Will you cry for them, soft and subtle tears? You were sitting on the edge of a hill, legs stretched long out over the little tufts of stubbly grass. The city stretched into the land, the land stretched into the sky, and the sky was hanging like a pall, like a mask, like a thin strip of gauze, all across the blanketed earth. The slight shudder of wings clasping liquid, in clouds, and moving among the clouds, and the clouds drifting white and lazy like coagulated drops of cream dispersing through a clear, hot stream, approached your ears. You heard music, just a faint voice, in the distance, like blood trickling down from lips, or a stream poking through the collosal rock of a sandy scrape-and-tear projection, whipped in the extension of air. It is cold in the high reaches, and a wind coming down from the sky shudders you. The voice is not speaking in any language, the world is murmuring and you don't understand what it's saying. Each word is a tremble flowing into the next word and crying into a cacophony of three-hundred sounds that coalesce into a single, strong, imperceptible whine and a buzz. There are little dots of red way down yonder. There will be bees buzzing among the flowers -- the flowers in spring-time, the trees peaked out like bouquets, lovers' hands offering fruit. Teeth sinking into golden apples, races and love. Did you proffer her wine at the banquet? Her hair decorated with pink garlands, and the slight of satin waving across her breast, and falling and scraping the ground. The smooth stone rocks back and forth on sandled feed, impatient whines of conversation, a snatch of a memory whistling through the air that you can't quite tear apart. And then the long tables, the white canopies, and big red bowls of plastic punch. A flimsy plastic ladle pours a glass. This is not the sweetness of wine (which is bitter, but only for poets), and it courses down your chest and leaves a cold cess-pool in your stomach. All these things stretching up like a red eye-sore, or a long and tawny hill, breaking into crops of rock.

Where is the tall glass building? A tie hanging from a black-suited chest, and outside are stretching more buildings, and the McDonald's and the vegan who is serving lunch, thick slabs of cow. An eagle perches on the branch, picks, preys at the berries growing in poisonous clusters, stabbing with its beak like piercing, the spoiled juice flows sharply down the crag like drops of rain, slams upon a rat, curious in deception, and wings off. The endless flat tops of the city stretch out like the days and nights. Where was love in the city squares and the stretching lights across and down the streets? You followed her, vague promenades, always through a blue dress or a pink gown, always a tinceled scarlet of beauty hanging gems around her neck (her white neck) always under marble statues stabbing swords into the brazen air. Through great crowds of many vestments, and many heads, and flows of many thoughts. All pulsing, if you could hear the deafening roar like the crashing waves. One judgement attacking, another receding, who knows how many knives they've plunged into how many hearts in the dark of their fantasies? Its amazing that murders happen, not once or twice, but more often, only on paper.

Long vaulted cielings; the vault of the heavens, the sky constrained. She was no great affair. Black already peers through the windows like a ghost or a foreigner; long ranks of zombies, clutching bloody fingers, hungry; constant war is life; is there nothing to love? Not in bloodshot eyes. A scrawling pen. Many scrawling pens. Many fingers moving. A whole deafening valley of fingers moving; the dead dragging the dead dragging the dead.

And sitting by the banks of the river Chebar, I saw the dead come to life. They picked themselves up, they would live; some broke into mausoleums looking for artifacts; old priestly garments they stole from museums; others wore crowns; they stumbled about on the streets, or they stole bones from the graveyard and put together great wings, windless flapping, trying to fly like giant skeletons of old pterodactyls, and with many glittering rubies and emeralds on their fingers, and some wearing parchment and the scabs of Greek letters. Some lit fires and cracked their knuckles over the fires; some clacked their clacking joints in the aching cold. Beggars watched them and followed by example, took of their skins and collapsed in the streets, and stinking piles of flesh were everywhere. On the third night large boils developed under their chins that were no longer chins; deep rings beneath eyes that were no longer eyes; and the whole heap boiled and hissed like a viper, and red as a gardner, ready to strike.

Cry for Lila, cry; she had the folds of beauty like a perfect rose; she grew in a desert wasteland where the waters always trickled and every tree dripped with a dewy honey. There were violettes and lilies everywhere, and all the hills were purple. When she stretched out her hand, the music came to a high lull and everything was frozen; snowflakes drifted down, looped, glided, fell in each other on heaps gathering on heaps of promises, like the white silk folds of her dress that dragged on the ground. The earth is very frozen, black, and very, very deep.