House of Incest Read Free Page A

from Arabia
and felt in my breasts the currents of liquid fire which run through the rooms
of the Alhambra and refresh me from the too clear waters.
    The too clear pain of love divided, love
divided…
    I was in a ship of sapphire sailing on seas of
coral. And standing at the prow singing. My singing swelled the sails and
ripped them; where they had been ripped the edge was burnt and the clouds too
were ripped to tatters by my voice.
    I saw a city where each house stood on a rock
between black seas full of purple serpents hissing alarms, licking the rocks
and peering over the walls of their garden with bulbous eyes.
    I saw the glass palm tree sway before my eyes;
the palm trees on my island were still and dusty when I saw them deadened by
pain. Green leaves withered for me, and all the trees seemed glassily
unresponsive while the glass palm tree threw off a new leaf on the very tip and
climax of its head.
    The white path sprouted from the heart of the
white house and was edged with bristly cactus long-fingered and furry, unmoved
by the wind, ageless. Over the ageless cactus the bamboo shoots trembled, close
together, perpetually wind-shirred.
    The house had the shape of an egg, and it was
carpeted with cotton and windowless; one slept in the down and heard through
the shell the street organ and the apple vendor who could not find the bell.
    Images—bringing a dissolution of the soul
within the body like the rupture of sweet-acid of the orgasm. Images made the
blood run back and forth, and the watchfulness of the mind watching against
dangerous ecstasies was now useless. Reality was drowned and fantasies choked
each hour of the day.
    Nothing seems true today except the death of
the goldfish who used to make love at ninety kilometers an hour in the pool.
The maid has given him a Christian burial. To the worms! To the worms!

    I am floating again. All the facts and all the
words, all images, all presages are sweeping over me, mocking each other. The
dream! The dream! The dream rings through me like a giant copper bell when I wish
to betray it. If brushes by me with bat wings when I open human eyes and seek
to live dreamlessly. When human pain has struck me fiercely, when anger has
corroded me, I rise, I always rise after the crucifixion, and I am in terror of
my ascensions. THE FISSURE IN REALITY. The divine departure. I fall. I fall
into darkness after the collision with pain, and after pain the divine
departure.
    Oh, the weight, the tremendous weight of my
head pulled up by the clouds and swinging in space, the body like a wisp of
straw, the clouds dragging my hair like a scarf caught in a chariot wheel, the
body dangling, colliding with the lantern stars, the clouds dragging me over
the world.
    I cannot stop, or descend.
    I hear the unfurling of water, of skies and
curtains. I hear the shiver of leaves, the breathing of the air, the wailing of
the unborn, the pressure of the wind.
    I hear the movements of the stars and planets,
the slight rust creak when they shift their position. The silken passage of
radiations, the breath of circles turning.
    I hear the passing of mysteries and the
breathing of monsters. Overtones only, or undertones. Collision with reality
blurs my vision and submerges me into the dream. I feel the distance like a
wound. It unrolls itself before me like the rug before the steps of a cathedral
for a wedding or a burial. It is unrolled like a crimson bride between the
others and me, but I cannot walk on it without a feeling of uneasiness, as one
has at ceremonies. The ceremony of walking along the unrolled carpet into the ghtl where the functions unravel to which I am a stranger.
I neither marry nor die. And the distance between the crowd, between the others
and me, grows wider.
    Distance. I never walked over the carpet into
the ceremonies. Into the fullness of the crowd life, into the authentic music
and the odor of men. I never attended the wedding or the burial. Everything for
me took place either in the