On the Third Day, Page Five: Coldest
These angels and queens we’ve made of our deities could not stand. Nor even kneel. Wings and tiaras bound to the white hail-front of nocturnal gall, pachinko-pelting a curry of downy aspens and knoll weltings all blurry in snow-down. The pre-spiritation of renegade northern horses tolting through trunk-high drifts of mid-Winter fallout, mounting bellicose Valkyries who point spears at Valhalla for fear she will come spread her drapes in greeting. But as the air becomes a blinding cloud of crystal probabilities, their Nordic organs frieze into patterns of memory sparks, icicled weapons and furrowed, rimed brows. The shock of freezedom sparkled their breath and disappeared down hart burrows, to seize the soul of the Earth and cinch her.
But contraction’s pressure builds warming the stalk of sap until it liquefies again and rushes towards gravity, spelling biological alarm in chemical symbols. The first phalanx had been defeated, atmosphere was valiant and armed with the antidote to nuclear fission, tempers were calmed to a harmless vapor. Mollified and anaesthetized, the ribbons of over land’s growth were stultified. Sweet nectar of systemic entrancement by phantom memories of once having been pure. A vague recollection of an orgasmic unity, in which the molten nature of all, viscously enveloped all essence and idea in a nomadic Eden of perfection. Of a dithering whiteness. Before it can even remember bones, they are cold. Of a smothering whiteness of input, where all of the jacks were plugged, but no feed. No static, just whiteout. The welcoming embrace of Erebus from beyond immortal alabaster pews, homed with knick-knacks of artifacts, a cairn mausoleum where every rock points to a root and every root buries an abstraction.
Even the rye grass was heavied by her crown, and a licorice kelp, once caught waving a passage banner for any errant light spewed in decay, now inert, frozen to brick, forgetting all the merriment of the day. And loose as cannons, they were, flamboyant and generous before the icy calm now in quiescent internal struggle over reanimation, its conscious movements subordinated, unable to resuscitate, but not required, as the gelatinous thumbs cease reprovingly in enjoyment of stasis. The acreage of space in-between cells solidifies and halts the passage of enzymatic furor. The tune of the universe played ruthlessly on over this barren catafalque of frost, with no ears to hear anything but the howl of winter’s tundra.
Even icicles were enlisted to undrip, as frontline cadets bombing the last patches of moss, through the terrain, to explode in a tizzy of totemic shards, each one reflecting the twilight settling the last moisture over the ecosphere. For her darkness is encyclopedic, and in her darkness, nothing knows which way it goes, if not chained by force its birth, the arrow of causality that tickles an ego into adsorption, the keen awareness of some once and future kingdom: the biosphere of the cosmos, planted with all of its seeds inverted, buried and frozen in a tiny coordinate of existential vacuum; one last and final time capsule buried at the central heart of the winter-stalled cosmos who couldn’t remember how to tell the time to stop.
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