking of food, money, the diseases of animals and men, droughts, selling at a loss) and their vigorous joys at the mercy of prowling ghosts.

           

each breathing, / each different hope, / interweaving like / the incandescent / tubework, oils, acids and clear

 

He composed his face for Basic Pain as he had been taught to compose his face to show nothing.

 

 

“Zarathustra!” he gasped. “How the dickens did you get in there?” “Ruf,” Zarathustra replied.

 

 

But the word proper, introduced as meaning ‘suitable for rats’, but also having an irrelevant suggestion of ‘right and natural’, and more exact memory of those (nowadays phosphorus) poisons which are designed to prevent rats from dying the wainscot, produced the grander and less usual image, in which the eating of the poison corresponds to the Fall of Man, and it is drinking water, a healthful and natural human function, which it is intolerable to avoid, and which brings death.

As the uncut lawns grew deeper and the formal gardens deteriorated, they spent their time cooking small meals on a charcoal stove which they set up beside the cemetery statuary on the floor of the ornamental pond. The smell of bean curd and spiced noodles drifted among the disrobing nymphs.

 

The walls had gates, and behind the gates were cobbled roads. If you walked along the road up the mountain there would be terem, and in the terem a golden bed. On that bed there was a girl braiding her hair, one gold, the next silver, one gold, one silver … Her feet had claws … She hooked you with her claws … with her claws …

 

They came out of a solemn impasse to offer a kiss of pity beneath the gaslights of the main street. In that moment, they were divine.

 

Turn my eyes insane.

 

The priests showed us two of St Paul’s fingers, and one of St Peter’s; a bone of Judas Iscariot (it was black) and also bones of all the other disciples; a handkerchief in which the Savior had left the impression of his face.

 

I was chatting with a girl. Her left brow crinkled each time I became excited about what I was saying. —I wonder, how many left brows like hers exist in the world.