Black lace on golden skin, copper glances, the gentle mouth of a serving maid as she circled the table with a jug of wine. He’s a solitary star in the process of dying, the last of a galaxy, the only point of light in a bad piece of darkness.Īs a young man, he walked the roads of Andalusia, and mapped brightness instead of the night. The spheres above him, the sky filled with planets, and all of them are in love. Solomon spends an hour staring bitterly at the sky, mapping more of the ways of loneliness. Tziporah, he thinks, and then, realizing what he’s doing, brushes her abruptly from the table. He idly makes a heap of fine sawdust and positions it across from him. Had he a ship, he might sail to some far off country where women had never seen men, and thus wouldn’t recognize him as a ruined specimen. He touches the ship’s outlines, the oars, the rigging. Solomon sits alone at supper, taking figs from a dish painted with a lustered ship. Words hide in the shadows and in the cracks in the walls, refusing to be written.Īll he has are words, and none of them serve him. When he lights a candle, he sees books he’ll never finish. He can’t sleep, nor can he organize words into sentences. When he’s on his pallet at night, words stand on their hind feet and stare at him. Unspoken poems run through his house, little long-legged darknesses. When Solomon wakes each morning, his mind is filled with words chewing at each other’s tails, tangling toes and tongues. A coverlet made of sand, a bed made of blisters. The four-hundred-thirty-fourth way to be lonely is the loneliness of the sleepless, awake while the world is not, moon risen, bats with it. He’s spent twenty years describing the thousand ways, and no time on any softer arts. There’s no hope of love now, not the way he looks. There will be no blank-faced brides made of mud in Solomon’s house. One is not allowed to do that in order to fulfill selfish desires. To defend a city, one might permissibly make a warrior of clay. There is a short history of forbidden creations, a litany of longing. God doesn’t permit men to knead dust into something with a heart. Then he sweeps her into the street and watches her blow away. No medical man can help him, and no woman will have him.Īlone in his house, Solomon names a cloud of dust, picturing an Avra with delicate fingers and a quick smile. It isn’t leprosy, but it looks enough like it that the neighbors shun him. Something’s climbed beneath his skin, creating scabrous ridges on the sides of his ears and lips, and a cough, sometimes bloody. Solomon’s come South from Saragossa to the city of his birth in a last attempt to heal himself. Wherever he steps, there is sorrow and pain. It’s beautiful everywhere, everywhere but where Solomon is. Sweet milk, grapes and almonds, figs, lemons, bitter oranges, pomegranate, a view across the ocean from Spain to the coast of Africa. Málaga isn’t a city where loneliness should overtake a man. Screaming quiet is the way the world lets a man know he’s alone forever, with no remedy but death or sorcery. The quiet is full of wineglasses and whippoorwills. The quiet is full of newborn babies crying and lovers murmuring. The quiet is never quiet, not to the lonely. There have been boulders installed for leapers once the never is too much. In the dark, visited by spirits jealous with their leavings.Īt the tops of certain mountains there are places for those the world refuses, and at the bottoms of other mountains there are prisons for those the world regrets. In a tower, feet forced into standing, floor too small for kneeling down, the only view a high window, the world below made of fire. In a market stall, surrounded by speechless wooden wares, or banished to a black rock in the center of the sea. Since the beginning of the world, there’ve been a thousand ways invented to be lonely. Shelter me in your shadow Be with my mouth and my word Watch over my ways So I will not sin again with my tongue.
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