Among the rocks,
Helen sprang to her feet
and swiftly, lithely fled.
The sun was still high then;
it was a hard blue white,
it was cold, it burned the sky.
Ice burns like that, from the inside out;
He had said to her:
“Helen! Do you not wonder about the sun?
Yellow, was it not, once?”
Helen did not want to speak of this, and they fought.
“At least, Helen,” he said,
“spend the night in the car, don’t go far.
Spend the night listening to something
reassuring — Schubert,
or grounding, like Bach.
“Do not listen to Shostakovitch —
for Shostakovitch was not known for doing favours,
and he is not going to start with you.”
The night from which the kangaroo emerged was black.
It had settled hard, like black ice on a road.
The kangaroo was six feet or more tall,
if he existed at all;
as solid as one of those Egyptian statues he was,
the way they seem to stand on the edge of everything;
in the silence he waited and did not move.
His eyes overflowed with darkness
and did not move;
Simon approached the kangaroo
where it stood and did not move;
he reached up and laid a hand upon its face.
You could ask a mountain to hear you;
or just as well this apparition / that if it were to move
would split the ground
in two without a sound
and of the witness leave no trace.
Something like Horus on a rooftop,
and he has bought infinity to the dawn,
and you are something to do with Seth, perhaps,
some lackey of mortality, the end of it all…
flee the light, for Horus is on the rooftop —
Helen arrived at dawn with the sun on her back,
back at the point from which she had fled;
music they did not discuss.
A veil had drawn behind her;
she held a book,
and she had drawn pictures, of kangaroos,
in the spaces on the pages of this book
that he had never seen before;
(it was in fact the manual,
taken from the document pocket
of the Falcon’s farside door).
Now the circumference may be small enough,
but the axle moves to a baritone,
and when the Falcon starts, its engine roars to life;
Horus leaves the roof,
and flies into the sunrise,
the golden spokes of which form chords, suspended,
that never will resolve to a tonic or to proof;
and the Falcon no longer sits upon the roof
with its gaze upon the silence
in which the kangaroo does wait
with darkness in its eyes
and does not move.
